Bolognese-y

As anybody who has have ever had the poor judgement to disagree with one will know, the Italians are not a people prone to equivocation. This is not a bad thing, and I say it as someone with a deep love for the Italian way of life. It’s just an Italian thing. A fiery and impassioned bunch, a degree of cocksure self-certainty is, I think, the necessary obverse of the vivacity which makes the Italian home such a warm and welcoming space.

Given an opening, the average Italian will readily offer you their unshakeable opinions on all sorts of things: fashion, football, familial relations. And, of course, food. Nowhere are the Italians more self-assured than in regard to the culinary. With no trace of self-doubt, that peninsula people will happily tell you not only the best market in town – be it their town or yours – but also what you must purchase from it, the order in which you must eat what you purchase, what drink you must have alongside it, even the time of day at which you must eat it.

If you are in any doubt about the severity of Italian opinions on food, you need only to consult the ‘Accademia Italiana Della Cucina’ in Bologna. Here, with uncharacteristic fastidity, Italian recipes are officiated by serious scholars engaged in what they describe as ‘lengthy and extensive research’.[1] At the Accademia, the Italians play God over their cuisine, deciding with absolute finality which recipes are legitimate and which are not; which dishes exist and which do not.

To the British researcher, there is one notable absence from the archives: spaghetti Bolognese. There is a dish called spaghetti con il tonno alla Bolognese, but this is a tuna dish quite unfamiliar to the British diner. There is also a recipe for ragu alla Bolognese, a tomato sauce closer to something we might recognise. But the AIDC confirms one of the Italians’ most unequivocal culinary beliefs: there is no such thing as spaghetti Bolognese. At best, that British staple is a bastardised Frankenstein of a dish. At worst, for the Italians, it simply is not – it does not exist at all.

To this British researcher, this presents a curious question. Spaghetti Bolognese – or, to give it its proper title, spag bol – is the only dish my parents explicitly taught me to make. So, when the Italians insist that there is no such thing, I can’t help wondering what, exactly, I learned to cook one evening almost two decades ago? Did my mum and I actually just stand around staring blankly into space like NPCs? Did my parents, in fact, never teach me to cook anything at all?

I would hope not, as the ritual of a parent teaching a child to cook – most often, throughout history, a mother teaching a daughter – is surely one of humanity’s oldest. For most people, living or dead, the chain of instruction extends backwards through history along great branching trees of ancestors. The recipes most people have inherited, it often seems, are deeply rooted in their cultural traditions, composed of ingredients that are indigenous to their ancestors’ lands, tying peoples to places through produce and generating strong senses of national, cultural and ethnic identities.[2] But for me, the chain of connection is just one generation long. The only recipe my parents ever explicitly taught me is very different from the wartime turnips and meat-and-two veg that their parents would have known.

This means that my sole culinary inheritance is not ‘authentic’. Which is unfortunate, as authenticity is one of the most coveted badges of honour in the modern culinary industries. Among gourmands, it is generally taken to be better if food is served, so to speak, ‘as it should be’: true to old recipes and native palates. In Manchester’s Chinatown, for example, I have heard it suggested many times – from a great variety of people, including some Chinese – that the quality of a restaurant can be assessed by the ratio of Chinese diners to others. I certainly cannot cook ‘authentic’ Chinese food – I would barely know where to start – but I fear that the rules would dictate that I cannot, really, cook anything authentic.

It’s not that I know nothing of British cuisine. I have eaten fish and chips at the beach, roasted potatoes in all kinds of fat. Now that I think about it, my dad may also have shown me, earlier in my life, how to make -- 'cook' seems a bit generous here -- beans on toast. But not many so-called traditional British dishes rank among my favourite recipes or feature in my most emotive memories. For one thing, I have been vegetarian for a decade now, while for several centuries British food has been heavily associated, from inside and out, with meat (most famously roast beef).[3] But much more important is the globalised world in which I grew up. As a 21st century middle-class urban white brit, many of my most defining culinary experiences come from countries that are not my own, whether that is Belgian beer, Levantine dips, or the food I have eaten and cooked while living and travelling abroad or with people from elsewhere who have made Britain their home. Academic eaters Atsuko Ichijo and Ronald Ranta describe one of the defining features of food culture as locating ‘what is familiar and ours and what is not’.[4] But these lines, to me, are as malleable as overcooked spaghetti – what is familiar, often, is not mine, and what should be mine is not familiar.

To complicate matters further, I do actually have Italian family. That’s family, not heritage, as my mozzarella pallor inescapably confesses. My aunt married an Italian man and has lived in the country for 40 years, lending my parents’ culinary cosmopolitanism a degree of its own authenticity. (Although I suspect that my dad’s belief that a day-old Bolognese can be converted into chili con carne with the addition of kidney beans undermines that – and probably offends Italians and Mexicans in equal measure.) Time spent in Italy in my early 20s also had a lasting effect on my life, the infectious Italian enthusiasm for food stoking a passion that had always simmered quietly. I can quite legitimately claim to know a thing or two about a certain type of Italian food. But that food is very much not Bolognese. My family live in Puglia: the very Southeast of the peninsula, the heel of the boot. Bari, their city, is 400 miles from Bologna. In a country like Italy, that might as well be on the moon.

