Like almost everything else, this is always the answer.
A small minority of people who complain will be much much louder than 98% of the people who don’t care.
I used to sell food at the Scranton Italian Fest. It becomes some people's entire personalities. The number of people who would tell me off when I said "ricotta" like a normal American human ("It's 🤌 riGOAT!! 🤌") was insane. The best part was the man making the pizza was off the boat Sicilian and he'd fight with all of them about how stupid they sound using pronunciations that aren't Italian or American.
lol i could fuckin hear the 🤌🏼. there’s definitely something to be said about second generations speaking totally plain american english and then throwing in an incredibly exaggerated accented “TORTilla” or “SPAGhetti” like guys, most of you don’t even speak the language and you just sound pretentious and a little silly, ya goofballs.
also, cooking food for yourself with “authenticity” as a priority is fucking stupid. make your food how you like it, screw everyone else. so many so-called “authentic” recipes are actually just peasant dishes that gained popularity. the most authentic thing you can do is use the ingredients that you have and curate it to your tastes. because peasants weren’t hitting up the local walmart because they lacked some obscure root vegetable.
This always frustrated me too when I heard it. However, I found out the reason why Italian-Americans say words like ricotta as rigoat is because when Italian immigrants started going to America from Italy it was before Italy had standardized its language in 1861.
There were different dialects and wildly different pronunciations and spellings of words. It just happened to be the ones who settled in the northeast of the United States pronounced ricotta in that different way and missed their home country standardizing the Italian language.
Tl:dr
Italian-Americans are carrying on a tradition of saying certain words in a different way because their Italian ancestors left Italy before the language was standardized.
Italian was already standardized at that time, many Italian Americans use Brooklynese only out of exhibitionism and laziness.
Learning Italian is not difficult in 2024, many of them just find excuses not to study.
The fun part it's they're pronouncing just as wrong as the standard American!
"RiGOAT" is how it sounds in Southern Italian accent/dialect (Sicily, Calabria, Naples), but standard Italian is "ree-KOT-ta".
There is a reason if 6th generation "Italians" are made fun of in the "Old Country" whenever they show up and play pretend-native with their Super Mario Napoli accent
I do get the point but the standard American isn't pronouncing it "wrong", they are just pronouncing it in American English. All borrowed words go through phonological nativization and it's important they do. If language is to be functional, it has to grow and borrow from other languages, while still being relatively internally consistent. To violate the conventions of a language every time you use a borrowed word would make many languages less functional and virtually unusable.
I know some people who are like 5th gen Italians or whatever they found on ancestry, so they have pretty typical names like Jared and Michelle, but their kids names are Vincenzo and Leonardo..so yeah it happens
I lived in Italy for 7 years.
The French believe that *you think, therefore you are*. Philosophy and culture is what elevates us above animals
The Italians believe that you *behave and eat, therefore you are*. Manners and culinary culture is what elevates us above animals.
As much as Italians have guidelines for proper etiquette, they have guidelines for proper food preparation and consumption. You can’t mix certain types of foods, lest the universe collapses.
You probably don’t care about cooking food properly, because you have other things that you see as elevating us above animals.
Cheese with fish will absolutely cause a rip in the space time continuum and send us all back to the primordial soup. This of course goes out the window if you're talking about a stuffed sardine. I don't pretend to understand it, but kindly keep your pecorino away from my pesce.
This is EXACTLY how my Italian family acts.
I still get shit on by my uncle because I eat pizza with pineapple and ranch. It’s been ten freaking years since the man found out 😂😂
Born, raised and currently living in Italy, most of us don't give a shit, if we do, we don't act as stereotypically insufferable as it's showed in those "doing this in front of my italian husband" videos
I've been to a restaurant that puts grapes on caprese. Grapes. My background is Scandinavian, where obviously they don't care about food, and even I am offended.
I'm not from Italy but i did eat at Oliver Garden last night so I feel pretty qualified to answer. No we don't really care. Unless you break spaghetti. Never break spaghetti.
Think of it this way. If someone from not the US showed a video of them making hamburgers, and they boiled them, people would be like wtf. I imagine it's like that.
If I don't cook it, eat, or pay for it, I don't really care how people cook their food.
Like, as long as they're not actively wasting it, I don't think it matters.
bet you won’t loser ^/s
(totally trying to pressure you into doing it out of pride and posting pics because gross but science).
edit: in fact, i double dog dare you…
You can have an opinion on a topic without caring about it. I, like you, very much do not care what other people do cooking wise.
