My wife puts Tabasco sauce on her pizza, while I am convinced that an Italian person dies every time she does that. Help us sort this out, please.
I haven’t been arrested by Italian food cops yet so I’d say it’s fine. Do whatever you want to food that makes it taste good to you because taste is a very subjective thing.
The Pizza Police, you say?
Pizza Polizia
TBF, not only would that same Italian person you envision also die every time a “pizza” is made, (IRL, they’re far hardier as a people) but I personally reached a similar point in my impression of “proper” sushi. 🤷🏽♂️ For decades now, I’ve looked down on cream cheese, et al, used as ingredients in rolls of all kinds. That eventually evolved into other disdainful opinions on adjacent foods’ contents, but I’ve fairly recently discovered a simple fact: in its culture of origin, sushi is known to on occasion include ice cream as an ingredient.
Therefore? Such quixotic prescriptionism is worse than useless: it restricts access to experiences based on fabricated and imaginary rules (or, face the piercing judgment of… actually no one at all).
Fuck what “people” say. Engage with your wife’s view, and maybe even join her in exploring what other curious ways one can enjoy weird shit. 🫀🖖🏽
Yup, there’s three rules about food:
- Don’t eat what will kill you.
- Eat stuff that tastes good.
- Eat stuff that’s good for you.
As long as you never break rule one and only occasionally break rules 2 and 3, you’ll have a good time.
I felt somewhat similarly about cream cheese in sushi, then I watched some video of a guy in Japan taking Americanized sushi to an old traditional sushi chef. When he liked the cream cheese, I unclutched my pearls a bit.
The closer I get to that “old chef” icon myself, the more I come to realize that the majority of it is projected onto the concept from the surrounding culture… (I blame that very thing for contributing in large part to the robbing us all of Bourdain, in fact. 🙇🏽♂️💔)
Well, let’s be real, pizza isn’t some kind of holy thing that is only Italian.
It’s not like they’re the only people to ever put things on flat dough and bake it.
But ignoring that, food is a living thing, just like most languages, like music, like fashion and art. You can try to stick a pin in it, but you kill the thing by doing so.
It reaches a point where it’s ludicrous to try and claim a thing is possessed in its entirety by the place that first named something.
Once a cultural idea spreads far enough, you can only specify one type of the thing. It’s why we have champagne, and sparkling wine. It’s a way of putting a pin in something but recognizing that there’s still living versions out there.
Or, look at it like the difference between formal and colloquial language.
Pizza may have started in Italy as a term, but it’s like kleenex and qtips. Pizza is now the generic term for stuff cooked on flat dough. It can even be applied to stuff being placed on flat bread, and then cooked, though I don’t know why you’d not call it one of the other words for that idea other than being unaware of those words.
Put whatever you want on your dough, call it pizza, and enjoy ;)
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laughs Japanesely They have a dish here called something like Napolitan that’s a ketchup-based sauce on spaghetti. IIRC it was partly born out of post-war food shortages and trying to make something Western-ish by a hotel in Yokohama. It became its own food, however, and lots of people love it.
I am always amazed by how the japanese are often times very willing to experiment and be inventive in terms of melding their own culinary culture with foreign ones, considering the isolationist and conservative history and reputation they have overall as a people.
To me, that simply says that food really is one of the universal languages.
I’d love to try this dish if just for experimentation, although I suspect it wouldn’t be something I’d have more than once lol
Have you read the story of Panko breadcrumbs?
It came from food and fuel shortages in WW2 where the ingredients for bread but no ovens or equipment to cook it into anything. One guy hooked a bunch of dough up to a car battery and electrocuted it and created a crustless loaf with a weird texture. He also discovered this weird texture made for great even sized crumbs with a uniform colour and after the war ended decided to turn it into a business.
As I understand it, it was created by a hotel chef trying to find something to feed foreigners (mostly soldiers) very soon after the war, so it’s kinda different.
Tempura and Pan (bread) come from the Portuguese. They did start growing hot peppers like many after they got here via either the Portuguese and/or Dutch following the Columbian Exchange.
Much like there’s American Chinese food, there’s also Japanese Chinese suited to their tastes. Pizza is probably the most prominent examples: mayo, corn, etc. pizza is common here.
Ketchup + sour cream + grated Trappist cheese (cold) mixed with piping hot pasta is godlike though. Was a staple during my childhood.
