Food Particularities

Be prepared to not be shocked: food is a big deal in Italy. Cappuccino has its time (before 11:00 am), colazione (breakfast) has its fastidious rules, and you should probably not drink wine with pizza. In the States, I've noticed, people will eat large quantities of mediocre food and be perfectly content with that. If it's cheap and not bad, it will suffice. With some Italians, on the other hand, I've noticed them not finishing their food if it's not quality, and even going into detailed analyses of the food they are consuming and the ways in which it could be better. If I'd cooked a dish for my friends in the States, I would hear a chorus of "yum, this is great, thanks!" even if it was only okay. Not even my closest friends would be honest with me. Here, Frank is their middle name.

Case in point: last week my friend Katrina was visiting from Aarhus, Denmark. We made homemade ravioli with ricotta and spinach filling in some and squash and ricotta filling in the other. I'd made this dish back at Hampshire, and people had (I'm pretty positive) genuinely appreciated it. Here, my roommates told me it was fine, but not particularly good, and that my dough could have been more elastic and thin and that it was aesthetically unpleasing and that while my red sauce is decent, I still have some "segreti" to learn. Understandable: I was cooking Italian food for real Italians, and my ravioli were far from pretty.

However, the next weekend, when Marco and Chiara made Chinese food, there was an even greater level of analysis. They made rice noodles (spaghetti di riso) and dim sum (which they called ravioli). Marco and Chiara came into the living room before dinner was served and warned us that it was awful and that we could try it, but if we didn't like it we could go get pizza. I think he was serious about the pizza part. Yes, the noodles were a tad sticky and the dim sum wasn't like they made it in Chinatown, but it wasn't bad! Yet there came a serious of detailed analysis: they should not have put in two types of rice noodles: both spaghetti di riso and linguine di riso were used; some noodles were overcooked, some were undercooked; the ravioli, while aesthetically pleasing, tasted like foam (they said mine were better, though I don't know how one can compare Italian ravioli with Chinese dim sum); maybe the noodles should have been used in a broth instead. Someone even gave a step-by-step description of how he would have cooked the dish instead.

My roommates also have their opinions on the food I eat for breakfast. Usually in the states I eat muesli or granola with milk for breakfast, but I can't find cereal that I dig here. As far as cereal goes, they're all about the rice krispies and cornflakes and light muesli. Usually when I buy cereal in the States (which is often. I'm a granola fiend) I buy it either from Mixed Nuts (holla!) or Cornucopia where I can get good, filling granola and muesli in bulk. Here they don't have the same hippie co-ops or bourgie health stores and don't have bulk sections in their grocery stores so I've been getting creative. I started out doing the Italian bar breakfast. I'd go to this famous, kitschy bar called Necci and get either a cappucino or caffe' (shot of espresso) and a cornetto with nutella filling.

However, those were the days when I didn't know how to use our stove-top espresso machine and I was embarrassed that I didn't know how to use it, so I didn't ask my roommates to teach me (that was kind of a vicious cycle, because the longer I stayed here, the more dumb I felt at not knowing how to use it and the less I wanted to ask). Anyway, bar breakfast started to get too expensive, and, more importantly, too early. So out of desperation and the need for cheap caffeine, I asked Sasa' to teach me how to use the espresso machine and ever since then I've been happily making (and burning) my own caffe' each morning.

Also, I started to get hungry because they don't each lunch until 13:00 or 14:00, and I totally buy into the theory that you should eat a big and nutritious breakfast to start your day right, as bogus or as unscientific as it may be. So instead of buying cornetti, I started making eggs and toast, pancakes, french toast, yogurt (not all in one day, mind you), breakfast potatoes, etc. This led to discussions with my roommates about the breakfast foods one eats in Italy. Italians eat light, light, light food for breakfast and often they eat just a few cookies (biscotti) and caffe latte for breakfast. You'll be hard-pressed to find an Italian who would prefer a savory to a sweet breakfast. Sasa' was the only one who wanted to try my breakfast potatoes and that's only because he'd lived in Scotland and can dig a savory breakfast. They all liked my pancakes though, but upon finding out that I'd been a vegan for a year, Simone asked if I could make them without eggs so they'd be lighter.

Making ravioli