Category: About This

Articles on this blog or on the author.

Seven Links

A few days ago I had the honor of being nominated by Nami (@ Just One Cookbook) for the Seven Links Challenge. It consists of selecting seven of my existing posts based on as many given criteria and explaining the reasons behind the choices. So, here I go!

1. The most beautiful post

 

As my most “beautiful” post, I have chosen Risotto with Porcini Mushrooms. This is mostly because I like the picture, a lucky single shot taken on a trip to Italy. After this became my first recipe on Quatro Fromaggio, I continued posting more recipes and realized how hard food photography really is!

2. The most popular post

formaggi

According to Google Analytics, the Formaggio Cheese post is the one that reached my highest number of views so far. Several people find this article while searching for a particular type of Italian cheese. Hopefully, it answers their questions!

3. The most controversial post

pasta

Pretty much every single article on Quatro Fromaggio has some level of controversy. The whole premise of this blog is to compare authentic Italian food to its many aberrations, and my role can’t be too accommodating towards the “offenders” 🙂 In the Pasta 101 article, however, the controversy is in the reference to the Atkins debate.

4. The most helpful post

pasta-names

home-made lightbox
My home-made lightbox

Pasta Names Explained has been called out as the most informative by commenters. This makes me really happy because of the effort that went into the preparation. The collection of the various pictures was the challenge. Since I didn’t want to buy all the different types of pasta at once, I came up with a system based on a home-made lightbox that I could carry with me and use to take pictures in almost identical conditions over time.

5. The post that was surprisingly successful

pizzoccheri

I didn’t think that Google would rank Pizzoccheri della Valtellina as high as it does. In fact, most people come across this page through the search engines. Pizzoccheri is a relatively unknown dish outside of Italy – most readers are probably Italians.

6. The post that did not get the attention it deserved

Possibly because I posted it when not many people knew about this blog, but Eating Vegetarian didn’t do as well as I hoped. My fiancée is a vegetarian (and the artist who painted the above picture), and I firmly believe in yummy vegetarian food where nobody would lament the lack of meat. Italian food often qualifies as such.

7. The post I am most proud of

The research work behind Rice Demystified was one of the most productive and satisfying for me. I quickly answered my own questions and I started producing the illustrations, starting from my own scans of real rice grains. I really enjoyed that 🙂

~~~~~

And now to the part where I nominate 5 bloggers and pass the Seven Links Challenge on to them. I have chosen some that I have been following for quite some time, and that have been a great source of motivation and inspiration for me:

Birthday Blog

It has been one year already! I started this blog at the end of July 2010 out of sheer exasperation. I felt that Italian cuisine was too often completely misrepresented in North America. Not only was it not authentic (which is understandable this far away from Italy), it frequently tasted plain bad.

With many of its principles distorted, Italian food becomes a caricature of itself. It needs to have olives and sun-dried tomatoes; bread must be foccacia or have flour on it and be called ciabbata; tomato sauce, salami, olive oil, or a balsamic reduction must be involved; there need to be mountains of parmesan and mozza, along with a mix of 20 Mediterranean spices. If short of Italian ingredients, anything Spanish or Greek will be close enough: feta cheese, kalamata olives, even chorizo…

I understand that, just like American English has drifted from British English, Italian food in North America has evolved into its own genre. What I don’t understand is when the adjective “authentic” is still used. If you serve authentic Italian food, please:

  1. Make sure your Italian dishes exist in Italy (there is no Alfredo sauce and Spaghetti with Meatballs is extinct!)
  2. Check your recipes (whole garlic cloves have no business on any pizza!)
  3. Spell-check your menu (once and for all: it’s ‘prosciutto’, not proscuitto, it’s ‘quattro formaggi’, not quatro fromaggio!)
  4. Don’t say something is “Tuscan” just to make it sound more Italian (what is the point of serving Tuscan Chicken Pasta, when nowhere in Italy will you find chicken on any pasta?)
  5. If you serve espresso, don’t feel that you have to fill up that little coffee cup! Half-full is fine – just make sure it’s creamy.

Over the course of the year, lots of discussions were had through comments, and a small but energetic group of friends has formed: Italians living abroad, Italians living in Italy, and foodies living all around the world. Thank you all – you are my source of motivation, and your feedback has been invaluable.

I also would like to thank my fiancée Candace – I owe her many of the considerations on the differences in culture between Italy and North America, and she is a fantastic editor! Thanks, Candace, also for being so patient with me as I got more and more obsessed with this project. I even wonder if this should still be called a blog… on many occasions, writing the articles has required me to do quite a bit of research. But it was fun, and I learned a lot from it.

Looking forward into year two, I am hoping to get the community even more involved. I would like this blog to become a hub for discussions around authentic Italian food and a reference for anyone interested in learning more about it. But for today, I’m just going to open a good bottle of ‘spumante’ and celebrate making it this far!

Thanks all for reading.

Preface

I was born in Italy and I have been living in Vancouver, Canada for the last 10 years. I love Vancouver and I love eating out in Vancouver, but I can’t help but notice the many distortions of Italian dishes on restaurants menus.

For some reason that I don’t understand, in Vancouver Italian food is almost as common to find as it is to find sushi. And it isn’t just because of the many (more or less authentic) Italian restaurants, west coast restaurants, and even chains often like to feature Italian dishes as part of their regular menus.

If on one hand, I’m flattered for all this attention, on the other hand, I’m seriously worried that the authentic Italian cuisine might get undermined by all these unsuccessful imitations; that people will either decide that they don’t like Italian food or -worse- that they like the imitation better than the real thing, and would turn the latter away. Frightening!

Even just on spelling and pronunciation, I understand that some Italian words will get Americanized (e.g. ‘Parmesan’ cheese), but I don’t understand why people can’t do an Italian spell check or even just a Google search before printing out their menus (it’s ‘focaccia’, not ‘foccacia’!) Maybe I’m hyper-sensitive to the issue because Italians don’t make many spelling mistakes (the Italian language is written pretty much exactly like it’s pronounced), but this makes Italian spelling mistakes stand out even more.

In this blog, I’m very pretentiously trying to fix the problem. I will say the proper ways to write the names of Italian dishes. And, from what I know, I will also try to say how the dish should look and taste… for sure I will say how the dish most definitely *shouldn’t* look or taste 🙂