ch...ch...ch...changes

"How much do you think you have been changed by living in Italy." I looked at my interlocutor, it was a deep question I wouldn't have expected from him. I sipped my tea.

"Well, " I paused, and looked across the table at a colleague who was fiddling about with the computer, "maybe I'm more tolerant of certain situations or less impatient. No point getting annoyed if people turn up late for appointments if it's a national trait." I shrugged.

"There's also waiting for ages in a bank, or the post office, just to have an elderly person cut  in front when it's your turn. I'm kinda used to that" piped up my colleague. 

"Or no change at the supermarket. The one at the foot of my building never has 2 cents."

I nodded, "Or we have to take it as read that it's perfectly normal to receive a bill the day before its deadline, if not actually after." We all nodded sagely. We all knew about the last minute rush to the post office to pay a bill that should have been paid yesterday. Even more stressful when the bill in question was a tax bill.

"Or that we usually wait over forty minutes for a bus that is supposed to pass every 15 minutes" said the original interlocutor.

"Or there's accepting that even the most basic discussion will last three times the time it would anywhere else, due to the national tendancy not to get to the point."We had all suffered that one.

We looked at each other. How wise and tolerant we had become.  

A few days after this conversation, I was leafing through a recently purchased cook book by a famous British chef I greatly admire. There were, as ever,  lots of mouth watering pictures of food beside their recipes. I was deciding which I'd attempt first bearing in mind that some ingredients are difficult to get here.

I turned the page. And recoiled. Surely not? I risked a glimpse. The horror... There in front of my eyes was a platter of tomato spaghetti with chunks of chicken atop and aspargus laid in a fetching criss cross pattern. Carbs, protein and veg. What was the problem? Had it been rice or mashed potatoes I wouldn't have blinked.  But spaghetti rosso? No. It was a melding of an Italian primo with a secondo and the contorno heaped on top. "Ca ne se fait pas," as my mother would say to explain just about anything when I was growing up. It just isn't done.

the 'shocking' dish

It brought me back in time to the infamous 'Pizza Hawai': a doughey concoction heaped with chunks of pineapple, pieces of chicken and grated emmental melted on top. On days when my mother didn't feel like cooking we would go to the local mini-market and there sat the monstrosity ensconsced between a goat cheese and ham pizza, and a Margherita that bore little resemblance to the Italian original as this one had parsley in the place of basil and grated emmental (always a favourite in Northern Europe) in lieu of mozarella with large slices of watery beef tomatoes.

 Yet at the time, I ate it with relish, in fact all these pizzas struck me as pretty good. Now I wouldn't touch them with a barge pole. 

Equally alarming was the Norman pizza which I found myself eating one summer. In my defence there was nothing else to eat. 

I had given instructions relayed via a third party over the phone: pizza bianca with tuna. 
The take away person asked : "anything else?"
 "Slices of onion."
 "That's all." 
"Yes," as I walked away I heard my bother-in-law whispering into the phone, "I know. but she lives in Italy."

Half an hour later, the pizzas arrived. Mine was bianca (without tomato sauce) with tuna and onions and  a large dollop of Norman double cream slap bang in the centre festively adorned in basil, parsley and oregano. I regarded it, shook my head and bit the bullet (it tasted fine.) I noted that the other pizzas at table had cream on them. It seems Normans put cream on everything.

This may seem a tad fussy, after all food is food. Tastes vary from place to place and nation to nation. However Italians take their food and associated traditions very seriously. A famous Italian chef, a Masterchef judge, once revealed his secret ingredient for the dish of 'Bucatini all'amatriciana'. It was an unpeeled clove of garlic added to the sauce.

The furore that ensued was epic. The mayor of Amatrice invited the starred chef to Amatrice to try the real deal. There was no mucking around with such a traditional dish, food stars or no food stars . 

For the record, according to tradition, the Amatriciana sauce is made with guanciale (cheek lard), pecorino cheese, white wine, San Marzano tomatoes, pepper and peperoncino (Italian red chili peppers). Sadly, today the mayor of Amatrice has more pressing problems to deal with as a large proportion of his town was shaken to the ground this summer, just days before the annual pasta fair.

So has living in Italy changed me?  As regards my attitude to food, if it's a pasta dish, most certainly. I've never paid much attention to the cappucino rule - never after 11am or lunch as the milk prevents digestion - I don't like cappucino. I tend to ignore bathing rules: just after eating or else you have to wait 2 hours. Again, digestion has something to do with it. Italians have quite a few digestion-related hang ups.

 I rarely scare at the 'colpo d'aria' - literally 'hit by the wind' aka a draught - which seems to worry a lot of people and provoke the risk of catching all kinds of nasty illnesses.

 I thought I'd become more tolerant and less impatient but a recent flare up with, of all people, an Italian boss, may indicate that like the Vesuvius, my impatience tends to be dormant and can still erupt unpredictably. 

Bellissimo cavolo nero. An Autumn prince.