Italian academic stirs up controversy by claiming carbonara is an American dish

An Italian scholar has made quite a stir after claiming that the recipe for carbonara is American and that the only place in the world to find bona fide Parmesan cheese is Wisconsin.< /p>

Alberto Grandi, professor of food history at the University of Parma, made the remarks in an interview with the Financial Times. He also claimed that tiramisu and panettone were relatively recent inventions and that most Italians hadn't even heard of pizza until the 1950s.

Grandi is known for his bold statements about Italian cuisine, but for Coldiretti, Italy's largest farmers' association, he has taken the biscuit with his latest demands, especially as the government has just offered the country's hallowed cuisine as a candidate for Unesco Intangible Cultural Heritage.

Coldiretti said Grandi's interview delivered "a surreal attack" on symbolically Italian food "precisely at the occasion of its candidacy for intangible heritage".

"Based on imaginative reconstructions, the most deeply rooted national culinary traditions are challenged," the association said. are commercial products to recent ones. Above all, [the interview] goes so far as to speculate on parmesan cheese and that produced in Wisconsin in the United States - the homeland of fake "made in Italy" cheeses.

Grandi has also drawn the ire of Matteo Salvini, Italian Deputy Prime Minister and leader of the far-right League who has long used food as a symbol of Italian national identity.

In a post on social media, Salvini said that "experts and newspapers envy us our tastes and our beauty" before adding that "buying, eating and drinking Italian is good for health, labor and the environment!"

Grandi's claims were partly drawn from existing academic literature, the Financial Times said. In reference to carbonara, he quotes Luca Cesari, food historian and author of the book A Brief History of Pasta, who said that carbonara was "an American dish born in Italy".

The dish is said to have been prepared for the first time by an Italian chef in 1944 for American soldiers in Riccione with rations of bacon and eggs. "Italian cuisine is really more American than Italian," Grandi told the Financial Times. century and Grandi believes that Italian immigrants, probably from the Parma area, began producing it in Wisconsin in the early 20th century.

He said Wisconsin Parmesan was "an exact modern-day match" for the original recipe because, unlike their Parma counterparts, the U.S. state's cheesemakers never evolved the recipe.

As for pizza, Grandi said that before the second world war it could only be found in certain cities in southern Italy and the first restored nt serving only pizza opened in New York in 1911. "To my father in the 1970s, pizza was just as exotic as hi is to us today," he said. /p>

As the row rumbled, Grandi told La Repubblica on Monday that Italian cuisine was "taking on an identity dimension beyond all reasonableness" and that "Pavlovian reactions" to his comments "make no sense".

"I don't understand why many are attacking me," he said. "I do not question the quality of Italian food or products, I reconstruct the history of these dishes in a historical and philologically correct way.

"With my studies , I showed that many preparations derive from the last 50 to 60 years of history and interactions with American culture.”