“And the fact that Italians and many more around the world increasingly love their cuisine is bad because?”

It’s bad because Italians are white, duh!

So, is this all basically mocking Italians’ fear that a massive influx of Muslim and African immigrants will destroy Italy’s cultural traditions? I eat imported Italian parmesan almost every day. Because it’s perfect.

Well, all these Asian countries got their chili peppers where??

There is so much regional variation in Italian food, and it’s all the better for that. You want pizza? Naples. Even Rome has great pizza. Steak? Florence. Wild boar? Orvieto. Delicious food of all kinds? Bologna.

Okay, Caesar salad is Mexican. I’ve never had a Caesar salad in Italy. Why would I?

Tiramisu is modern. So what. Have a nice cannoli when you go to Sicily. Or have a gelato and shut up, commie.

o/t Wayne Kramer, the influential guitarist from the seminal garage rock band the MC5 has died at 75.

RIP Wayne https://t.co/DBxrIGrHPf pic.twitter.com/00HCM0w6yj

— Des (@desdelboy) February 3, 2024

Let a hundred pastas bloom!

I’m surprised the writer didn’t bring up that Italians didn’t really start eating tomatoes until the 19th century.

The man I’m dining with is Alberto Grandi, Marxist academic, reluctant podcast celebrity and judge at this year’s Tiramisu World Cup in Treviso. (“I wouldn’t miss it, even if I had dinner plans with the Pope”.) Grandi has dedicated his career to debunking the myths around Italian food;……

Perhaps Professor Grandi is just a lying commie.

This is all of a piece with the campaign to convince Europeans that they have no special tie to their own countries, that they don’t really have a culture, that Whites weren’t even the overwhelming – almost exclusive – majority of Europe.

In the past they might have said: you are Bourgeois and your traditions are bad. Now they just say: your traditions aren’t even your traditions – you just halucinated them.

All of this is being done in the service of taking those countries away from those to whom they rightfully belong.

This article is just gaslighting.

He is a devotee of Eric Hobsbawm, the British Marxist historian who wrote about what he called the invention of tradition.

Yeah. Right. “British”.

Supposedly this cultured, accomplished and tasteful Italian fellow invented “Italian cuisine” in the late 19th century:

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/historical-italian-cookbook

Maybe to some extent it’s true, but why not?

Jack D, a lawyer who seems to know an impressive amount about cooking (and cars), claims that sourdough is essentially foreign to America. As a Westerner who grew up with sourdough, I disagreed. But maybe we can both have a point, and sourdough baking can become part of the American culinary repertoire as both an immigrant add-on and a holdover from the wagon trains of the early 19th century

The thing is, we’ll be richer as a country and people either way. Culture is something you build. It isn’t a genetic trait, and because of that we have even more of a right to call it our own, because we either voluntarily took it on or came up with it ourselves.

Like the Italians who embraced Signor Artusi, we as Americans have the right to – and should – interpret our culture as we see fit. Those who scold us and push us around can take a hike. They offer nothing. Certainly less than a Guatemalan street vendor who might actually have something useful on the menu.

I became suspicious as soon as I saw “Marxist historian.” I wouldn’t trust anything he says.

But even what he says doesn’t make sense. Foods that were popular in one part of the country naturally wouldn’t spread around the country in the old days. That they have spread recently doesn’t make them any less legitimate.

I’m firmly pro-Italian on food and many other joyful things. Marvellous place, at least the northern parts I’ve visited.

The best steak I’ve ever had was in Florence: no steak I’ve ever had in the “Anglo-sphere” has been a patch on it. I will concede this to US steak: I’ve never had one as bad as a steak I was offered for breakfast in Australia.

For what it’s worth my steak number 2 was in Montpellier and number 3 was in an Italian restaurant in Australia.

I have never visited Buenos Aires.

Always liked hanging out in my Italian Amercan friends houses. The food was great and there was plenty of it. but as you said Italian-Americans were richer than Italians.

Italy, not so long ago was a poor country. In the 1880’s, in Northern Italy the diet contained a lot of corn meal and was so deficient in nutrients that malnutrition and pellagra was endemic. Other areas tended to eat pasta so pelegra wasn’t a curse but it doesn’t seem they ate well.

