When you go to Italy, you eat a lot of pasta.
On my first trip to Italy, I remember stopping at a restaurant for dinner and ordering (what else?) spaghetti. When it arrived, I got out my knife and fork and began cutting the spaghetti noodles in half like I always did. It made it easier to eat. Then I noticed two pairs of eyes staring at me -- my two Italian traveling companions, frozen in place in shock.
"What?" I asked.
The look of dismay in their eyes was, well, dismaying.
"Don't cut the pasta," they told me.
That's when I learned that pasta is sacred in Italy.
I tried to think of examples in America that compare. Like stabbing your steak with your fork, holding it up, and eating it like meat on a stick. (My sister went to Hawaii for her honeymoon and told me she saw Japanese tourists there doing that.) But that's more about table manners. This was like disrespecting the food. Violating it. Americans just don't have the respect for food that Italians do. Hence Chicken McNuggets.
I spent the rest of the trip trying to learn how to eat huge, long strands of spaghetti without cutting it. Believe me, it's not just stab down, turn the fork, and shovel it in. Doing it that way, I got many, many forkfuls of pasta so big that they wouldn't fit in my mouth. During one exasperating meal, one of the Italians I was with finally showed me: Lightly skim the fork across the top of the spaghetti (it helps if you pile it up a bit), twist the fork to get a few strands, and voila!
I was in Italy for a month, and we ate pasta every day. I'm not kidding. Sometimes, twice a day.
And you know what? when I got back to the U.S., I started craving pasta. And I no longer cut my spaghetti.
Could you eat pasta every day for a month? Leave a comment!
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The family I stayed with in Italy alternated between rice and pasta. But maybe I was having a small pasta? I remember tea and "biscuits" every morning ... fresh fruit and cheese as a course for every dinner ... and STRONG olive oil. One night I had thin sliced duck ... cooked rare ... that still had buck shot in it. You didn't mention the pizza ... you get a whole pie not sliced. And dogs are allowed in restaurants.
ReplyDeleteNo hot dogs? LOL
ReplyDeleteFood of the gods, Italian pasta. I had no idea until I went to Tuscany a few years ago and ordered a plate of fettuccine with lemon zest, olive oil, and pepper. That's it. Four ingredients. I thought I'd died and gone to Dante's Paradiso. I'm jealous you'll soon be doing the same in -- Venice!
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