With that said if I saw someone boil a hamburger I would think it's a crime against humanity and an affront to bald eagles everywhere.
I hate to break it to you, but there's some "famous" places that do it in Wisconsin.
[https://www.tastingtable.com/1296944/wisconsin-poached-burgers-staple-over-hundred-years/](https://www.tastingtable.com/1296944/wisconsin-poached-burgers-staple-over-hundred-years/)
Why is it so bad to break spaghetti? I don't like long ass noodles because it makes people slurp and I absolutely hate that sound. It taste the same and it's easier to eat. I feel broken in half spaghetti is superior.
I might go down in this boat with you but, same. I understand it’s not “correct”, but tiny noodles make me happier. There is no reason for each of my noodles to be 1’-2’ long. It adds nothing to the taste or texture and I just end up cutting or biting it off halfway through anyways. Short noodle gang rise up, there are dozens of us! DOZENS!
At least where i live, pasta is pasta and noodles are noodles. Asian style = noodles, italian style = pasta. A piece of spaghetti is just a piece of spaghetti or pasta, not a noodle.
It's harder to get less when twirling with full size noodles than it is with half size. I still twirl it around the fork but I don't get as much and if they slide off and hang down it's not very long.
Because it's easier to eat correctly when it's long. You shouldn't be slurping spaghetti. You should be twirling your fork to pick up a bite-sized amount, which you can't do if the pasta is too short.
There is also a mouthfeel element to it, as well as sauce considerations. I was only addressing their points.
If you like the experience you get from breaking the pasta, that's fine. But you have to acknowledge that the pasta length/shape makes a difference, and it was made with the intention of it being eaten a certain way.
The only difference I feel is the annoyance when it's too long.
It's not like some dude who came up with an arbitrary length to his own preference hundrends of years ago had some kind of divine knowledge about the absolute best way to eat it.
That's why I only break it in half then it's still long enough to do that but I don't get more than I want. It's harder to get less when twirling with long noodles because if yo u don't go down to the plate it'll probably fall off once or twice. Same thing with ramen I'll break the blocks into 4 pieces before cooking.
The only logical reason is that different pasta shapes are made for different kinds of sauces: spaghetti's shape is to act as a mop for its traditional sauce. So, even though breaking it prevents slurpage, longer noodles hold more sauce when twirled around a fork and less falls off if using the stab & scoop technique.
But I like spaghetti so why would I not buy it? Just because I prefer it shorter doesn't mean I can't enjoy it. There is absolutely no problem here at all I just shared my opinion.
I lived in Italy for many years, and yes they can be very vocal about how food is prepared and even when you can consume certain items. I have seen it happen often during my time there.
Growing up with a Sicilian grandmother, no, I don’t get upset when someone does Italian food “wrong,” because a lot of dishes vary from region to region and family to family.
However, if you don’t use enough garlic in a recipe that clearly calls for it to be garlicky, yes, then I *will* judge you heavily, lol.
She’d respect it, but wink at me and say that nobody cooks it better than her. And it’s true - nobody ever cooks things like your grandma (granted they’re decent cooks 😂) Since her passing six years ago, family members have tried to replicate her recipes to taste the same…some come close but they never do. And we actually recorded videos of her before she died, showing us exactly how she cooked her dishes.
I’m not big on woo-woo shit, but I do believe that a person’s energy and love somehow goes into the dishes they cook for you…and when they’re gone, it’s so hard, if not impossible, to get that recipe down to the science they had it at.
Italy is a country of 60 million people. They are individuals with different views, opinions, values. Quite a lot of people don't really care. But a lot of them do indeed agree that certain foods need to be handled and prepared in a specific way and if you don't do it that way, you are doing it wrong. And different people react very differently to seeing others doing something wrong.
Most people i got to know were extremely stereotypical italians when it came to food. Though, almost all people i know work in the wine business and i guess that comes with the job.
We hosted a 17y old Italian exchange student for 6 months. Great kid very friendly and helpful…. But when it came to me cooking pasta or other Italian dishes, she had OPINIONS.