After WWII the Italian battleship Giulio Cesare was given to the Soviet Union as part of reparations for the war. The Russians found the ship’s kitchens were set up with large pots and could only prepare pasta. One of their first tasks was to rebuild the galleys to serve Russian chow.

Admittedly the Italian crews lived in barracks when in port but it belies the idea of a sophisticated cuisine at least for the enlisted men.

OT:

When I first heard about the American attacks against targets in Iraq and Syria, I switched over to CNN for the first time in at least a year. I was hoping for one of those dramatic on-the-scene reports from an intrepid journalist cowering in his hotel room trying not to wet himself as the bombs kept bursting in air.

I knew I was going to get a big steaming pile of BS, but I was hoping for some entertaining BS or perhaps some mildly-amusing BS – something along the lines of Charles Jaco’s histrionic performance in Saudi Arabia back in the early-’90s glory days of Faek Nooz:

Or maybe this:

Instead all I got was a bunch of schlumps regurgitating Pentagon press releases:

No wonder CNN is dying.

They are lying. They know they are lying. We know they are lying. They know that we know they are lying. And yet, they lie.

But their lies are so BORING.

If Ted Turner were dead, he’d be spinning in his grave. (Is he still alive? I can’t remember.)

““When a community finds itself deprived of its sense of identity, because of whatever historical shock or fracture with its past, it invents traditions to act as founding myths,” Grandi says.”

Ladies and gentleman, I present you the american negro.

The total cultural output of Italy >> than all other countries combined.

will suggest H.D. Miller on why pizza is usa .https://eccentricculinary.com/about-me/

I’d say the most distinctive Italian food is casu marzu cheese from Sardinia. It’s actually illegal, thanks to EU food safety rules, but can be found if you ask around.

“Jack D, a lawyer who seems to know an impressive amount about cooking (and cars), ”

Wikipedia is a centuries old jewish tradition.

Financial Times:

From panettone to tiramisu, many ‘classics’ are in fact recent inventions, as Alberto Grandi has shown

Not mentioned in the article, some ‘classic’ Italian creations of surprisingly recent (post-1900) vintage:

bronchioli expectoranti
sonofagooch
gnocci Paramusu di Bergen
lufa riggno
mestizo baccadahouse
scabbalucci
credenza toe stubbi

I’d say the most distinctive Italian food is casu marzu cheese from Sardinia.

i.e., maggot cheese. Don’t confuse “distinctive” with “disgusting”.

Not mentioned in the article, some ‘classic’ Italian creations of surprisingly recent (post-1900) vintage:

Also little known is that the Italians invented the suppository. The Italian word for it is “Inuendo”.

Casu martzu (rotten cheese) is as disgusting as it sounds. It is infected with maggots and if you eat it the maggots can take up residence in your digestive system. Blech!

Sardinia belongs to Italy but it’s not really Italian.

A pet peeve of mine is all the hullabaloo about al dente, pasta, and how horrible the soft pasta at the Olive Tree is.

The only reason you can get pasta to be al dente is because it’s prepared from dry pasta. Dry pasta is cheap convenience food developed for poor urban peasants. It’s the meals-ready-to-eat of Italian food, supplied during food shortages, the carb equivalent of Velveeta.

People with money would just make pasta fresh, cracking a fresh egg into a pile of flour and it would have a chewy texture different from al dente.

A catchy headline from WSJ’s editors for Marianna’s fluff piece. But it’s shtoopid.

Everything I, an American, thought I knew about our republic was wrong.

His skill is in taking academic research and making it digestible. And his mission is to disrupt the foundations on which we Italians have built our famous, and famously inflexible, culinary culture — a food scene where cappuccini must not be had after midday and tagliatelle must have a width of exactly 7mm.

Sounds kinda deconstructionalist. There is no such thing as Italy! Certainly nothing qualifying as an identity. In the West, we are all too often reminded that we do not exist. And when we do, we’re merely in the way and ready to be swept away by the glorious progressive future.

