A Beginner's Guide to Authentic Italian Food
This week we take a break from our usual recipe posts to share a series of articles I wrote way back in 2012. Together, they try to give the reader a sense of what I saw then—and largely still see—as the basics of authentic Italian cookery, written from the perspective of an Italian-American who has spent many years living in Italy and a lifetime studying and cooking continental Italian cuisine.
Since 2012 a lot has changed. Certainly a lot of ink (virtual and real) has been spilled over the topic. And, over all, there’s a lot more familiarity today with “real” Italian cookery than there was then.
But it seems that familiarity has bred contempt. It is fashionable today to attack the whole notion of “authenticity” as elitist, as a way of dissing the cooking of the Italian diaspora. Or just plan false. Famously critics like to point out, for example, that even though many writers (including me) will tell you that a true carbonara never includes cream, the very first written recipe for carbonara did call for that supposedly iconoclastic ingredient.
For other critics, the concept of authenticity may have been useful back in the day as a way of introducing non-Italians to real Italian cooking, but since we know better now, the concept has outlived their usefulness.
Yet other critics think the concept might have some usefulness, but it’s gone too far. For them, the “authenticity police” are trying to turn Italian cuisine into a kind of holy canon of “authentic” recipes from which you can only deviate at your peril. That kind of rigidity only turns people off. For non-Italians in particular it can be infuriating to be told by purists that a real carbonara can only be made with guanciale, when where you live you can only find pancetta—if you’re lucky.
Personally, I have a lot of sympathy for these critiques, to a point. But I find some of them self-interested. A lot of them seem to come from non-Italian content creators who want to give themselves license to play with Italian cuisine in ways that most Italians would find objectionable, even disrespectful. (The term “cultural appropriation” comes to mind, even if I realize it’s a loaded term.) Or to justify not knowing what they're doing. As a wise person once said, you need to know the rule before you can break it.
Actually, though, even Italians would agree with some of these critiques. Especially that the concept of authenticity (for Italians, genuinità) has become a kind of straight-jacket that stifles creativity and openness to new influences, and tries to prevent the natural evolution that any cuisine undergoes over time. Some Italian observers, most notoriously Alberto Grandi, have gone as far as to dismiss the whole concept of genuinità as a “post modern invention”.
It’s a fascinating (and sometimes infuriating) debate. Personally, I think that there’s still a place for the concept of “authenticity”. Yes, the bad old days when Italian cookery outside Italy was dominated by “red sauce” joints” is over, at least in the larger, more cosmopolitan cities. And yes, if you take it too far, the concept can become a straight-jacket or a kind of snobbery.
But that said, I know what I read online. And I know what I taste when I eat in Italian restaurants outside Italy. There’s a still a lot of distortion and misinformation out there. And there’s still a lot of very bad “Italian” food, too. And while cooking does and should change over time, there are some core principles and sensibilities that remain constant.
And so, I think there’s still a place for these articles, even if my own thinking may have evolved a bit over time in some details. In any event, I hope you find them useful.
And perhaps thought-provoking. I certainly don’t claim to be the last word on any of this. Let me know in the comments what you think. Do you believe in the concept of authenticity? What do you think the critics get right, or wrong? And how would you define “real” Italian cookery?
Part I: The Varieties of Italian Cooking
This post walks you through the principal types of Italian cooking you are likely to encounter from true Italian food, the kind they make in Italy, to Italian Diaspora cooking, which at its best has an authenticity all its own, to the more dubious ‘Italian-style’ cooking and just plain bad imitations.
Part II: Learning to Tell Real Italian Food from Fake
This post gives you some pointers on where to go to learn about authentic Italian food, from the best books and online sources to TV shows, and lists some of the most common tell-tales signs of fakery.
Part III: How to Cook Authentic Italian Food at Home
This posts gives you the skinny on how to recreate authentic Italian dishes at home. It’s much easier than you think, so long as you keep some basic pointers in mind. The post runs down how to choose and work with ingredients for authentic flavors, and how to develop authentic cooking techniques.
To get the most out of this post, read it in conjunction with our pages on The Italian Pantry and Italian Food Culture.
Buon appetito and happy cooking!
Hello Frank,
Reading with interest and shaking my head "Yes" to so much you've written here. As to the authenticity police, I see them online all the time. But cooking has always been an intuitive art, hasn't it? So, some of the more militant voices will have to calm down.
