More to the point: even if you can’t cook to save your life, it’s probably going to end up pretty decent anyway. It’s really hard to mess up carbonara noodles, spaghetti bolognese or cans of ravioli. It can be done, but it’s a challenge.
Similarly, I can’t think of anything you could do to a poor slice of prosciutto that would end up making it taste like crap - pour oil on it, or lemon juice, or even shudder BBQ sauce, grate cheese on it, eat it raw, eat it with salad or 'mashed taters, fry it, grill it - it’s going to turn out good, and it’s going to go with pretty much anything.
This is a pretty stupid comparison, and yet another refinement of the unending stream of No True Scotsmen fallacies that we’ve witnessed in this thread. We’re talking about family run restaurants, catering to the likes of local politicians, business men, and so on, not McDonald’s and Cheesecake factory.
Apparently you missed the inception of this thread of conversation. Namely, Italy seems to have a superabundance of tasteless, boring pecorino cheeses. What are we to do with them? They’re not fit for consumption as is. If you can’t slice tasteless pecorino and put it on a sandwich, then you’re essentially left with a cheese that’s entirely useless and not fit for any purpose.
Nobody claimed it did. We’re in CS discussing food. It’s a matter of opinion and taste. I explicitly asked for the opinions of others in the OP. I’m not entirely sure why you think otherwise. You seem to have been repeating the same thing for the entirety of the thread, however, so it appears to be a long held misunderstanding.
Pretty much, yes. At one time French cuisine was the darling of British foodies (rightly so). Now Italian seems to have taken over. Witness an inordinate number of British food programmes devoted to Italy: Jamie Oliver’s trips around the country, Two Greedy Italians, various other Antonio Carluccio shows, Food and the Unification of Italy, ad infinitum.
Further, I’ve never ever seen anybody list Chinese food as amongst the best in the world. Perhaps that’s an American thing?
Pretty much. It’s the equivalent of having boiled potatoes with every meal. It’s fine for about two weeks, the duration of a holiday, say, and then the incessant repetition of pasta on top of pasta on top of pasta, with maybe some other variety of stodge thrown in from time to time, is unbearable. Something has to eventually snap.
The fact that she cannot eat anything in Italy implies that Italian food is pretty limited in its variety, not just that there’s a very limited selection of non-Italian food, no? How could it be otherwise?
> Further, I’ve never ever seen anybody list Chinese food as amongst the best in
> the world.
I’ve read several sources that say that Chinese and French are the best cuisines in the world. Italian is often listed well up there as well. Look, it would take me days to look up lots of sources to convince you that this is true of many culinary experts around the world, and I don’t have that kind of time. Perhaps someone else here has access to some sort of poll among culinary experts about the best cuisines. In any case, I think that the posters to this thread who say that Italian cuisine is never considered one of the great cuisines are wrong. It’s often listed among the great cuisines. I think you’re wrong too, Capt. Ridley’s Shooting Party, when you say that Chinese isn’t listed among the great cuisines. It’s often listed right there near the top.
Huh? I didn’t say that it wasn’t. I just said that I’ve never seen it listed as amongst the world’s greatest cuisines. Certainly, if somebody asked me to name the two cuisines with the best reputation I’d almost certainly blurt out French and Italian before Chinese, which often has the reputation of including repulsive (for Western tastes) ingredients.
This is pretty silly. So if you can’t slice it and put it on a sandwich, it’s not a good cheese? What a bizarre thought. Besides, you certainly can use a cheese like pecorino toscano or sardo on a sandwich.
I think pecorino romano, for instance, is a wonderful cheese, and no bucatini all’amatriciana (one of the most wonderful pasta dishes in the world) would be complete without it. But for the days you want something more subtle, pecorino toscano or sardo are great.
It’s pretty much as close to a consensus as I’ve ever seen that French and Chinese are the world’s two great cuisines, and it’s just the third that always gets argued about.
Wait, what? Again, please read the whole thread of conversation. I’m not saying that all pecorinos are bad cheeses. But the overwhelming majority of them are tasteless, waxy cheeses that serve no purpose, and really couldn’t be distinguished from each other in any sort of blind test. Like I said, for a country with such a good reputation for cheeses, the selection that one typically finds in supermarkets and even dedicated cheesemongers is pretty disappointing.
Actually, yeah, I just went back to see what I wrote (my boss was walking around, so I had to type quickly) in reply to Kimstu. Kimstu’s original claim was that French and Chinese were the two great cuisines of the world. Where I wrote “I’ve never seen Chinese cuisine listed as amongst the best in the world”, it should have read “I’ve never seen Chinese food listed as second best cuisine in the world”.
Unsurprisingly, what constitutes the first and second best cuisines in the world is pretty contentious, and I suspect varies by region. It’s perhaps unsurprising that the Indians view their own cuisine above the Chinese, for instance!