Say, what if a bullet, a screw, rivet, bolt or policy isn’t quite “exact” by Euro standards — which are inherently White and therefore bad?

South Africa used to possess nuclear weapons. When the old, so-called “apartheid” regime resigned, responsible parties ensured that those nasty weapons, which were difficult to maintain, were sent elsewhere or dismantled. Israel and SA were collaborating a lot.

These past few days I’ve been wondering where the West’s nuke weapons will go. What plans do we have in the US in case of an invasion? We seriously need to think about this stuff.

“I’m dining with is Alberto Grandi, Marxist academic, ”

Another useless credentialed pos.

This guy has a point. You should see Italians snickering at “incorrect” carbonara made by Youtube chefs. Carbonara is a relatively new recipe that was introduced in 1944, and yes it was originally made with cream LOL. But wow do these gastronomic hall monitors go crazy when a recipe that was revised in the 90s to include and only include the 4 now-standard ingredients is altered in any way. Reminds me of the British suddenly caring desperately about calling the British Open “the Open” somewhere around 1995, and gaslighting people into believing they were completely wrong for using any other name. It was never called “the Open” even by the Brits in the 20s and 30s.

I could suggest a domestic cohort in America that has some pretty ridiculous myths about their role in world and domestic history, but no journalist at a mainstream publication has the stones to talk about that, much less sneer at it.

I became suspicious as soon as I saw “Marxist historian.” I wouldn’t trust anything he says.

A healthy dose of skepticism, at least, is needed. The serious Marxist historians embedded in Western unis are often very intelligent. The more intelligent ones with deep foreign affiliations keep a low profile.

As the great Derb said: We are doomed.

Schrodinger’s celebrity: the celebrity is in an alive/unalive quantum state until someone looks him or her up and flips the state. I just flipped the state: Ted Turner is alive and 85 years old.

So what’s the story for pasta alla carbonara? Cheap fat/protein/carb bomb for exhausted Italian coal miners to sup on, or WW2 provenance, whipped up for GIs who told the locals they liked eggs and bacon?

Today by chance I drove by an obscure Gaza Ceasefire! demonstration/blockade of the Chevron Refinery Gate in Richmond, CA, the third largest of the 11? refineries in California. There were about a hundred demonstrators stretched along the narrow sidewalk running along the fenced property, an average cross-section of Bay Area progressivism, except not a Berkeley student crowd, and a bit on the scruffy side.

Surprisingly, there were about 20 cop cars from several jurisdictions parked around, and police were crawling all over the sidewalks. Hmm, I wondered why.

Chevron is in an out of the way location: not that many drive by its entry gate compared to traffic elsewhere. The Gate area is a grim industrial landscape devoid of strollers. The demonstrators were not there to be seen by the public, and there were no news media around.

Suddenly, I realized that the demo was symbolically threatening a major strategic asset. In a time of foreign tensions they were signaling that we know it’s here, we know it’s important, we know it’s vulnerable. That’s why the police were all over.

I’m not against the Palestinians, nor the Israelis, don’t want to be anybody’s propaganda dupe, I want diplomats to work for peace. But that demo seemed off to me.

In 2019, the archbishop of Bologna, Matteo Zuppi, suggested adding some pork-free “welcome tortellini” to the menu at the city’s San Petronio feast. It was intended as a gesture of inclusion, inviting Muslim citizens to participate in the celebrations of the city’s patron saint.

Pork-free tortellini is supposed to make up for his cathedral’s fresco depiction of their prophet writhing in hell? As for Wisconsin parmesan, WopPo WaPo covered this in 2019:

Parmesan from Wisconsin? How dairy you?! Italy wants to reclaim its cheese.

The only Wisconsin Italians that come readily to mind are Vince Lombardi and the Fonz. And half of Liberace. Corsicans, of all people, settled Iron County on the Michigan border, at least one of them representing the area in the state assembly for years, and some of their log cabins survive after 140 years. No connection to the Corsica Loaf baked over on the Door peninsula.

Here’s the transcript of a discussion with Wisconsin dairy experts about this. Maybe I should talk with the missus, who worked in one of the many little “cheese factories” that dot the state like quilting shops.

