💾 Archived View for soviet.circumlunar.space › pjvm › transmissions › noodle-issue › leap_of_faith.g… captured on 2024-05-26 at 14:59:11. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-01-29)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Almost every time you get into an "ethnic" or "traditional" restaurant, you are committing yourself to a leap of faith. Unless you are originally from that specific place, or country, you must trust the restaurant owner and, above all, the cook: they normally say that the dishes they will serve you are "originally" from place X or country Y, exactly as they had been cooked by any random person down or up there for centuries, or millennia!
And it is quite hilarious to read the on-line reviews of restaurants by random British people who praise the place for "serving the best Indian curry in the East End", or "the best Alfredo Pasta this side of Milan".
You might know already that "curry" does not exist at all in India. Or better, curry is actually the name of a tree native of the Indian continent and present in other sub-tropical countries, whose leaves, both fresh and desiccated, are widely used in the traditional cuisine of many places around India and Pakistan.
But there is no single dish called a "curry" in the whole Indian continent. The name was actually made up by the locals in the 1850s to simplify the matter for the barbarian colonialists who came there and started tasting those delicious sauces accompanying anything from chicken, to lamb, to fish, to eggs. Every single place has their own peculiar way of cooking meat and fish, and use specific names for them. And since India is indeed a continent rather than a small nation, you have literally hundreds or thousands of different ways of cooking lamb or chicken or fish, using local, specific mixtures of herbs which are sometimes totally unique of that place. Too much complicated for a bunch of traders and bureaucrats! The indian cooks made a leap of faith and decided to call them all "curry". They would have known what the customers meant when they asked for "a curry": please bring me that delicious sauce you serve with lamb and paneer! The name stuck, and now it is just "curry", all over the world.
But that's just a convention for illiterates: no proper Indian would get into a street-food restaurant in Kolkata or in Delhi and ask for "a curry". As much as you don't get into a pub in Brussels and ask for "a beer". As much as you can't get into any random restaurant in Italy and ask for "Penne Alfredo".
Sorry for destroying a myth here, but "Penne Alfredo" is something that Italians have never cooked for themselves. Simply, no one in Italy would ever dream of "Penne Alfredo", because "Penne Alfredo" is not an Italian dish, at all. It looks like "Penne Alfredo" were probably invented during the 1920s or 1930s by Italian immigrants to the East Coast of the US, who started experimenting with different ways to cook pasta in the new world. But there was nobody back in Puglia or Lazio cooking "Penne Alfredo" until the late 1970s or maybe the early 1980s, when the dish was "reimported" as a "truly traditional one", mostly by tourist restaurants.
Nevertheless, there is not any single "Traditionally Italian" restaurant around the world that does not have "Penne Alfredo" in its menu. And, worse, you can nowadays find dozens of restaurants in Florence, Rome, Naples, who surrendered and started proposing "Penne Alfredo" to the tourists who had come to Italy to taste the "traditional Penne Alfredo". And if you ask the owner of the restaurant, they will swear that Penne Alfredo has been cooked in that same way in her family for at least ten or twelve generations. And you gonna believe her.
You would be also surprised to learn that the traditional "Pasta Carbonara" did not exist at all in Italian cuisine until after the second World War. It probably comes from the ingenuity of many Italian mothers, who had to make ends meet in the poor and shattered post-war Italy. As a matter of fact, dried eggs and bacon were indeed a major part of the rations provided by the US food aids in the "Marshall Plan". Apparently, a primordial version of "Carbonara", the "Cacio e ova" (literally, cheese and eggs), had already existed for decades, and was mentioned already in several cooking books dating back to the 1700s. But in the post-war Italy meat was rare, and mums had to make a leap of faith: putting bacon in the "Cacio e ova" would have made a big difference in proteic intake, so why not try it? The thing seemed to work, and the recipe stuck through and became part of the "truly traditional Italian cuisine".
Only, Italians realised very early that "Guanciale" tasted much better than bacon in a Carbonara, and they "reverted" to the "most traditional way" of cooking Carbonara as soon as Italy started coming back on its feet after the war, and meat became less of a rarity. There are nowadays religious wars about whether you should put Guanciale or bacon in a Carbonara, or whether it goes with Parmigiano or Pecorino cheese. And, in an ardent leap of faith, each faction will enforce its version citing "dozens of generations" of "proper Carbonara cooking". All Italians agree on one point: putting cream or double cream in a Carbonara is a capital sin, and you will burn in hell for the eternity if you commit such a crime! I must admit I am happy that the yankees did not include any double cream in the Marshall rations, or we would have a much worse-tasting "traditional" pasta dish, and another "cream vs double cream" religious war.