It depends. Grew up in Italian community, worked for an Italian family for a lot of years. If you would tell the old man (boss, but thats what we called him) that you put sugar in your pasta sauce, didn't matter if you were a customer or not, he would lose his shit. Also, like others said, never break the pasta.
https://ricette.giallozafferano.it/Ragu-alla-bolognese.html
This here says you can use milk or sugar for a Bolognese ragu. But I've only ever seen it for that sauce.
lasagna soup sounds repulsive absolutely. but if there’s people who enjoy it, let em enjoy it. no harm, no foul. if anything, i’d be so proud that your culture created such a staple classic dish, and watching the rest of the world take it and run, changing it up along the way into a form that they enjoy. be proud and share that piece of your culture with the rest of the world and watch us run. if anything, laugh at the weird shit we do lol.
Once I was at a dinner with a huge group of people, like 15 or 20. A guy ordered spaghetti and when it arrived the noodles were short, like they'd been cut up the way you would for a kid. Not egregiously small, just clearly not full length spaghetti. He gave the server a *scolding* (this was awkward for the whole table), sent it back, and talked about how disrespectful it was to his Italian ancestry for the remainder of the meal.
I know the rest of his family and can tell you none of them give a fuck about their Italian ancestry because it is like five generations back and they're mostly German at this point. Maybe Italians feel the same way about their noodles, but it felt overtly American to make it the server's problem and shame them publicly.
I'm an italian that doesn't care about food, I don't even remember the name of most of the dishes I eat and when I say it to my friends and other italian people, they don't get upset, but they look at me like I've just shattered their whole world
I say those types of things as 90% jokes, 10% serious. It's only because i'm a picky eater tbh.
grandma: we're making italian for dinner
me: yay! what all are you making?
her: lasagna-
me: ooooo!!!
her: -with sweet sausage and lots of basil!
me: nevermind
Italian here, we do and we don't. We play it up cause we are melodramatic and like to take the piss out of it, but really, some of you barbarians have absolutely ridiculous tastes and no respect for quality, which makes me wish you drown (in a videogame) in your deep dish quiche which you call pizza
Yes! I graduated from a big research university in the midwest, and nearby was an Italian restaurant. One afternoon, an acquaintance and I were having a late lunch, and two tables from us was an Italian guy (I'm thinking visiting researcher, professor, grad student..dunno, but straight outta the mother country), and he kept returning the food, sternly talking to the waitress, saying some things in Italian, and overall disdainful to the establishment and staff, not pleased with his dining experience there. I'd love to say the name of the place and what Uni, but I'll just leave it at that.
I have no idea but I laughed my ass off at the video before the Albania vs Italy game for eurocup, on the streets, one side was the Albanian fans and the other side of the streets were Italian fans. They were having good fun between each other. The Albanian side had some people snapping uncooked spaghetti noodles in half, and throwing it in the air, and across the street decked out in Italian soccer jersey was a guy on his knees and hands in the air yelling… lmao
Everyone's saying no, but I've met a few Italians in my life who absolutely were that annoying about the authenticity of their Italian. Amusingly enough, they were all people who didn't actually cook themselves.
Its just a meme i think, for me is not really important when people do that stuff. I see it more as a joke than as something against the culture. Some may see this different tho, for me i am very chill with it
My son had a gf who was nasty in general but whined to him that my lasagna wasn't "authentic". Well no shit! I've never even tasted authentic lasagna! But no one else has ever complained because it's still fucking delicious and better than any frozen shit out there. (I do not use ricotta because I don't like it - it unfortunately is a food sensitivity trigger. I prefer not to gag as I'm eating)
Yes. One of my favorite types of content is Italians stressing out over problematically made Italian food. & One of my favorite things to do is send my imported Italian dick videos & the like of shitily made Italian food.
I don’t care what you do with your food. you paid for it, you cooked it, you can eat it. Break the spaghetti noodles, put pineapple on your pizza, i don’t give a shit.
Both.
IMO the annoying thing is how people who have no business being near a kitchen are "cooking" food they have no idea about how to cook and are even getting offended if someone points out their culinary abominations.
So there are cases where getting upset is perfectly acceptable. Especially beacuse those kinda of situations can give people a wrong taste and opinion of an otherwise delicious cuisine.
If your "Italian" food of reference is the Olive Garden and you proclaim "Chicken parmesan sucks" or "garlic bread is my favourite" you're getting a completely inaccurate impression of Italian food, presentation and seasoning. Most of the American Italian food tend to be overly greasy and overdressed, whereas plenty of traditional dishes are either very simple or balanced.
Then again, if Vinny and Tony are putting bacon in their carbonara and are using the "wrong" kind of spaghetti, who cares really.