I don’t really think Italian cuisine is overrated anymore than Indian is. A lot of people have a serious and extreme love of Indian food to the degree it can sometimes be annoying to hear them talk about it, and some people are the same way about Italian food. I think both can get very very repetitive if you ate them every single day, but they both are also something that wouldn’t be bad to eat every day, which is probably why people from India and Italy do tend to eat their own cuisine every single day.
I’ve never heard anyone talk about Italian like it’s the best cuisine in the world (in a foodie sense); like others have said French and Chinese are almost invariably the two that get talked about as the best. Now at least in the U.S. while people inclined to fine dining will typically regard French cuisine as the best not many that I know would consider it their personal favorite, a lot of times things like that come down to comfort food and etc.
I don’t know a lot about how people eat in the UK, but the nice thing about America which has no extremely dominant culinary tradition of its own (although there are several things like Tex-Mex that are uniquely American and awesome) is you can enjoy a massive variety with a ton of options. Maybe the UK is like that as well and that’s why a place like Italy can grate on you over time, in a culinary sense.
Most of the world does not enjoy huge variety in food offerings, and even some famous food destinations like Japan which famously tons of extremely respected restaurants from all kinds of cuisines has some serious deficiencies. While never a problem for me, a friend of mine who lived in Japan for two years said the one thing it’s very hard to do there is be truly vegetarian, Japanese culture just doesn’t have a lot of it, and virtually every thing you can buy at most markets or restaurants even if the main ingredient is a vegetable probably has been prepared with some meat product. (This was 8-9 years ago so maybe it’s changed.)
Capt. Ridley’s Shooting Party, may I suggest that perhaps you aren’t very well read in culinary matters? Your opinion on what food you like is as good as anyone else’s, but your claim to know what most culinary experts think of as the great cuisines of the world is suspect. If the title of this thread had been “Italian cuisine isn’t very good”, I wouldn’t have cared at all what you said. This title though is “Italian cuisine is overrated”. It appears to me that you don’t actually know that much about such ratings.
I don’t know if it makes that much a difference, but when I say “great,” it doesn’t solely mean “best,” but also “most influential.”
Here’s another example of a foodie discussion about the 3 grand cuisines. Note that in the discussion, Chinese is a given and non controversial. French, actually, is argued about quite a bit.
I’m actually a little surprised that in that discussion, Italian is getting as much play as it is as one of the 3 grand cuisines.
I suggest you and anyone else wishing to avoid the unspeakable horror that is repetitive Italian pasta take a good look at the part of the menu headed “secondi”.
Btw, I actually do believe that you have a clear idea of what Italian food is. It is just that you keep confounding me by being disgusted or bored by things which are in my opinion quite delicious. So we’re not really going to agree here. I’m just sincerely surprised, that’s all.
P.s. You called me a wiseguy earlier. Does that mean I qualify for free cannoli? Mmmmmmmm. Cannoli. drool
I was not referencing food critics when I entitled my thread. I was referencing the perception amongst members of the public in my home country (at least). Repeated references to people returning from holidays, and their description of the food, made this clear, I would have thought. I have no idea how this thread morphed into a discussion over which cuisines self-described gastronomists rank, and in which order, as if they have a monopoly on opinions about food.
I am still pretty confident that in the UK, at least, Italian cuisine is perceived as being rated more highly than Chinese cuisine, amongst the public. I think a large part of confusion in this thread stems from the fact that this perception doesn’t appear to be shared in the US. Further, I’d go as far as suggesting that, in the region where I’m from, with its heavy immigration from the Indian subcontinent, the general impression amongst the members of the public is that Indian cuisine is again ranked higher than Chinese cuisine, with the ever present insinuation that what you are eating at a Chinese restaurant was either caught from a backalley earlier that day, or consists of various unknown animal parts.
Here I actually completely agree and I would also agree that the whole love affair with “Italian food” in the UK is strange and somewhat irritating. In the UK I’d really rather eat a nice cheese sandwich than a grammatically odd and overpriced “panini” and don’t see why pesto has to be added to everything and anything. But I think they are selling a lifestyle here, complete with beautiful people and fancy espresso-machines. Often this kind of Italian food has very little to do with what is actually eaten in Italy.
The don’t eat the pecorinos, and eat one of the dozens of other cheeses. Fontina, gorganzla, mozzarella, ricotta, Bel Paese, marscapone, etc., etc.
At this point you just come off at massively uninformed about food in general. Search for great cuisines and Chinese is invariably in the short list.
Pasta is not the be all and end all of Italian food. If you are tired of it, don’t eat it. It’s possible to go into any restaurant and order crap food if you don’t know what to order. Italy has fantastic seafood, great vegetables, a wide variety of meat dishes, incredible sausages and hams, and delicate pastries. If all you order is pasta with red stuff on it, then it’s your fault it all tastes the same.