Italy’s Great Garlic Divide

To the average American, Italian food means something flavored with garlic. To some, the more garlic, the more "authentic" a dish is. But that isn't the story in Italy, and the flavor of garlic was not always welcomed in America the way it is today. See, in most of Italy's long culinary history, garlic was seen as something only poor people ate.

While garlic is as central to Genovese pesto and Piedmontese bagna càuda as it is to any spicy Calabrian tomato sauce, there is a sense that strong flavors like garlic were initially introduced to mask the absence of better ingredients in times, and especially regions, of scarcity. Former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi famously wouldn’t allow anyone in his cabinet to eat garlic when they were around him—a taste that suited his “successful businessman” persona. And when Italian cookbook author Marcella Hazan called the overuse of garlic “the single greatest cause of failure in would-be Italian cooking,” she was not denigrating any region or class of Italian food per se, but rather attempting to distinguish her recipes for dishes like delicate risotto alla parmigiana or luxurious vitello tonnato from the cucina povera that had dominated Italian-American cooking up to the mid-20th century.

And who immigrated from Italy to America? Poor people, looking for better opportunities. Read how garlic came to be accepted and even lauded in America, while the rift remains in Italy, at Taste.  -via Damn Interesting