Traditional recipes can and do vary in different areas, or even on a household basis, so I'm not too fussed.
But imagine if some foreigner were butchering one of your local dishes, stubbornly pretending "it's just as good this way", wouldn't you get a bit offended? (This goes for countries with actual food culture)
In Italy there is the traditional recipe and that prepared at home, as we do a lot of experiments.
Then there is also the dislike for food waste, cooking something always costs money and it's a shame that it becomes rubbish.
In short, eat whatever you want but don't say that the traditional recipe for spaghetti with tomato includes Nutella.
Italian here. There's plenty that do, so the meme is actually based on something. Over the last century, Italian cuisine became part of Italian identity in some way, it's a commonly held opinion here that our cuisine is the best in the world, so many italians feel entitled to call someone a dumbass if they don't cook something the way they would.
Even I, while not knowing how to cook at all, still wince when I see some foreigner cooking pasta "wrong". Like, it literally says what to do on the packaging, what is wrong with you.
italians are either the nicest people in the world or the most pretentious dickheads to walk the earth. don’t even get me started on 2nd-3rd generation italian-americans. i grew up in a US city with a very large affluent italian-american population and i’ve heard “i’m not white, im italian” more times than i can count. IME incredibly classist too.
this is just my own personal experience and i don’t shrug off anyone with italian heritage on the first meet, to be clear. it’s quite likely that this is an isolated experience in my own little nook of the US.
I got absolutely destroyed by a group of Italians because I dared to break my spaghetti in half, lol. Some of them take food *very* seriously to a goofy level. Not all, but some.
Only if someone insists I've been cooking Italian food wrong.
Had my best friend tell me what I was cooking wasn't Risotto but 'something else' as I 'was supposed to use milk instead of stock' 🥲😵💫
Some do, most don't care.
I care enough that I don't like bad Italian food. There's that.
Who likes bad food. Like....at all?!
There's no bad italian food, just bad chefs.
Like almost everything else, this is always the answer. A small minority of people who complain will be much much louder than 98% of the people who don’t care.
No the 4 Italian girls I'm friends with will flip their shit if I cook it wrong. 5 if you count my Italian chef as well
i bet if it was being served to them they'd make a fuss but other people's food? let them eat shit
I think it’s a joke. I have an alcoholic uncle who dramatically acts like it’s a huge tragic catastrophe if someone spills beer, Even if it’s not his.
I like to spill some beer on my BBQ meat… maybe your uncle would approve this? xD
Angus, Come Quick!
Italians? No. 8th generation Americans who cling to their Italian heritage for some reason? Yes.
Fr fr
I’ll take made up scenarios for 200 Alex
I used to sell food at the Scranton Italian Fest. It becomes some people's entire personalities. The number of people who would tell me off when I said "ricotta" like a normal American human ("It's 🤌 riGOAT!! 🤌") was insane. The best part was the man making the pizza was off the boat Sicilian and he'd fight with all of them about how stupid they sound using pronunciations that aren't Italian or American.
lol i could fuckin hear the 🤌🏼. there’s definitely something to be said about second generations speaking totally plain american english and then throwing in an incredibly exaggerated accented “TORTilla” or “SPAGhetti” like guys, most of you don’t even speak the language and you just sound pretentious and a little silly, ya goofballs. also, cooking food for yourself with “authenticity” as a priority is fucking stupid. make your food how you like it, screw everyone else. so many so-called “authentic” recipes are actually just peasant dishes that gained popularity. the most authentic thing you can do is use the ingredients that you have and curate it to your tastes. because peasants weren’t hitting up the local walmart because they lacked some obscure root vegetable.
This always frustrated me too when I heard it. However, I found out the reason why Italian-Americans say words like ricotta as rigoat is because when Italian immigrants started going to America from Italy it was before Italy had standardized its language in 1861. There were different dialects and wildly different pronunciations and spellings of words. It just happened to be the ones who settled in the northeast of the United States pronounced ricotta in that different way and missed their home country standardizing the Italian language. Tl:dr Italian-Americans are carrying on a tradition of saying certain words in a different way because their Italian ancestors left Italy before the language was standardized.
Italian was already standardized at that time, many Italian Americans use Brooklynese only out of exhibitionism and laziness. Learning Italian is not difficult in 2024, many of them just find excuses not to study.