Related to yesterday’s talk of height and longevity, Sardinia is a famous “Blue Zone”:

Why were Sardinians the shortest Europeans? A journey through genes, infections, nutrition, and sex

The only reason you can get pasta to be al dente is because it’s prepared from dry pasta. Dry pasta is cheap convenience food developed for poor urban peasants. It’s the meals-ready-to-eat of Italian food, supplied during food shortages, the carb equivalent of Velveeta.

Or ramen.

Dried semolina/water pasta and fresh egg/flour pasta are distinct products. One is not better or a substitute for the other. Dried water pasta is the more ancient type and was prevalent in Southern Italy while egg pasta is from the north. It had nothing to do with economic class.

Pizza otoh is a food of extreme poverty. It was eaten by the street people of Naples who were too poor to afford kitchens. A visitor to Naples in 1831, Samuel Morse – inventor of the telegraph – described pizza as a ‘species of the most nauseating cake … covered over with slices of pomodoro or tomatoes, and sprinkled with little fish and black pepper and I know not what other ingredients, it altogether looks like a piece of bread that has been taken reeking out of the sewer’. It would take another 70 years at least for Americans to revise their views about pizza.

When I see pizza I think medieval trenchers:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trencher_(tableware)

Flat disc of bread with good stuff on it.

Wisconsin has had Italian cheese making families for 80 years – Sartori, BelGioioso, Stella, etc. Italians make cheese for Italian Americans in the cheese capital of America was a natural fit.

Back in 2007 AD, Mearsheimer claims that oil/energy companies scrupulously avoid lobbying re foreign policy, and did not lobby for a war to gain access to Arab oil. So, what does Chevron have to do with /what connection with the Gaza War then?

“This is the worst. This expresso end#&+*!”

https://youtube.com/watch?v=YWb8-sp4K9A

Sardinia belongs to Italy but it’s not really Italian.

So sayeth Jack D, iSteve’s leading expert on Italian affairs.

Rotten cheese is bad … but raw chicken is good. Pork is bad … but cousin marriage is good. White people should sit at the back of the bus. And the purity of New Yawk wahtuh is overrated.

The preceding paragraph was a succinct summation of some of Jack D’s most salient recent contributions to the iSteve comment section.

Jack D might be tempted to attempt to summarize my most salient recent contributions to the iSteve comment section, but I’ll save him the trouble:

Will Stancil is a weenie, an obtuse bit of human flotsam, an ant in the afterbirth. He is incapable of grasping the magnitude of his moronitude. He cannot grok the extent of his non-significance. If there is a bright center to the universe, he inhabits the planet it is farthest from. Not only is no “there” there, there is no “there” anywhere.

Okeh, that’s enough. Carry on.

You can’t have sourdough without San Francisco fog. Period.

BREAKING: Tucker Carlson reportedly spotted in Moscow, Russia as speculation swirls that he will be interviewing Vladimir Putin.

Carlson said he previously planned on interviewing Putin until he found out the U.S. government was spying on him.

"The NSA broke into my signal… pic.twitter.com/MahlBIDEFa

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) February 3, 2024

The real key to pizza is that, for millennia in Europe, when snacked you betwixt meals, the main go-to was some sort of toasted bread with some sort of maillarded cheese.

I read recently that the median age of CNN and MSNBC audiences is 75. This was responded to by an anon who claimed anecdotally that his nonagenarian grandma sits in an old folks home where the TV which nobody watches or comprehends is always set to CNN. Literally already over.

Totally OT: Gloria Steinem was a CIA asset. The more you know . . .

The pizza tradition in Italy is vastly overstated.

To put it bluntly, the average pizza in Italy is not particularly memorable. NYC’s average pizza is of higher quality than the average found in the supposed home of pizza. I once trekked down into the wonderful shithole that is Naples to sample “authentic Neapolitan pizza” — and…meh.

TBH, I find most Italian food overrated with the exception of their sandwiches and panini — the average gas or train station sandwiche in Italy is of exceptionally high quality.