We were poor.
Yeah, no judgement here, when one is poor they gotta do what they gotta do, and ketchup is probably cheaper than decent tomato sauce in some parts of the world I would imagine.
That said, I am willing to bet that the same pasta but with actual prepared tomato sauce (that means put it on the stove, let it simmer, add some salt, maybe a bit of pepper or a pinch of chili flakes if you like, and a drop of EVO oil when it comes off the heat) in place of ketchup would be even better.
Although in your case, the ketchup recipe likely brings back happy emotions relating to your childhood which, after all, are also part of the food experience. Cheers!
But no comment in the sour cream?!
Tbh Hungarians eat everything with sour cream.
There are plenty of pasta dishes and sauces that use cream, and while sour cream is not used in italian cuisine I think it tastes amazing :)
So I can absolutely see sour cream working in pasta
The Trappist cheese sounds like a more expensive option imho
It was the staple of Hungary during socialism and probably still is. Supposedly 70% of all cheese purchases are Trappista.
It’s very similar to what North Americans would describe as basic cheddar.
Aha wow, today I learned! Are there that many Trappist monks in Hungary, or is the name entirely unrelated to the monks?
Yay. Chili flakes are great, too.
BTW, the worst pizza I ever had was served in Italy. Absolutely drowned in oil.
Maybe the oily pizzas are more pizzas than the ones we eat out of Italy
You put red pepper flakes on your pizza sometimes, yeah? She just likes hers in liquid form.
Don’t worry about what Italians think about how you eat pizza. Unless you are in Italy, however you are eating it is probably unappealing to most Italians no matter what you are putting on it, even in its base form with no modifications.
Not one single actual Italian gives a flying fuck how you eat anything, as long as you eat enough.
The only “Italians” who say this shit are people that claim to be Italian because their great great great great grandfather once got a hand job in a Fiat 500
If you wanted pizza to be “italian”, it would have to have no tomatoes, peppers, pepperoni, buffalo milk cheese, basil or a whole bunch of other ingredients that are commonly added to pizza.
Pizza is a global food, do with it as you will
I mean, Italians put French fries and hot dog slices on pizza. Can we really say they’re the last word on “authenticity” ?
That’s Pizza Americana though
I don’t see them serving these in America, though.
And I don’t see them serving Panda Express in Beijing. The point is not authenticity it’s that different cultures take what they perceived to be another culture’s food and bend it to their preferences.
But mostly I was making a joke because of its name.
if an Italian died every time “an italian dies” Italy’s population would be in the negatives by now.
It already was in the negatives the last time i checked
As an Italian I love Sriracha or Harissa on pizza, but the vinegar, no please!
Tabasco?
I prefer hot sauce on old pizza, not vinegar
Is she making he pizza for Italy, or for herself?
Put whatever you want on a pizza, its a good delivery mechanism
I’m not a big hot sauce ON pizza kinda guy, but I dip the crust in something like secret aardvark. Buffalo chicken pizza is pretty popular and that’s basically a hot sauce pizza.
Sure, why not? I put sriracha on some the pizzas we get, or make at home.
Some Italians may find this offensive, alas not as offensive as lathering pizza in ketchup.
Tabasco is tasty and Italian food mythologies are fairly silly.
As an Italian, sorry for my choice of words but that article is pure, untainted ass.
“Pizza is more American” why doesn’t he go yell it in public in Napoli, i fucking dare him.
Italians are well-known for being sticklers about the right way to prepare their food, often implying it is ancient. Unless it is a low-oil focaccia or a salad (ancient Roman), it is surprisingly often the case that it is a dish that is 50-100 years old with a foreign influence.
Naples has been making pizza for about 200 years as a basic flatbread with tomatoes, mozarella, and basil. If you eat pizza with a tomato sauce… that’s an American change. Pizza was not often eaten outside Naples [Edit:whoopsie] until around WWII. The most common variations around the world are all based on the American version.
Carbonara was a WWII-era invention with tons of variations at first and an American origin. I’ve known Italians that get actually upset if you prepare carbonara with the “wrong” ingredients even though they were ingredients used on “original” carbonaras less than 50 years ago.
If you go back just a bit farther, every dish that needs tomatoes or potatoes or peppers is from the Americas, not Europe. And Europeans were not big on tomatoes for a looong time. It’s only been in much use there for about 250 years.