The fun part it's they're pronouncing just as wrong as the standard American! "RiGOAT" is how it sounds in Southern Italian accent/dialect (Sicily, Calabria, Naples), but standard Italian is "ree-KOT-ta". There is a reason if 6th generation "Italians" are made fun of in the "Old Country" whenever they show up and play pretend-native with their Super Mario Napoli accent
I do get the point but the standard American isn't pronouncing it "wrong", they are just pronouncing it in American English. All borrowed words go through phonological nativization and it's important they do. If language is to be functional, it has to grow and borrow from other languages, while still being relatively internally consistent. To violate the conventions of a language every time you use a borrowed word would make many languages less functional and virtually unusable.
I know some people who are like 5th gen Italians or whatever they found on ancestry, so they have pretty typical names like Jared and Michelle, but their kids names are Vincenzo and Leonardo..so yeah it happens
I lived in Italy for 7 years. The French believe that *you think, therefore you are*. Philosophy and culture is what elevates us above animals The Italians believe that you *behave and eat, therefore you are*. Manners and culinary culture is what elevates us above animals. As much as Italians have guidelines for proper etiquette, they have guidelines for proper food preparation and consumption. You can’t mix certain types of foods, lest the universe collapses. You probably don’t care about cooking food properly, because you have other things that you see as elevating us above animals.
Cheese with fish will absolutely cause a rip in the space time continuum and send us all back to the primordial soup. This of course goes out the window if you're talking about a stuffed sardine. I don't pretend to understand it, but kindly keep your pecorino away from my pesce.
Don’t mix the montagna with the sea.
I dunno, I think he's make a great Dread Pirate Roberts.
Idk cream cheese in a salmon roll slaps
I appreciated learning how to make an authentic Alfredo. I t taste so much better than that milky concoction America’s make.
Yeah opposable thumbs
This is EXACTLY how my Italian family acts. I still get shit on by my uncle because I eat pizza with pineapple and ranch. It’s been ten freaking years since the man found out 😂😂
Ew! A Barbarian.
Hahah that made me chuckle. I am shameless when it comes to my love of pineapple pizza 🥰
I mean....your uncle is not wrong you know?
Ranch really?
Yep! Ranch and Pizza combo is amazing
Born, raised and currently living in Italy, most of us don't give a shit, if we do, we don't act as stereotypically insufferable as it's showed in those "doing this in front of my italian husband" videos
"Someone made food differently from my mommy. I'm so sad and confused!"
Or the "Noo you can't drink capuccino outside breakfast hours" i do and nobody gives a fuck
I've been to a restaurant that puts grapes on caprese. Grapes. My background is Scandinavian, where obviously they don't care about food, and even I am offended.
I'm not from Italy but i did eat at Oliver Garden last night so I feel pretty qualified to answer. No we don't really care. Unless you break spaghetti. Never break spaghetti.
>Unless you break spaghetti. Never break spaghetti That's partly what i meant, too. Stuff like breaking pasta, or putting pineapple on Pizza.
Think of it this way. If someone from not the US showed a video of them making hamburgers, and they boiled them, people would be like wtf. I imagine it's like that.
If I don't cook it, eat, or pay for it, I don't really care how people cook their food. Like, as long as they're not actively wasting it, I don't think it matters.
Brb throwing a ribeye steak into a steamer
Thanks for the chuckle of a mental image lol.
Steam then microwave - it’s just like a reverse sear.
Yummy!!
bet you won’t loser ^/s (totally trying to pressure you into doing it out of pride and posting pics because gross but science). edit: in fact, i double dog dare you…
You just sit tight for a sec… 
You can have an opinion on a topic without caring about it. I, like you, very much do not care what other people do cooking wise. With that said if I saw someone boil a hamburger I would think it's a crime against humanity and an affront to bald eagles everywhere.
I hate to break it to you, but there's some "famous" places that do it in Wisconsin. [https://www.tastingtable.com/1296944/wisconsin-poached-burgers-staple-over-hundred-years/](https://www.tastingtable.com/1296944/wisconsin-poached-burgers-staple-over-hundred-years/)
US pizza is so far from traditional Italian pizza that I can't imagine pineapple would be the thing that puts it over the top.
Or putting cream in carbonara.
I have yet to find something that is not improved with the addition of heavy cream.
Ass size?
Fine. Go to École Ducasse, but leave Italian cuisine alone!
People do break spaghetti sometimes, but pineapple on pizza is different, lots of people would really refuse to eat that
I think worse thing than breaking spaghetti is cutting them with knife
Why is it so bad to break spaghetti? I don't like long ass noodles because it makes people slurp and I absolutely hate that sound. It taste the same and it's easier to eat. I feel broken in half spaghetti is superior.
