Probably even more specifically, it’s a southern Italian-American thing. In recent years, there has been an attempt to obliterate the authenticity of southern Italian cooking in favor of Northern Italian cooking. Many Europeans who go to Italy or eat in Italian restuarants in European capitals are most familiar with the cooking for Florence (Tuscany), Venice, MIlan, Bologna and Piemonte. Most Americans are familiar with the immigrant cooking of Sicily and Naples – and in recent years a lot of hoo-hah has been circulated out of New York mainly to say that the dishes of Southern Italy are not the “real” Italian cooking, and that Italians don’t eat many of the dishes with which Americans are most familiar, but eat something much more elegant, without tomato sauce or lots of pasta. Northern Italians east risotto, gnocchi, polenta etc.
But if you are American and go to southern Italy you will recognize a lot of these traditions in what arrives at your table, things you were told by quality newspapers that “real Italians never eat that” . Even in Italy, there is a lot of prejudice against the south and the food traditions there, which many Italians think make Italy look “backwards” in the eyes of the rest of Europe.
Just by chance earlier today, I was reading the blog of a southern Italian who offered the recipe of a sort-of over-the-top baked pasta dish that is not made with lasagne but with a beautiful pasta from Campania that looks like candles and therefore is called candele.
Anyway, this baked pasta dish (which is from the Irpinia area not far from Naples) is made with both bacon (pancetta) and lard ('nzonga in local dialect) plus sheep cheese and an egg!
There is chopped onion in the dish and kind of hard to imagine someone would refrain from tossing in some spicy sausage (very typical of southern Italy) if there was some around needing to be used up.
Anyway, the dish looks pretty amazing when done, and if you are snowed in with 20 other people (Irpinia is a mountainous area), just the perfect thing to pull out of the oven on a freezing cold day
Here’s the recipe (in Italian) for anyone interested.
