Sort of reminds me of how Japan has mastered high end denim despite it being a very American product.
It is such an American comment. Cheese is a very diverse food and putting on pizza itself not a quality.
But my main point is that: Ranking food is so American. I like to draw this comparision: Germany today has the highest share of people not born in the country (20%). So it is not a surprise the local cuisine is heavily influenced by foreign cuisines. The most famous dish of that process is Döner, originated from the Turkish Döner Kebab. So what are the Germans handle this fact? At least if you read comments in r/Döner, it is seen as just two different dishes with its own qualities. You can't get the OG Döner Kebab (and all its variants) in Germany very easily, but vice versa German - styled Döner in Turkey isn't so good. And I like that attitude. Food is art. You can't just rank art. But Americans still try.
Denim is a contraction of "serge de Nîmes". It is French in origin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denim
https://www.insidefashiondesign.com/post/how-denim-was-inven...
I guess I was more thinking of how blue jeans (and maybe denim jackets?) specifically are a classic part of Americana.
Napoli is still making the best pizzas, just because their tomatoes and mozzarella is so good. Followed by New York.
(joking)
All these at least resemble the original
I would suggest that from the outside it could be easy to underestimate just how seriously (many) Italians take their food.
Last year - as a family, on the way somewhere else - we visited a "factory" that makes Parmesan cheese. It's astounding how much work and time goes into making a product that, although it's of course produced "on mass", feels anything other than mass produced.
En masse?
"en masse" is French for "in mass" not "on mass" so completely different.
to be more french, say "awning" but lose the entire "-ning" part, and then "mass", like the "a" in father, not the "a" in cat.
Once I tried pointing this out. The speaker said "it doesn't matter". Sure, bud, enjoy your lard. Ew.
My French is just fine - merci beaucoup - yet unfortunately yet another HN thread gets distracted from the intention of a post by someone determined to focus on semantics :/
(This is the first time I've had this on HN) but I have no idea what you mean. Is someone really not understanding? It looks like they're trying to correct what I wrote :/
It's a product produced in quantity, but not “mass-produced”.
For what it’s worth I definitely did a double take and had to re-read the sentence because I was not expecting those words there.
The Italians really did their marketing well to get the attribution
Pizza without bread? Pizza without bread.
Pizza? Pizza.
Pizza with pizza? Pizza++.
A quesadilla is a sandwich, though.
It might be casual heresy but it is right.
Granted, Nice is next door'ish to Italy
Pizza with classes?
we all agree what pizza means at least till the point we need to duke it out over pineapple (which is not pizza)
i'm reminded of an old Lake Wobegon piece about Minnesota tacos (pronounced to rhyme with tack-o). they're made with folded over white bread and with your flannel sleeves rolled up because the juice will run down your arms
shuffle emily poem dickinson invariant are.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002gqz2 41:00
Approx transcript:
> by the 1970s Italy had left its peasant origins behind it had become an industrial consumerist, democracy, and at that point, people start to get nostalgic, and they make the past simple for themselves by turning it into recipes, turning into simple forms. And that has become actually, and this is another novelty, very politicised in recent years. The current government, which of all the various right wing parties have been in power since 1994, is the one that most is most proud of its sort of fascist DNA, if I feel like, it's linked to historical links to Mussolini's fascist Party. They've really wedded themselves to this idea, this food nostalgia, this idea of defending Italian culture against contamination from abroad or wherever it might be.
French winemakers started defending their region names as trademarks in the middle of the last century (picked up steam in 1960s to 1970s) and cheese followed, and the rest of the Europe too. That's where the joke "real Existentialism must come from France, otherwise you just have sparkling anxiety" comes from.
As one rather benign example, Hungary and Slovakia asserted rights to the name of the wine Tokaji/Tokai and in 2007 Friuli Italy had to stop using that name for their wine, a name they had been using for hundreds of years (though the grape is still called Tokai in Italy). In Hungary, the measure of quality/sweetness of the wine (it's a dessert wine) is called Puttonyos. The Italians now call their wine Friulano (not a dessert wine in particular); I want the Italians to start measuring their quality in Putanas just to give the finger to Hungary.
