Food traditions: made to be broken?
Peckham's new Café Britaly offers a provocative take on Italian and British classics. But their food is a reminder of just how recently invented many classic Italian dishes are
NO nation is quite as obsessed with food tradition as Italy. From repeated, bitter rows over the correct recipe for pasta carbonara to last year’s call from the country’s neo-fascist agriculture minister for a task force to ensure that Italian restaurants at home and abroad follow only traditional recipes, Italians are known for their hostility to culinary innovation.
Just about the only British dish which provokes the same kind of politicised reactions is the Full English Breakfast. Last week renegade Tory/Reform MP Lee Anderson tweeted a picture of his Full English in the House of Commons canteen along with Union Jacks and the strange, paranoid comment, “how long before some highly educated expert tells us our traditional breakfast is racist?”
I would love to sit such harrumphers down in Peckham’s new Café Britaly and watch them turn apoplectic with outrage while I tucked into an ‘nduja scotch egg and “Full Britalian” including fennel sausage and deep-fried pizza dough.
Indeed the café offers provocative takes on a number of classics. Said scotch egg, with piccalilli dressing, was a minor classic when I lunched there last weekend; mackerel bruschetta and baked Coley and mussels with beans were both very good. Most ingeniously of all, chef Alex Purdie has devised rice pudding arancini as a dessert: I’m not even going to try to explain what it tastes like.
“Since the Romans founded Londinium 2,000 years ago, the cuisine of two countries has been intertwined,” says Britaly’s website. “We make Italian dishes more British, and British dishes more Italian.”
Perhaps – though for reasons I can’t quite pin down, I thought that Britaly’s food tasted more British than Italian. One dish where this was true marked the menu’s ultimate provocation: spaghetti carbonara with a fried egg on top.
Carbonara has proved a particular flashpoint for Italians. Last year food academic Alberto Grandi sparked uproar in Italy by claiming in an interview with the Financial Times that the dish was an American invention, created after World War II at the request of occupying US soldiers, using black-market American bacon. He was attacked by Italy’s far-right populist Deputy Prime Minister, Matteo Salvini, while Coldiretti, Italy’s biggest food and farming body, lashed his “surreal attack on the iconic dishes of Italian cuisine”.
Grandi’s claim, in fact first made in 2018 in his wittily titled book, Denominazione di Origine Inventata, seems well grounded. The first printed recipe for carbonara is from Chicago in 1952. But since then, the dish has been adopted as quintessentially Italian, and indeed specifically Roman. Any suggestion that it might be improved – worst of all, by adding a dollop of cream, as a French chef suggested in 2016, sparking “carbonaragate” – is denounced as heretical and an affront to national pride.
Not content, Grandi has given the same historical treatment to tiramisu (a 1960s invention) and indeed to pizza. Pizza was almost unknown outside its Neapolitan home before 1945, though varieties of focaccia were available elsewhere. In La Cucina Italiana Non Esiste (Italian Cuisine Doesn’t Exist, published last year with Daniele Soffiati) Grandi maintains that pizza Margherita in its modern form was an Italian-American invention re-exported to the motherland after the war.
If accurate, this puts a different perspective on the long-running Italian outrage over pineapple on “Hawaiian pizza”. And who knows what they would make of the most arresting pizza topping I’ve seen on a menu recently, at Caravan restaurant in King’s Cross: spiced lamb with fiery Israeli-Yemeni zhoug sauce, crème fraiche, cumin, mozzarella and parmesan. In other words, essentially a baked kebab with cheese.
As his books’ titles suggest, Grandi – like Britaly’s owners – is a provocateur. What remains less clear is why exactly these food mythologies sprung up when they did. They’re a classic example of what the great British Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm called “the invention of tradition”.
Grandi told a Swiss newspaper last year that he thinks Italy turned to these myths during a time of profound, breakneck social and economic transformation in the 30 years following World War II. As that interview paraphrases him, Italy cannot cope with modernity, so it wants to live in a constructed past. This is Hobsbawm’s thesis: that the invention of tradition “occur[s] more frequently when a rapid transformation of society weakens or destroys the patterns for which the ’old’ traditions had been designed.”
As for the other half of Café Britaly’s heretical offer, I’m not sure whether the emergence of the Full English Breakfast quite fits Hobsbawm’s explanation – but invented it certainly is. The eighteenth-century aristocracy were known for their lavish breakfasts, but the idea of a “full breakfast” did not reach the middle classes until the mid-nineteenth century (the term first appears in Isabella Beeton’s 1861 classic Book of Household Management.)
And while the kind of men who worry about their breakfasts being called racist would probably bristle at the suggestion, cooked breakfasts don’t seem to have become a working-class favourite until the 1950s. For most working families, this would have been the first time they could afford to eat meat at breakfast. Google’s ngram tool suggests that the phrase “full English breakfast” first appeared only in the early 1980s.
Not that the politics of traditional food are all right wing. Particularly with the impact of globalisation on food production, left-wing defenders of tradition have emerged too. Italian Carlo Petrini, founder in 1986 of the International Slow Food Movement, is a lifelong left-winger. Likewise the famous French farmer, protestor and Green politician José Bové, best known for dismantling a McDonalds restaurant in the Midi in 1999: plenty of right-wing French traditionalists tut over their nation’s addiction to burgers (McDonald’s’ largest European market) even if they don’t share Bové’s anti-capitalist views.
Yet abomination though pineapple on pizza certainly is, I think the Italians can afford to relax a little: their culture seems at less risk of erosion than ours, buffeted as we are by the endless dominance of American popular culture in our own language. At the same time, the British are generally more culturally open to new influences - including new tastes and flavours - than many of our European neighbours. That’s a tradition to be proud of - and not even an invented one. And I like Café Britaly’s cheeky celebration of it.
What I’ve been drinking this week
Vignerons Ardèchois, Chardonnay les Gravettes 2023, IGP Ardèche - I opened a bottle of this, one of my go-to affordable whites, with seafood paella last weekend. From a good southern French cooperative, this is fruity but crisp and well-balanced: a nice, unassuming all-rounder (The Wine Society, £9.95.)
Ousyra Fokiano rosé 2022, PGI Cyclades - I’ve written before about the improbably named Edward Maitland-Makgill-Crichton’s wines from the island of Syros but this is my favourite. Made from the local Fokiano grape, it’s a quite deeply-coloured rosé, bursting with strawberry fruit but well balanced with acidity and herby notes. Unusual and delicious (Maltby and Greek, currently on offer at £18.75.)
Maisulan “Los Magines” 2020, Rioja Alavesa - I visited Eva Fernández at her winery last August for a fascinating discussion and tasting: her and her husband Luis’s passion for organic viticulture shines through. This cuvée is majority Tempranillo, made from 75 year-old vines at 480 metres. Dark fruit and herbal notes, ripe fruit and lively acidity, with only unobtrusive oak. A fine Rioja in the style of a new generation of producers, rejecting the traditional focus on oak ageing and concentrating instead on unique mountain terroirs (€15 ex-cellar; N/A UK. Good Welsh importer Ultracomida stock several Maisulan wines, though not this one.)
John Dickie wrote a great book, Delizia, looking at the myths behind Italian food. We’ll worth a read .