Paradoxically, given its ancient history, Italy is really a very young country. My workplace predates it by 55 years. Until the mid-19th century, the Italian peninsula comprised of fiercely independent city states, their respective citizens proudly differentiated from one another through mutually incomprehensible dialects, varying customs, and different cuisines. The climate alone dictates that Italian cities must eat differently. A thin, dramatic landscape stretching across many latitudes and altitudes, Italy ranges from a fresh alpine north where lush grass supports herds of dairy cows, to a parched, semi-arid south where the olive grove reigns supreme and fresh white cheese is made from the milk of the hardy Italian buffalo.

We can squeeze these cuisines into a neat little box labelled ‘Italian’ only because our understanding of Italy is shaped by the food it contains. Massimo Montanari – Italy’s leading food scholar and so, by default, one of the world’s leading food scholars – has explored the idea that the writing of so-called Italian cookbooks in the early 1800s helped form the national identity which led to unification in 1866.[5] That is to say that Italian food precedes Italy itself – Italian food was Italian before Italy was Italian. Regional cuisines differed, but what was shared was enough to unite the land: bread, pasta, basil, and, of course, that most Italian of all ingredients, the red of the tricolour – the tomato.

And yet… that, too, is a relative newcomer to the footwear of Europe. In its wild form, the tomato is a small berry native to the highlands of central America. Carried by itinerant farmers to modern-day Mexico where it became a staple of the Aztec diet, the tomato was among the loot exported to Europe by Spanish colonisers. Initially, it was not well received in the old world, languishing for many years in botanical gardens, tolerated as a curiosity but kept well away from kitchens. Slowly, begrudgingly, the red fruit was adopted into the cucini of chefs in the then-Spanish – previously Greek – city state of Naples.[6]

Many others can claim the tomato long before the Italians got their hands on it, which begs the question: what makes it an authentically Italian ingredient? If the tomato is not authentically Italian, what does that mean for the sauces made from it? Ragu alla Bolognese, arguably, is just one stop on the long winding route travelled by the tomato, so what is one more hop across Europe to the British Isles? Is the institutizione’s precious recipe really any more authentic that good old British spag bol, complete with minced beef, Heinz ketchup and Worcestershire sauce?

I suspect I had better tone it down a notch here, lest I offend my readers (and relatives). But there is, it seems to me, often a curious inconsistency among the middle-class gourmands who will seek out and celebrate an ‘authentically’ national cuisine but would reject the idea of national character as outdated and dangerous. Because both are, really, constructs; illusions which can be convincing from distance, but which dissipate into nothing the closer you get.  

I can say, erroneously, what it means to be Italian because I am not Italian. My exposure to Italy is enough to form a sketch, but not to create a picture so intricate as to be beyond all recognition. I would be much less inclined to say what it means to be British because I know firsthand that to be British means 67 million different things. As, indeed, does British food. British food is roast beef on Sundays and Turkey (previously goose) on Christmas. It is also jerk chicken and overproof rum punch; tarka daal and fish finger bhorta; Tesco hummus and cornershop prosecco. British food culture is, at one and the same time, one of the world’s most dynamic fine dining scenes and families going hungry because the local foodbank has been ransacked.

British food, in short, is whatever food is eaten (or not eaten) by people who live and work in Britain. It is both an authentic ragu brought over by Italian immigrants after the second world war and dutifully served in restaurants, and it is something different, too: a dish shown to a teenager, in which, according to the AIDC, the garlic is sliced incorrectly, the pancetta is missing, the tomatoes not simmered long enough, but which can nonetheless occupy an important place in a personal and national history. A dish which is both British and Italian and, at the same time, not quite either. We Brits call it spag bol. Perhaps, at the very least, the Italians will admit that it is a bit, well, Bolognese-y.

Notes

[1] https://www.accademiaitalianadellacucina.it/en/notizie/notizia/italian-academy-cuisine-registers-updated-recipe-true-rag%C3%B9-alla-bolognese

[2] You can see this reflected throughout food writing and food culture more generally. See, for example, Pragya Agarwal’s reflection on Indian lentils in her essay ‘The Slow Dance’; Levi Roots’ wistful recollection of Jamaican Ackee during his appearance on Desert Island Discs; or Welsh rugby fans dressed as giant leeks.

[3] Ichijo, A. and Ranta, R. Food, National Identity and Nationalism p. 171

[4] Ibid, p. 8

[5] Montanari, M. Food is Culture

[6] Riddaway, M. Edible Histories, pp. 23-35