FWIW as my Croatian friends are fond of pointing out — what is now know as Croatia has been producing olive oil and flatbreads with toppings just as long as Italy had ie thousand of years. It is absurd to think that Italians would have some sort of natural monopoly on them.

And the Croatians are, in fact, right. Croatian pizza is on average better than the Italian equivalent — one reason being, they’re being baked by Croats, not Arabs or Filipinos or Indians like in Italy.

Och, please don’t get me started on how I learned to make the world’s most perfect gazpacho (which is of course Spanish, but I used/still use all-Italian ingredients — and NO FILLER!!!) while living in a commune with 23 topless lesbians and a feminist Peruvian Ingmar Bergman scholar. Yeah, you heard me right the first time.

Details some other day.

Meanwhile, more of La Goddess Emmylou:

You’ll thank me later.

I’m continually surprised at how little time Steve Sailer has spent outside the US-“a week in Italy in 1980”- and yet is very interested in the world outside the US.

Just an observation

As I mentioned recently, my 69-year-old aunt recently stopped watching CNN because the prospect of Donald Trump’s possible return to power fills her with soul-crushing dread.

When my grandmother was in her late eighties – she died at 91 – she lived with my aunt for a couple of years. My aunt subjected Grandma to a steady diet of CNN. She even bought a huge new TV with a picture sharp enough to reveal Dana Bash’s pores.

Grandma had Alzheimer’s. In her confusion she thought that the talking heads were peeping Toms staring at her day and night. Apparently she was especially creeped out by Anderson Cooper. (I can relate.)

My 72-year-old mother doesn’t watch cable news – thank God.

I have a couple of seventysomething neighbors with whom I converse regularly. The husband was a loyal Fox viewer for decades until Rupert gave Tucker the heave-ho. Now he’s an avowed Newsmax devotee.

What a stupid article, that could only be written by a woman (it’s always the women). Why do they always love to put their own culture down?

Yes, everybody knows “tiramisu” is a relatively recent invention. So what? It builds on a lot of previous desserts, it’s not as if Italians (in all regions, from Trento to Sicily) didn’t have a very long tradition of great desserts.

As for panettone, it’s just not true. The tradition and association with Christmas goes back at least to the 16th century, although of course in the 20th century it became much more common and there started to be much more quality and variety (today you can find all kinds of panettone types).

Also, there’s no “Italian cuisine” as such. Every region in Italy has its own culinary tradition that goes back centuries.

As for the rest, it’s just plain stupidity. Pizza is more popular and common today than a hundred years ago? Gee, you don’t say…

My grandfather, from outside Lucca, hated the CC. He said that as a boy whenever they had eggs, the priests would come and take them.

My dad got the recipe for a version of carbonara that he liked at a Naples restaurant in the mid 50s. I don’t know who Americanized it, either Mario for his USN customers or my mother, but it uses bacon, egg yolks, cheddar!, milk or cream, and beef consomme but no pepper. I fix it when my siblings visit with a lower proportion of pasta than any Italian would. It’s a mess to clean up.

My Methodist grandmother associated spicy food with drinkers, perhaps one reason her DIL hardly ever used pepper, but I can’t stomach much of it, so it could be a genetic prejudice against it. I had a sip of lemon grass soup in the 80s and haven’t considered Thai food since.

I like this gentle, pleasant way of making fun of Jack D a lot better than Twinkie’s diligent interpretation of everything he says as proof of his Badness.

OT: Total votes in the South Carolina Democratic Primary in 2020:

539k

Total votes in the South Carolina Democratic Primary in 2020 with 99% of the votes counted:

131k

Biden is in massive trouble when he can’t get 3/4 of the Democrats to show up in one of his strongholds. South Carolina isn’t even one of those Democratic states that are being flooded with immigrants, ticking off the Democratic base that already lives there.

Really interesting. I grew up in an Italian-American neighborhood in the 70s Bronx (we’re Irish) and the pizza was uniformly fantastic. So it was a disappointment trying pizza in Rome on a class trip in 1984- it was like white-bread toast with spaghetti sauce. Awful!

