Anyone who has seen the 1955 Disney film, Lady & The Tramp,\u00a0 will remember the iconic scene at the restaurant when the waiter shouts\u00a0 “Hey, Joe! Look! Butch-a, he’s got a new girlfriend.”
\nand Joe replies\u00a0 “Well, a-son of a gun! He’s a got a cockerel Spanish-a girl.”\u00a0 Years later, thanks to the lovely image of\u00a0 the two pooches tucking into a plate of spaghetti and meatballs, debate has raged about the authenticity of the dish.<\/p>\n
Americans and Brits will swear it is a real dish from Italy and can point to many restaurants in Italy that have it on the menu. My family (from the South) swear it is made for tourists, especially Americans. The truth is somewhere in between.<\/p>\n
Meatballs (polpette) are unquestionably Italian and there are many regional versions, especially in southern Italy.\u00a0 Spaghetti calls for a particular sauce where the ingredients mix with the pasta, can be twirled and eaten together – this is not really possible with large meatballs.<\/p>\n
There are many traditional dishes in Italy where polpettini (small marble sized meatballs) are served with pasta, including regional preparations from Abruzzo, Campania, Puglia, Calabria and Sicily but the huge meatballs sitting on top of a big plate of spaghetti with tomato sauce is not one of them. Yet, it became a distinctly Italian-American dish, particularly among Italian immigrants in New York in the late 19th\/early 20th century. The preferred past here would be a ‘pasta corta’ like rigatoni, mezze maniche\u00a0 or my preference, orrechiette. These shapes allow the sauce and ingredients to mix better together and make it easy to pick up at the same time.<\/p>\n
Polpette, are usually served in a rich tomato sauce as a plate on its own. The idea of a big lump of meat mixed in with spaghetti or pasta just does not reflect the balance associated with most Italian dishes. Over time, recipes get modified (don’t get me started on people putting cream in a carbonara), German versions of Italian food seem to add a lot of cream and Americans a lot…I mean a lot…of garlic.<\/p>\n
However,\u00a0 Spaghetti & Meatballs is more than just a ‘fake’ Italian dish, it is a story about Italian migration and adaptation. In fact the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Racconti delle Radici\u00a0 project specifically presents spaghetti and meatballs as a symbol of Italian-American immigrant identity.<\/p>\n
Italian immigrants had access to more meat in America and adapted their old recipes to their new circumstances. The result was a much more substantial dish than many traditional Italian versions. There are documented American recipes for pasta with meatballs before Disney, including one published in New York in 1888. Recipes can change over time as a result of a number of factors such as the availability of ingredients, changing tastes, customers etc., and there is no law against it, in my mind though, when you create a change, give it a new name e.g. Spaghetti con Polpette versus Spaghetti con Polpettini – simple.<\/p>\n
Basically,<\/p>\n
\ud83c\uddee\ud83c\uddf9 Italy invented the meatball.
\n\ud83c\uddfa\ud83c\uddf8 Italian immigrants reinvented it with spaghetti.
\n\ud83d\udc15 Disney made it romantic.<\/p>\n
Two questions to think of:<\/p>\n
Anyone who has seen the 1955 Disney film, Lady & The Tramp,\u00a0 will remember the iconic scene at the restaurant when the waiter shouts\u00a0 “Hey, Joe! Look! Butch-a, he’s got…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":44,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-food-traditions"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/britaliani.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/britaliani.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/britaliani.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/britaliani.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/britaliani.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/britaliani.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":52,"href":"https:\/\/britaliani.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1\/revisions\/52"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/britaliani.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/44"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/britaliani.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/britaliani.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/britaliani.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}