A former lifelong New Yorker, I now live in New Hampshire. Believe me, there are still "red sauce" establishments proliferating up here. Olive Garden (love the sign) is popular. Chicken Parm abounds. I have to jump through hoops to find authentic ingredients, especially cuts of meat. I once had a butcher look at me and say "What's that"? when I told him I was making osso buco and asked for veal shank. I would have to wait 2-3 weeks because he had to order it in special. The food culture here, unless you live near the coast, is decidedly pub food - BBQ, burgers and beer.
I teach a course on regional Italian food focusing on much of what you've said including one section on history including the Risorgimento. The subtitle of the course is "Italian Food - There's No Such Thing". I am always met with blank stares when I say this. Despite that, when my course was advertised online it filled up in 27 minutes, so the interest is there. We are fortunate to have many farmers' markets when wonderful produce is in season. My local supermarket is barren of any ethnic produce and foodstuffs. Admittedly, I am spoiled coming from New York where I could get whatever I wanted at any time. Having been born and raised in my grandmother's house, and cooking since I could see over the stove, she taught me all I know about food. I do rely on your newsletter for interesting thought pieces and it is a rich resource for information. Thank you!
Maria DiVita D'Aquino
Folks, Posting a comment on behalf of a regular reader and personal friend Mark Sammons, who was having some technical trouble with Substack:
"My first career, thirty years, was in social history. So I tend not to view food as unchanging, but rather as specific to time, place, and resources. "Resources" includes both general availability and specific household wealth.
Among Lorenza de Medici's recipes we find one for pasta with cinnamon and rosewater and sugar. This suggests a time after the Arabs had introduced pasta up through Sicily into Italy but before high Ottoman taxes drove European tastes away from exotic flavorings and more toward local flavorings. The place, Florence, was a city state in constant competition with other city states for the accumulation and display of wealth. The resources of the Medici family were immense. The recipe is very expressive of this.
Similarly, tomatoes or chili peppers signal a date after 1492. Once chiles spread, anyone and everyone could have piquant impact of costly pepper from India from just a few seeds they could grow themselves, and pass along from friend to friend. Hot flavor was no longer the realm of the wealthy.
Sometimes an ingredient can be traced to interesting stories a Veneto polenta made with native American corn indicates not merely a date after 1492, but also a date after the 16th-century losses of Venetian empire territory to the Byzantines and League of Cambrai, and loss of trade controls to the Ottomans, and competition from other city-states and other countries in trade with newly-encountered continents. Cut off from their source of wealth, Venetian merchants turned to investing in mainland holdings in the Veneto, draining and improving the land to maximize returns. Notably, Leonardo Emo growing corn that became integral to regional cooking. He started out with money and grew rich, and is mostly remember for the villa designed for him by Palladio that integrates family home, barns, service wings, threshing floors, granaries all into one elegant form that might easily be mistaken for a vast palace.
All this is by way of saying that "authenticity" is highly particular to place, time, resources and relative wealth.
Then there are cross-currents of influence. When I studied art history in Rome for five months, Italy had been united for only 110 years; regionalism in cookery was still very pronounced. Pinsa probably survived in backwater neighborhoods as Trastevere was then, or in outlying villages, but I never encountered it. The same with the highly local white "pizza" with just salt, sometimes rosemary or mortadella; local, not noticed by foreigners. I think I saw pizza of the Neapolitan type never or only occasionally in the inexpensive tavole calde of my era (early 1970s). This was in the middle of the first world-wide fuel crisis, so there was no heat, little light, and trade was stalled. So, "authentic" was still very attached to time, place, resources (and, for me, to budget).
Seasonality was extremely prominent; I stayed in a pensione run by a convent, meals included. The sisters maintained a very large garden between orchard trees (from my books I could look up to seem them plowing on a tractor in full old-fashioned habit). I was mostly looking at frescoes, but I noticed and appreciated that the food was entirely unfamiliar, always changing, and when I had occasion to go out for a meal, I deliberately chose items I could not find in my pocket dictionary, just to see what they were (and I was not always certain afterwards).
Not that I minded Italian-American in my encounters in the US; it bore no resemblance to anything I encountered in central or northern Italy, which alerted me to Italian-American's more southerly influences. It seems not merely of differing regional origins, or "drift" from prototypes, but, in its abundant quantities, a celebration of escape from poverty into comparative prosperity.
Ten years later, circa 1981, I was pleased to encounter a "authentic" Italian restaurant in Boston. I had landed with friends of friends and was way out of my budget league. I was stunned to find cucina povera classics at high prices, $12 for a plate of pasta, (equivalent to $40 now.) The place was trendy, elegant, and hugely overpriced; the vaguely-defined "traditional" Italian cuisine was about to be discovered by Americans."