I feel bad too for tourists who have heard about “NYC pizza” their whole lives, they are nearly all in Manhattan where really cruddy chains- “No we’re the REAL Famous Ray’s!”- serve up lukewarm barely-okay slices. I don’t know what to say to them. “Take the A Train for 25 minutes up to the Bronx..” Ha.

The story is similar to Chinese food in America- the version popular worldwide. Invented by Chinese immigrants here. Of course you get snobs saying “That’s not REAL Chinese food!” but since we all know now about the “wet markets” in Wuhan- we don’t WANT to eat crickets or opossums or those animals held in miserably inhumane conditions. Beef lo mein is fine! ha.

Oh mio Dio! Next they’re going to tell us that the Italians culturally appropriated pasta from the noodle-slurping Chinese.

What the tenure committee said to themselves after the Wall had fallen and the Soviet Union was on the outs was “what this department needs is a lot more Marxy-Warxy.”

Dean Martin wasn’t Italian, he was Welsh. At least according to the Steubenville mobsters he owed money to when he died.

“It’s all about identity,” Grandi tells me between mouthfuls of osso buco bottoncini. He is a devotee of Eric Hobsbawm, the British Marxist historian who wrote about what he called the invention of tradition. “When a community finds itself deprived of its sense of identity, because of whatever historical shock or fracture with its past, it invents traditions to act as founding myths,” Grandi says.

The guy doesn’t seem to understand that tradition is not static or suddenly fabricated. It develops, evolves and mutates over the centuries, sometimes much more quickly than at other times. But, as a Marxist, he wouldn’t. In nearly all cases, there is very little innovation or invention, but modification or expansion of an already existing tradition. Pizza is an example. It was very much restricted to Naples and its environs and was virtually unknown elsewhere in Italy. The vast majority of Italian emigrants are from the South and Neapolitan Pizza became popular in pre-WWII America. After the War, it was carried back to Italy and has expanded there and worldwide ever since.

Where there has been sudden change, it has usually been due to the introduction of novel ingredients. But even here, this was usually grafted onto existing tradition. There was pizza before tomatoes or mozarella. Originally, it was just thin piece of dough with olive oil, chopped garlic and herbs on top, baked for a short time in a hot oven. More elaborate ones had chopped veg as well.
So his claim that “deprivation of identity” leads to “invention of tradition” does not stand up to critical analysis.

“And that’s bad because” because it violates the tradition of what it was! Wait…

As an addemdum to my previous observation that modern America and places it sees as under it’s cultural hegemony (Western Europe, nobody cares about Eastern Europe because very few Americans consider that “The Old Country” and many of the ones who it was the old country for hate that people and culture there since it was not only the old country but also “the latest country” and because it’s poor.) operate as it’s highest conception of morality (Effectively it’s guiding religion) the idea that:

Whites (Or if in a Western country, native whites, this applies on a sliding scale for non-native whites depending on their core WEIRDness, the less WEIRD the more they are treated as non-whites) only have collective responsibility and never collective pride or legitimate collective interests. Their identities not only don’t matter, they are dangerous and threatening.

Non-whites only have collective pride and legitimate interests and never collective responsibility. Their identities are not only important and crucial to protect but bring enlightenment.

Similarly white traditions are all made up and meaningless (See the famous Swedish lady politician lament about how “vibrant” the “new Swedes” were with their cooking and clothing and religion, meanwhile the Swedes to her only had “Midsommer and other such silly things” or the contention that everything good in Sweden “came from outside”. Whereas an outside observer from a non-Scandinavian country would see enormous amounts of Swedish culture, she doesn’t see it and thus sees mainstream ethnic Swedes as not having a culture) while non-white traditions are always deep, meaningful and “authentic”. None of it was also formalised at all in the 18th and 19th centuries. (A time of increases literacy and movement leading to many languages becoming homogenised with dialects lost and many traditions losing regional but not national form)

The advent of modernity also led to a lot of searching for the folk ways that were being displaced in Europe during the 18th and particularly the 19th century. But while traditions were reforged from incomplete or modified forms there was rarely anything that was just completely made up like Arthurian legend, there was often something left to take and make live again in the new age. And part of the purpose of national traditions is to exist in and of themselves, so 200 years of this style of cooking is indisputably an Italian traditional national cuisine even if you want to pretend it was all just made up 200 years ago when it clearly wasn’t.