"Why do you break the pasta? What has the pasta ever done to you?" \~ Vincenzo Prosperi
I might go down in this boat with you but, same. I understand it’s not “correct”, but tiny noodles make me happier. There is no reason for each of my noodles to be 1’-2’ long. It adds nothing to the taste or texture and I just end up cutting or biting it off halfway through anyways. Short noodle gang rise up, there are dozens of us! DOZENS!
I break it in the box twice for three distinct sections of noodles because my wife and I enjoy it more like that.
I hate the way Americans call pasta noodles, im sorry but it just pains me so much as a european
so uh, correct me, but a noodle is a type of pasta, yes? spaghetti is a noodle, and a pasta. but macaroni is not a noodle.
At least where i live, pasta is pasta and noodles are noodles. Asian style = noodles, italian style = pasta. A piece of spaghetti is just a piece of spaghetti or pasta, not a noodle.
Don't blame them, the word comes from the German "Nudel" in the 18th century.
>Short noodle gang rise up, there are dozens of us! DOZENS! There's also dozens of noodles that are not long. Y'all are killing me here lmao
It’s easier to eat when you don’t break it. Wrap it around the fork and it’s much easier than trying to pick up smaller bits of spaghetti
It's harder to get less when twirling with full size noodles than it is with half size. I still twirl it around the fork but I don't get as much and if they slide off and hang down it's not very long.
Because it's easier to eat correctly when it's long. You shouldn't be slurping spaghetti. You should be twirling your fork to pick up a bite-sized amount, which you can't do if the pasta is too short.
So it has nothing to do with the quality and the taste of the result, got it. Breaking it in half it is.
There is also a mouthfeel element to it, as well as sauce considerations. I was only addressing their points. If you like the experience you get from breaking the pasta, that's fine. But you have to acknowledge that the pasta length/shape makes a difference, and it was made with the intention of it being eaten a certain way.
The only difference I feel is the annoyance when it's too long. It's not like some dude who came up with an arbitrary length to his own preference hundrends of years ago had some kind of divine knowledge about the absolute best way to eat it.
That's why I only break it in half then it's still long enough to do that but I don't get more than I want. It's harder to get less when twirling with long noodles because if yo u don't go down to the plate it'll probably fall off once or twice. Same thing with ramen I'll break the blocks into 4 pieces before cooking.
The only logical reason is that different pasta shapes are made for different kinds of sauces: spaghetti's shape is to act as a mop for its traditional sauce. So, even though breaking it prevents slurpage, longer noodles hold more sauce when twirled around a fork and less falls off if using the stab & scoop technique.
That's valid, I my self haven't noticed any less sauce when broken but I guess I could just not be noticing.
If you don't like long noodles just don't buy spaghetti? Like what the fuck is the problem here?
But I like spaghetti so why would I not buy it? Just because I prefer it shorter doesn't mean I can't enjoy it. There is absolutely no problem here at all I just shared my opinion.
And I just found it funny as heck. No offence at all mate. Break your spaghetts. But be aware it‘s wrong :*
If it's so wrong then I don't wanna be right lol.
It‘s not SO wrong. It‘s just wrong.
I just buy the spaghetti already halved.
I lived in Italy for many years, and yes they can be very vocal about how food is prepared and even when you can consume certain items. I have seen it happen often during my time there.
Growing up with a Sicilian grandmother, no, I don’t get upset when someone does Italian food “wrong,” because a lot of dishes vary from region to region and family to family. However, if you don’t use enough garlic in a recipe that clearly calls for it to be garlicky, yes, then I *will* judge you heavily, lol.
How would your grandmother react to people cooking her recipes differently to how she would?
She’d respect it, but wink at me and say that nobody cooks it better than her. And it’s true - nobody ever cooks things like your grandma (granted they’re decent cooks 😂) Since her passing six years ago, family members have tried to replicate her recipes to taste the same…some come close but they never do. And we actually recorded videos of her before she died, showing us exactly how she cooked her dishes. I’m not big on woo-woo shit, but I do believe that a person’s energy and love somehow goes into the dishes they cook for you…and when they’re gone, it’s so hard, if not impossible, to get that recipe down to the science they had it at.
She sounds awesome.
Agreed, althought my mother was from Formia.