But surely ideas about nationalism and purity can arise at any time?
IIRC the interview was about pasta recipes, and about cultural rather than DOP purity.
I'm not certain about your exact meaning, but I disagree here. Cheese availability in supermarkets is strongly regional even within Europe, and most non-local varieties are either impossible to get, or have to be ordered at 4 times the price outside their regions.
E.g. You can buy perfectly adequate taleggio cheese in an Italian "Lidl" supermarket, but stores (from the same chain!) just 2 car hours away wont have it, and there is no "unbranded" local replacement either.
You do get some very generic kinds of cheese pretty much everywhere ("vegan cheddar", sandwich slices mostly consisting of emulgators and color, Emmental, Gouda, Parmesan, ...) but the availability/selection even for very well-known cheeses (like pecorino) decreases quickly as you leave their regions.
I do agree that a big motivation is to reduce competition and protect regional monopolies basically, but in many cases this also protects and preserves the identity/taste of that product itself, by preventing large international producers from turning distinct regional products into lowest-common-denominator mass-market trash.
you understood what I meant, there is industrial scale dairy and artisanal dairy, and that has implications for health (industrial scale dairy can poison a whole country if it's impure) and a for quality (artisinal scale dairy can have more complex and unique flavors)
I like this requirement because it means I could go into a place, order a pizza, sit there starting at it for 15 minutes, and then report them for a violation. :-)
Joking aside, I'm always intrigued by these associations and legal categories that nail down specific characteristics for certain foods (or other items). A lot of them require stuff to be made in a specific geographical area, so it's cool to see this Naples pizza one focusing on the actual process rather than the location. But this is still largely about the process rather than the product. It'd be an interesting challenge to see if you could define such categories in terms of the product itself, so you could verify just based on the pizza whether it was a "real" pizza, without knowing how it was made.
I do have to wonder whether it's really worth it to go through all this rigmarole to get the official Neapolitan pizza seal of approval. In practice I find that in a fair amount of cases, the most "authentic" version of something isn't necessarily the one I like the most. And if it costs the restaurant a bunch of money to get this certification, I'm not sure it's going to be worth it to me as a customer when that cost is passed on to me. I care more about how good the pizza is than how authentic it is.
Amusingly, I once met an Italian (from the Veneto area) who loved Little Ceasar's pizza and said Italian pizza was "boring".
it's just the other way around: the pizzeria's duty is just to serve you a fresh pizza, but if you haven't finished eating it within 10 minutes, THEY can report YOU for violation and the pizza police comes for YOU. This ensures that customers don't hog the table (which is bad for business).
>A lot of them require stuff to be made in a specific
All these organizations are basically just lobbying/PR groups trying to ensure some amount of baseline "make work" for their members. They engage in certification and quality control (not that those aren't valid activities) as a means to that end. Their odd requirements like "made in X" and "consumed in Y" make sense in this context since they're basically political requirements to curry favor from various groups.
It mostly works. Neapolitan Pizza tastes the same everywhere and engineered structures mostly don't fall down but given the change these organizations try their hardest to capture markets and stamp out lower end competing offerings which is bad.
In my neighborhood in Denver I have several Neapolitan pizza options. One is fully Vero certified. I go there often because it truly does give me the taste of Napoli from my childhood.
The best option, however, is recognizable as Neapolitan pizza but is much better than anything I have ever had in Italy (at least to my taste buds).
I feel like both really have their place and both restaurants have been around for quite awhile at this point so it seems to work for both.
That said I do appreciate the places that have are fully Vero certified because when I travel if I see that sticker in the window I know I am gonna have a pretty good pizza.
Stromboli is closer to folded up pizza as it typically has mozzarella cheese.
It typically has both. And ricotta is legally not a cheese in Italy (because it's not made from milk).
