Italy’s food is bound by tradition. Its most famous chef isn’t (2013) | Hacker News Reader

Italy’s food is bound by tradition. Its most famous chef isn’t (2013)

newyorker.com

15 pointsprismatic6 comments

So it’s probably more shocking than surprising that, at first, Modena—home to a twelfth-century university and cathedral, to Italy’s West Point, to the Ferrari founder and the Maserati factory, to a concert hall, an opera house, seven theatres, three good museums, and a foundation with one of the best photography collections anywhere—was immune to the lure of gastronomic refreshment. The problem was pride as much as provinciality.

Ok I need to get this out of my chest. I think the words "gastronomic refreshment" would worry an Italian... a lot. It's true that traditions get in the way, but it's because of those traditions that we don't come up with things like "pizza with pineapple... with ketchup". I get it, people want to get creative in the kitchen, but if you miss the basis, your creativity will suck, full stop. In fact, even Bottura had to learn the traditional stuff, as most of people do in Italy - in his mother's kitchen. Note this works also for people that eat the food, if they have no idea what good food is, it's rather pointless to use the word "gastronomic" in the first place.

> "but if you miss the basis, your creativity will suck, full stop"

I couldn't disagree more. There's nothing wrong with learning from the past, it's a useful source of inspiration and ideas, but creativity is the 'art of the possible', in other words the only limits are those which set what is possible. If all new creations need to live up to the 'greatest hits' of the past then creative exploration is going to be severely limited. There is nothing wrong with making a bad tasting dish if you can learn from it.

I agree with you. I really rubs me the wrong way when people put down new food ideas by effectively saying "things should follow tradition".

It's like they don't realize that if someone hadn't experimented previously none of the foods they love would exist and that picking some arbitrary point in time before which experimentation was okay and after which it's not is really hypocritical.

When I was living in (Southern) Italy, something else that worried the local Italian population was any food that wasn't Italian. People wrote to their local papers congratulating the local council for refusing to allow a non-Italian restaurant to open.

Tradition is fine as a starting point, but I got so sick of (often mediocre through lack of competition) pizza and pasta. Sometimes, Italians take offence at what I'm saying and then list Italian dishes. Which often turn out to be different kinds of ways of arranging pasta, and different kinds of sauces for pasta. Tradition isn't meant to be a prison; it seemed to me that the tradition of the food had become more important than the actual food.

If you are interested in finding out more about Massimo or other Chefs, 'Chef's Table' on Netflix is quite a good watch. He is the focus of episode 1.

I don't know that Italy and new gastronomy are as incongruous as this article suggests. Arguably, the Italian futurists invented new gastronomy: http://thenewinquiry.com/blogs/the-austerity-kitchen/red-hol...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com