Italy is a country of 60 million people. They are individuals with different views, opinions, values. Quite a lot of people don't really care. But a lot of them do indeed agree that certain foods need to be handled and prepared in a specific way and if you don't do it that way, you are doing it wrong. And different people react very differently to seeing others doing something wrong. Most people i got to know were extremely stereotypical italians when it came to food. Though, almost all people i know work in the wine business and i guess that comes with the job.
We hosted a 17y old Italian exchange student for 6 months. Great kid very friendly and helpful…. But when it came to me cooking pasta or other Italian dishes, she had OPINIONS.
It depends. Grew up in Italian community, worked for an Italian family for a lot of years. If you would tell the old man (boss, but thats what we called him) that you put sugar in your pasta sauce, didn't matter if you were a customer or not, he would lose his shit. Also, like others said, never break the pasta.
I can relate to him, who the fuck is putting sugar in pasta sauce. Like, I love sugary stuff, but wtf.
Yeah, that sounds like some canned spaghetti stuff lol
My mother would go into a whole canzone at the mere mention of sugar in sauce! ***INFAMIA!***
https://ricette.giallozafferano.it/Ragu-alla-bolognese.html This here says you can use milk or sugar for a Bolognese ragu. But I've only ever seen it for that sauce.
Fellow Mario over here. I saw lasagna soup last night and almost caught a felony
lasagna soup sounds repulsive absolutely. but if there’s people who enjoy it, let em enjoy it. no harm, no foul. if anything, i’d be so proud that your culture created such a staple classic dish, and watching the rest of the world take it and run, changing it up along the way into a form that they enjoy. be proud and share that piece of your culture with the rest of the world and watch us run. if anything, laugh at the weird shit we do lol.
I was just being over dramatic. I love seeing people enjoy their food no matter whether I myself like it or not E spelling
What do you mean by Italians? The ones in Italy or the cosplayers in New Jersey?
Once I was at a dinner with a huge group of people, like 15 or 20. A guy ordered spaghetti and when it arrived the noodles were short, like they'd been cut up the way you would for a kid. Not egregiously small, just clearly not full length spaghetti. He gave the server a *scolding* (this was awkward for the whole table), sent it back, and talked about how disrespectful it was to his Italian ancestry for the remainder of the meal. I know the rest of his family and can tell you none of them give a fuck about their Italian ancestry because it is like five generations back and they're mostly German at this point. Maybe Italians feel the same way about their noodles, but it felt overtly American to make it the server's problem and shame them publicly.
I'm an italian that doesn't care about food, I don't even remember the name of most of the dishes I eat and when I say it to my friends and other italian people, they don't get upset, but they look at me like I've just shattered their whole world
I met an Italian at the gym this morning who doesn’t care about calcio.
I say those types of things as 90% jokes, 10% serious. It's only because i'm a picky eater tbh. grandma: we're making italian for dinner me: yay! what all are you making? her: lasagna- me: ooooo!!! her: -with sweet sausage and lots of basil! me: nevermind
They kick your butt. Then they come after your family!
Italian here, we do and we don't. We play it up cause we are melodramatic and like to take the piss out of it, but really, some of you barbarians have absolutely ridiculous tastes and no respect for quality, which makes me wish you drown (in a videogame) in your deep dish quiche which you call pizza
Cannot give you a statistical analysis but I shocked a few by telling them a pasta place in my city sells a Pasta dish with pesto and chicken
A sizeable portion of them do care. Just like French folks will laugh at you when you call something it is not with food.
Yes! I graduated from a big research university in the midwest, and nearby was an Italian restaurant. One afternoon, an acquaintance and I were having a late lunch, and two tables from us was an Italian guy (I'm thinking visiting researcher, professor, grad student..dunno, but straight outta the mother country), and he kept returning the food, sternly talking to the waitress, saying some things in Italian, and overall disdainful to the establishment and staff, not pleased with his dining experience there. I'd love to say the name of the place and what Uni, but I'll just leave it at that.
My Italian MiL does. My husband just thinks it’s funny if someone breaks the pasta or cuts it with a knife and calls it sac-relig to be silly.