Wikipedia says ricotta is made from milk in Italy from the production of mozzarella
Similarly things like mascarpone and yogurt which are not fermented using rennet can't be called cheese.
Regarding the type of whey used to make ricotta it can come from any cheese. In central Italy sheep ricotta is more prized than cow, but you can easily find buffalo and goat ricotta as well.
Sromboli can be ground sausage and cheese on a french bread roll.
Afaik they don't serve those in Italy or even that far away from Philadelphia. So "in the USA that can be anything" is ... I guess accurate, for a regional American dish
The Italians, for revenge, do their own cheesesteak sandwich.
It's a marketing gimmick to promote their pizza brand.
(But I can attest to the deep fried mars bar)
I could never find good pizza in California, and I definitely can't find it in Texas. Nor Illinois, sorry.
The only good pizza appears to be in NYC. It probably also exists in other parts of New England too. Massachusetts, I'm guessing.
But when someone isn't near the five boroughs, Amnon's Kosher frozen pizza is tolerable.
Why is it so damn hard to make edible pizza? Do 99.95% of customers have zero taste and will accept any trash put in front of them?
</us-centric-pizza-complaint-dept>
As a Hawaiian I find it culturally disrespectful what passes for poke in most areas outside the Hawaiian Islands, so I kind of wish they were required to use a different name so that they could hopefully learn what they're making is not poke, at least not traditional poke.
Here's is Google's first picture of poke
https://pasteboard.co/seVXA4y4e3Qb.webp
Maybe now-a-days that's common in Hawaii, probably to cater to tourists, but, at least all the places I go and the stuff I grew up with looks nothing like that.
It would look more like this. No rice, very few veggies.
https://pasteboard.co/RdAwZEuQQENd.jpg
There are various varieties (salt, shoyu, octopus, etc...) but they all have one thing in common. They are not served with veggies and rice.
Anyway, I googled up this [1] article about supposedly original poke, and it also mentions rice and shows images of bowls with rice. Interesting!
PS. As a Swedish person, the "cinnamon rolls" with frosting that are typical in the US are somewhat triggering to me (because [2]). Sorry about the poke!
Edit: switched the cinnamon roll link to the actual Swedish-style image, for clarity.
[1]: https://guide.michelin.com/hk/en/article/features/6-things-t...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinnamon_roll#/media/File:Cinn...
I don't see that as controversial. If you made a margarita with whisky you wouldn't put it on the menu as "margarita". You'd put it on the menu as "whisky margarita" to make it clear it's NOT a margarita.
Same with a mojito. If you change the liquor from rum or use a fruit other than lime then you change the name. "mango mojito" etc...
The same with poke. If you're going to add avocado, lettuce, edamame, rice, then don't just call it "poke". That's misprepresation of what you're serving.
If a particular country itself wants to police what something means, I guess... and that means we could ossify what poke means in the us but poke exists in other countries as well (like the philippine islands and japan.) and they are different.
But I disagree... we can have Texas BBQ and Carolinas BBQ and St Louis BBQ... or CT lobster rolls and maine Lobster rolls...
We might as well rail against calling non mincemeat hamburgers 'burgers because they are not genuine burgers...
If you make brownies without chocolate you don't call them brownies. Maybe you call the blondies. Or if they're made with a unique incredient then you called them whatever. "vegan brownies", "no-bake brownies", etc. but not just "brownies" as that has a meaning.
If you make hummus from beets you call it "beet hummus". If you make it from avocados you call it "avocado hummus". Because calling it just "hummus" implies you made it from chickpeans, seseme, etc...
Same here. If you add lettuce, avocado, rice, etc to poke then call it "salad poke" or "poke salad" but don't just call it "poke" because with those things added it's not poke.
The AVPN is basically just an organization promoting Neapolitan pizza around the world since Naples is traditionally a poorer part of Italy and extra tourism helps.
It is interesting though, and I do enjoy Neapolitan pizza (even got an Ooni pizza oven just to make it at home lol).
