My mother called me last week, saying she had urgent news: “There’s an Italian man in the Financial Times claiming carbonara is American, that panettone is new – and that no one in Italy had heard of pizza before the 1950s,” she said.
The FT article, which was provocatively headlined Everything I, an Italian, thought I knew about Italian food is wrong, includes an interview with Alberto Grandi, a professor of food history at the University of Parma. He says: “Italian cuisine really is more American than it is Italian.” Grandi claims that carbonara was first made for American soldiers, and describes parmesan made in Wisconsin, United States, as “an exact modern-day match” for the original parmesan, unlike that of cheesemakers in Parma. Ouch.
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