fettuccine Alfredo and chicken parmesan. Not dishes
that an Italian would recognise, let alone eat, but
now mainstays of the world’s idea of Italian food.
Pasta is arguably the foodstuff that best evokes
the idea of Italianità, Italianism. Its consumption
abroad became a badge of “diversity”. Locals
stereotyped Italian newcomers derisively as
“macaroni”, but ended up instilling in them a
sense of national as opposed to regional origin.
The postwar years, Italians left their devastated
nation in their hordes in a second major exodus.
Many settled in Britain, where their arrival coincided
with that of the Gaggia coffee machine, invented in
Milan in 1947. Coffee bars sprang up in bombed-
out city centres as the Brits fell in love with the
cappuccino, and trattorias with chequered tablecloths
proliferated in London’s Soho. In 1954, while Kingsley
Amis was pooh-poohing spaghetti as “coagulated
flour-and-water” in his comic novel Lucky Jim,
Elizabeth David was introducing the public to “real”
Italian country cooking with her classic Italian Food.
Cucina povera became fashionable, deserving of
serious interest, and even polenta, a symbol of rural
poverty gained star-billing on restaurant menus. More
recently, non-Italian TV cooks like Nigella Lawson and
Jamie Oliver have romanticised Italian food with a
surfeit of colour and peasant chic. “A land of mammas
and nonnas,” is how John Dickie, author of the Italian
food-history book Delizia!, describes Oliver’s vision.
The food-and-wine writer Matthew Fort fears
fallout on restaurants in Italy itself. “Tourists bring
the experience of Italian food that they’ve enjoyed
in their homelands,” he told me. “This bears little
resemblance to the true food of Italy. Increasing
numbers of chefs and restaurateurs are giving up
the struggle to preserve the purity of local dishes,
and give the tourist-customers what they want – the
Italian food they have in their home country.” ●GOURMET TRAVELLER 79