Our list of ‘improvements’ on time-honoured Italian food traditions is long. We borrow heavily from Italy’s culinary knowledge in Australia, and then gleefully break all the rules.
Drinking cappuccinos after 10am
In Italy it’s only acceptable to have milky coffees in the morning for breakfast, after that it’s strictly espresso time. In Australia we’ll order a cappuccino whenever we damned well please. If anything, the indulgent pleasure of a 3pm latte becomes even more enticing when you know it’s wrong.
Eating pizza with our hands
Source: Getty Images
I discovered the hard way that Italians don’t slice their pizza, while sitting in a gutter in Naples. After sizing up the crowd outside Da Michele, the Naples pizzeria that famously only serves and marinara pizza, beer and water, I decided to get my margherita takeaway. The anticipation of eating the world’s best pizza overcame me. Too excited to wait, I sat and opened the box to sneak a slice – only to be thwarted by a whole, uncut pizza. The reasoning is that if you slice a pizza, the toppings just seep underneath and make the bottom soggy. Italians may speak with their hands, but they eat pizza with a knife and fork.
Eat it however you like: get our Pizza Marherita recipe .
Pizza margherita. Source: Food Safari Fire
Eating the bread before your meal arrives
Australians consider it our birth right to be given bread at a restaurant, to dip it in that heavenly balsamic and olive oil combo we presume is Italian (it’s not) and eat it all before we’ve even ordered. Italians don’t do this. They have the restraint to wait until their meal arrives, and just use bread to mop up any sauce. Laugh at our ravenous bread-gobbling they may, but we’re on to our second basket, and they’re really missing out on the balsamic-olive oil combo.
Putting parmesan on everything
Italian culinary purists forbid putting cheese on seafood dishes. It stands to reason then that they’ve never put parmesan on prawn linguine, so they couldn’t possibly know just how good it can be. We know that Parmigiano Reggiano should only be paired with certain dishes, but why keep the best crockery for special occasions? If something stands still long enough here, we’ll grate some parmesan over it. There are few dishes it cannot improve, and we as a nation seek to prove the point.
Spag bol, generally
If there’s one dish that embodies our dogged refusal to pay heed to culinary wisdom honed over thousands of years, it’s this. We see your slow-cooked, meaty , and transform it into something unrecognisable. The secret ingredient in Bologna is milk, Australia's is often a slosh of cheap red wine that is no longer drinkable. We leave out the milk, add a tonne of tomato, and throw in whatever aromatics we find in the vegie crisper. The result is nothing like ragu alla Bolognese but we won’t hear a word against it.
That’s not to say some of our crimes don’t deserve lifetime banishment to Australia. Creamy carbonara, tandoori chicken pizza, excessive pesto use, our sun-dried tomato addiction and that bloated pasta floating in an RSL bain marie are not our proudest moments.
But some rules were just made to be broken.