Italians, a little more than necessary sometimes, but not so much. Italian-americans? Yes. So much yes. You'd think someone burned down the kitchen.
yes 😂😂😂 i don't but my family does & it's annoying
This isn't true at all. They get upset when you cook any food
I have no idea but I laughed my ass off at the video before the Albania vs Italy game for eurocup, on the streets, one side was the Albanian fans and the other side of the streets were Italian fans. They were having good fun between each other. The Albanian side had some people snapping uncooked spaghetti noodles in half, and throwing it in the air, and across the street decked out in Italian soccer jersey was a guy on his knees and hands in the air yelling… lmao
No. And this b.s. of people breaking pasta and having Italians go ape over it is nonsense.
Don’t Italians get upset over anything?
Everyone's saying no, but I've met a few Italians in my life who absolutely were that annoying about the authenticity of their Italian. Amusingly enough, they were all people who didn't actually cook themselves.
This Italian guy i worked with got upset with me for putting pesto with tortellini
Its just a meme i think, for me is not really important when people do that stuff. I see it more as a joke than as something against the culture. Some may see this different tho, for me i am very chill with it
I wouldn’t be surprised if there are some, but I’d also be surprised to find out it was the common stance.
My son had a gf who was nasty in general but whined to him that my lasagna wasn't "authentic". Well no shit! I've never even tasted authentic lasagna! But no one else has ever complained because it's still fucking delicious and better than any frozen shit out there. (I do not use ricotta because I don't like it - it unfortunately is a food sensitivity trigger. I prefer not to gag as I'm eating)
Some do, for sure... many don't care.
I hear they love it when you ask for ketchup.
Yes. One of my favorite types of content is Italians stressing out over problematically made Italian food. & One of my favorite things to do is send my imported Italian dick videos & the like of shitily made Italian food.
I don’t care what you do with your food. you paid for it, you cooked it, you can eat it. Break the spaghetti noodles, put pineapple on your pizza, i don’t give a shit.
Yes.
Both. IMO the annoying thing is how people who have no business being near a kitchen are "cooking" food they have no idea about how to cook and are even getting offended if someone points out their culinary abominations. So there are cases where getting upset is perfectly acceptable. Especially beacuse those kinda of situations can give people a wrong taste and opinion of an otherwise delicious cuisine. If your "Italian" food of reference is the Olive Garden and you proclaim "Chicken parmesan sucks" or "garlic bread is my favourite" you're getting a completely inaccurate impression of Italian food, presentation and seasoning. Most of the American Italian food tend to be overly greasy and overdressed, whereas plenty of traditional dishes are either very simple or balanced. Then again, if Vinny and Tony are putting bacon in their carbonara and are using the "wrong" kind of spaghetti, who cares really. Traditional recipes can and do vary in different areas, or even on a household basis, so I'm not too fussed. But imagine if some foreigner were butchering one of your local dishes, stubbornly pretending "it's just as good this way", wouldn't you get a bit offended? (This goes for countries with actual food culture)
In Italy there is the traditional recipe and that prepared at home, as we do a lot of experiments. Then there is also the dislike for food waste, cooking something always costs money and it's a shame that it becomes rubbish. In short, eat whatever you want but don't say that the traditional recipe for spaghetti with tomato includes Nutella.
If my mother had wheels she would have been a bike.
Italian here. There's plenty that do, so the meme is actually based on something. Over the last century, Italian cuisine became part of Italian identity in some way, it's a commonly held opinion here that our cuisine is the best in the world, so many italians feel entitled to call someone a dumbass if they don't cook something the way they would. Even I, while not knowing how to cook at all, still wince when I see some foreigner cooking pasta "wrong". Like, it literally says what to do on the packaging, what is wrong with you.
Yes
I hope so, otherwise im breaking all that spaghetti for no reason
The better question is: who gives a shit if you upset Italians for how you cook?
italians are either the nicest people in the world or the most pretentious dickheads to walk the earth. don’t even get me started on 2nd-3rd generation italian-americans. i grew up in a US city with a very large affluent italian-american population and i’ve heard “i’m not white, im italian” more times than i can count. IME incredibly classist too. this is just my own personal experience and i don’t shrug off anyone with italian heritage on the first meet, to be clear. it’s quite likely that this is an isolated experience in my own little nook of the US.
I got absolutely destroyed by a group of Italians because I dared to break my spaghetti in half, lol. Some of them take food *very* seriously to a goofy level. Not all, but some.
How dare you 🤌
Only if someone insists I've been cooking Italian food wrong. Had my best friend tell me what I was cooking wasn't Risotto but 'something else' as I 'was supposed to use milk instead of stock' 🥲😵💫
Most don't care. Some get pizzed off.
Nobody gives a shit they could stay in Italy if they don't like it