A country’s cuisine can often offer revealing insights into the national character. Decadent French food could only have been created by the pleasure-loving sensual French. But take one bite out of anything an English family serves for supper, and you’ll know that here you have a nation of self-denying stoics who don’t heat their houses in winter for the purpose of building character and whack their school children with rulers. I won’t say anything about American cuisine here; firstly for the fear of offending the largest chunk of my readership, and secondly because “American cuisine” does not exist, since what Americans choose to put through their digestive systems every day does not qualify as a “cuisine” anyway. Instead, I’ll pick on Italians. (Doesn’t everyone love to pick on Italians?)
I’ve always wondered what their cuisine – and more precisely its linguistic aspect – says about them. We are supposed to marvel at the fact that Eskimos have several hundreds of words for snow (which apparently isn’t even a fact at all). But we are not at all surprised when a nation has a comparable number of words to describe what’s essentially the same dish.
Consider a tomato. If I choose to cut it into slices I make it into a sliced tomato. If I cut it up into little cubes, it’s a chopped tomato. If a fifth grader slips it into his teacher’s chair when the teacher isn’t looking, in all likelihood it soon becomes a squished tomato (and if we’re in England the fifth grader gets whacked by a ruler). However in every instances we recognize that a tomato is a tomato is a tomato.
Now consider a sheet of pasta dough. If an Italian mamma cuts it into long flat strips about 0.4 inches wide, it becomes tagliatelle. If she chooses to make the strips 0.3 inches wide instead, she gets fettuccine. If she wants to do a real intricate precision job and go all the way down to 0.15 inches, then little Giuseppe is having linguine for supper tonight. And of course if she’s feeling kinda lazy – to hell with all the cutting! Just stack those sheets up, and you’re treating the family with a completely different dish! Lasagna! And don’t even get me started on what happens when she decides to get all fancy and roll it into balls, twist it into spirals, twirl it into cylinders, and otherwise deform it in a myriad of different ways.
If you are a spaghetti eater of any nationality and hold a special affinity for pasta dishes, you might be tempted to argue that this linguinistic phenomenon is a tribute to Italian creativity and poetic soul. Those who dislike pasta might hold a diametrically opposed view: that Italians ultimately lack creativity to come up with more than one dish, and they attempt to disguise this embarrassing fact by calling this one dish 350 different names. I think it’s just clever marketing.
As anyone in marketing will tell you knows but will never admit to you, people love to have an appearance of a choice. Whether they actually have a choice is irrelevant as long as you manipulate them into thinking they do (which is much easier than actually coming up with a variety of choices that serve consumers’ true needs). Example: fill the market with hideous squishy sandals in a billion different colours, and suddenly the customer is debating “fuchsia vs. canvas pantone” rather than “hideous squishy sandals vs. reasonable footwear”. At this point I would elaborate on how this applies to pasta, but I am rather hungry, so I’ll wrap this post up in a hurry and go make me some pappardelle. Or am I more in the mood for gnocchettoni zitoni tonight?..
