Tag: Mara L.

The range of what people consider ‘spaghetti with tomato sauce’ is truly impressive. When I was a student in England, I would shudder at the dinners prepared in the kitchen of the dorm: tins with soft spaghetti would be warmed up, and considered a nice change from the other kind of tinned food that was constantly around, baked beans. Of course, some of my fellow students were too English to eat the latter without the former. I.e, they would pour a tin of baked beans on their plate of tinned spaghetti (also nice on microwaved pizza—grrr!).

Fast forward to my first trip to the US. To some remote place near Washington D.C. There, of course, I made my way to an Italian restaurant. It took me a while to figure out that Spaghetti Pomodoro was called Spaghetti Marinara. The even greater cultural shock came when the plate was actually sitting in front of me.

Fast forward again, to today’s Manhattan, where people have come to refer to spaghetti with tomato sauce as Spaghetti Pomodoro. In my daily life here, I once in a while take real consolation in buying Italian tomatoes, packed in Italy (read the small print on the tin you are buying!), and Italian pasta, packed in Italy. I have a really cheap dinner, and for a quick moment pretend that I am not here.

My favorite versions, however, are entirely out of reach here, and only to be had during my extensive stays at home. As it is well known, the key differences between regional cooking in Italy reside in the fats: butter up north, parmigiano next, then mozzarella, and finally only olive oil. So the true sequence, when you travel from north to south (in order to get to my much-loved island Procida near Naples), is this. Gnocchi with a light tomato-butter sauce while you are still in the mountains. Next come ravioli with tomato-parmigiano. At the tuscan seaside then, you’ll have penne with fresh yellow and red tomato, and cold bits of Mozzarella on top. And then my favorite, spaghetti with slowly cooked grape tomato with parsley and olive oil in Calabria.

Now here’s my historical speculation: In the south, people throw in all kinds of seafood, whatever is available. So maybe, when Italians from the south first made it to the US, they held on to the name of the tomato-plus-seafood version, Spaghetti Marinara, out of homesickness! Even though no bit of mare was going to be part of the dish.

I have been crazy-busy at work for the past couple of months, so that’s why I neglected my culinary contributions to Jens’ blog. But I am back in the city now, and ready to throw myself again in the world of the young artist here. (Remember, I’m an expatriate architect, born in Northern Italy, and I sometimes like to muse about the difference between this down-to-earth profession and the loftier vocations of my artsy friends.) So, last night my German friends here in NYC took me to an absolutely not-to-be-missed gallery opening: Jürgen Teller, at Lehmann Maupin.

There, I had occasion to ask myself: What is German about German photography? Answer: A burnt German sausage with smelly Sauerkraut, served in front of the gallery, under the banner of Lufthansa.

But what else? Maybe it is politically incorrect to say, but wasn’t a certain kind of ‘depressingness’ a major element of earlier German art? This is what weighed me down last night. The photos are, to my humble taste, pitiful. Why would a grown-up man place more or less naked women in front of a tree or on a sofa, make a picture, and not think of this as deeply depressing?

(Depressing as in: depressing that there could still be people who consider this ‘shocking’; depressing that the young women probably think they are part of something great, namely art; depressing that the photos look only slightly different, if at all, from the endlessly many even more depressing amateur photos, where the amateur tries to become an artist by undressing his girlfriend and making such photos; and so on.)

However, you might say that you always knew that Italians have no taste in art. Or for that matter, in food.

When I first came to Manhattan, I was consumed with Green Values. Values which I had to give up on, since even organic food here is packed in lots of plastic, which means that Europeans have a strong inclination to refrain from buying it, which however also means that they are likely to starve to death. In Europe, the eat-healthy-food-movement is rather closely linked to the reduce-trash-movement. So it struck me as potentially very comic that, in stores that specialize in organic food, everything is wrapped and packed in plastic. However, it strangely is possible to entirely lose the sense that this is illogical, and to become a happy shopper of organic, plastic-wrapped food.

Why is this possible? For the simple reason that, bad as it may sound, I do not want to starve. However, I cannot deny some hesitation when it comes to certain kinds of organic food. It’s a strange aspect of the organic-movement being somewhat newer here than in Europe, that there seems to be something like an experimental stage. I have clear memories of that phase in Europe, when vegetables tasted like wood, but everyone claimed they were great since they were organic. I’ve seen some of this here, but I won’t complain, it’s bound to be a passing phenomenon.

But there’s also a related phenomenon, which to me is a little scarier – people get into self-fabricating food in roughly the same way in which an amateur might build a house, one where every doorframe is crooked, and which potentially is going to collapse. There was something a little too self-made about some of the cheeses I lately bought, and when I talked to the people who made them, I was not sure whether I should congratulate them for venturing into a field totally new to them, and simply making-some-cheese, or whether I should burst into tears, missing the value of traditional recipes, and the sense that whoever makes the cheese makes it in a fashion that’s been fine-tuned in centuries of experience.

But I guess they are like me, coming to this country. They are trying something new. So they are dear to my heart, and I buy their cheese.