I should say the latter thing is not really operant in Europe very much (Which is what the FT columnist finds annoying), but the former ones really does. If the Italians in the 18th century didn’t fully understand and replicate traditional Italian folk cuisine we understand they didn’t make it up and more importantly, their desire to understand it came from the very real existence of Italy and Italians and thus a desire to understand their national traditions. Though the author doesn’t directly challenge the existence of the Italian people, we understand that’s what is the real problem he has. If only the Italians would all just completely move to and displace somebody else from their ancestral land, then they’d not be so problematic pretending to own Italy. Don’t they understand good and evil?

Victor Davis Hanson keeps saying Latinos are just like Italians were 100 years ago. All that’s needed is lots of forced integration to turn them White.

I mean, what did Italy ever accomplish before Italians immigrated here? The Roman Empire, the Italian Renaissance, fellas like Galileo … no reason to think they had a better history than Honduras.

You need to try steaks from rural Texas and Northern Mexico, or steaks from central Canada.
I never had steak in Florence, but I had pot roast and it was terrific. Best steaks I have had were rural Mexico, rural Texas, and Winnipeg.

Ew! Living with 23 lesbians – I don’t even want to speculate on what that would smell like.
Meadow muffin × old grass?
Damb, I speculated. Ew!

Ladies and gentleman, I present to you the Old Testament – written in (perhaps) the 3rd century BC to provide foundation myths for the new Judean nationalists.

Unless you are certain about your Parmesan’s source, it might not be as Italian as you imagine it is. Plenty of subcon illegals (mostly Sikh Pajeets) are cheap labour in Italian agribusinesses:

As an Irish guy who grew up with and has family who are Italian, sounds like the perpetual feud between southern Italians (Sicilians and Napolitans) and northern Italians. Bulk of immigrants to America are southern, and therefore much of Italian–American cuisine is more southern. The northerners have always looked down on the southerners, and annoys northerners to no end that the “southern” cuisine is what many think of when they think of Italian cuisine.

Lots of cuisines get impacted by immigration. Irish and corned beef and cabbage; only find it in Ireland because Americans asked for it. Irish immigrants on the boats coming to the US were fed simple boiled meat with potatoes and cabbage on the trip over. They associated it with “home” and went looking for it here. With a bit of prosperity, Jewish conveyors of corned beef filled the need.

Told by many that what American think of as Chinese food is far from what they would get there. But told by a Chinese friend Chinese people are mostly okay with that rather than annoyed. It sells. There are dim sum places in many US markets like NY, Vegas and LA that barely cater to anyone but Chinese people. There is not a Chinese Grandi.

Grandi sounds like an annoying twerp. Wouldn’t be caught dead in an Olive Garden in the northeast; there are great Italian restaurants everywhere. But if you’ve ever been in Orlando on a 95 degree 100 humidity day with sunburned kids after a day at a theme park, that will do.

Lombardi was son of a Brooklyn butcher. His great nephew still is http://www.brenmansmeatmarket.com/Hours_%26_Location.html

This all sounds like a Freudian deconstruction, with the id being tasty food, the superego the morality of following the cultural narrative and the ego being the rationalization for why this is the right thing to do.

And 130 years doesn’t make for tradition because?
Indeed, there are countless of traditions in families, sports, colleges, and companies across the US, UK, and Europe that emerged in the last 130 years or so. It’s more useful to think of tradition as something that binds across generations.

I guess we can stop worrying about cultural appropriation.

They’ve only been White since they got the Untouchables to cancel all the Sicilian gangsters from TV. Also isn’t banning Columbo Day discrimination against Italians?

I went over this web site and I believe you have a lot of fantastic info, saved to favorites (:.

I have an 1832 British woodcut engraving of “the Maccheroni Seller of Naples“ in my collection. It depicts a street vendor supplying his customers with spaghetti, which, the accompanying text explains, they wrap around their hand, sprinkle with grated cheese or salt, and eat as they walk. A bit more than a century later, the BBC did a spoof documentary on the “spaghetti bushes of Italy,” which were shown growing long strands of vermicelli that the locals cut and dried in the sun. It’s only moderately embarrassing that Italians knew naught of pasta until Marco Polo found it in China, or that they long thought tomatoes either poisonous or intensely aphrodisiacal. Some of my ancestors came from southern Italy but I’d never heard of tiramisu at all, thought it must be Japanese when I first heard the name. Tastes good anyway, though, and that’s the point: leave the food snobbery to the Frogs. And excuse me, since when are we white? I grew up regarding white people as that mysterious tribe who lived among the trees in the ‘burbs and did all sorts of bizarre Protestant things like impressing their neighbors with their fancy possessions while they were secretly screwing their wives. I also learned you can pronounce “merdi di cani!” in such a way as it sound like “Americani!” and the WASPs will never know you are actually calling them dogshits.

He is a devotee of Eric Hobsbawm, the British Marxist historian who was an unrepentant Communist and never acknowledged the millions Stalin and others killed in its name wrote about what he called the invention of tradition.

Figures.

I read this stupid article in a flight magazine on my way home from Italy last summer.

It seems obvious that prosperity, better transportation, intelligent use of modern methods etc. would allow people who care about food to make it the way they like best and lead to the definition of classic recipes. Why that means Italian food isn’t really Italian food escapes me.

the magnitude of his moronitude

Very good, sir!

Grandi is not saying Italy inventing traditions is “bad”, that’s your projection Steve. I listen to his DOI podcast and in fact he is generally very positive about the incredible inventiveness of his countrymen. As an American one can also take some pride in the influence America has had on Italian cuisine, Grandi is very good about deflating the snobbishness of modern Italians toward the Italians that left for the US. There is also a good reason why nationalist Venetians, say, are actually insulted by the idea that pasta and pizza are supposed to be their heritage.

One interesting historical footnote – Mussolini despised pasta. He thought it was an effeminate dish from the backwards South, and the Fascists tried to discourage Italians from eating it. Mussolini was of course a northener who grew up on polenta. He’d probably actually side with Grandi on a lot of these takes. The irony is that a lot of the fake traditions Grandi is attacking were originally promoted by Italian Communists after the war, trying to create a narrative of a uniform Italian working class culture than transcended the very deep regional and linguistic differences in post war Italy.

It’s unclear why right wing conservatives should take pride in made up history and nonsense. It would actually be more healthy if Italians took more pride in their amazing tradition of industrial and artisanal prowess, their ability to innovate and their outstanding contributions to the arts, literature and science over the centuries. Centering your identity around a fairly unhealthy cuisine that was never most Italians´ heritage at all seems like an odd foundation to build national pride.

Wouldn’t be caught dead in an Olive Garden in the northeast; there are great Italian restaurants everywhere.

Grandi is actually the sort of iconoclast who would probably say that Olive Garden has a lot to offer. This is why many Italian snobs hate him.

But what have the Romans ever done for us?

FWIW as my Croatian friends are fond of pointing out — what is now know as Croatia has been producing olive oil and flatbreads with toppings just as long as Italy had ie thousand of years. It is absurd to think that Italians would have some sort of natural monopoly on them.

What bullshit. “Croatians” have not lived in modern Croatia for thousands of years. Slavs began arriving only in the 7th-8th centuries and have slowly displaced the native Celt/Roman population ever since. Istria and Dalmatia still had large indigenous Italian populations right up until 1945. Your Croatian friends are simply admitting that the Italians who formerly lived in Istria and Dalmatia had the same traditions as the Italians living on the peninsula. Slavs certainly did not bring a tradition of flatbreads and olive oil with them from the swamps and forests of their original homeland on the Bug river.

Croatia is arguably a country with no indigenous cusine. The coastal food is clearly Italian, inland traditions are mostly Hungarian and German based.

Wouldn’t be caught dead in an Olive Garden in the northeast

I can think of one exception. In 2019 we were in NYC on my wife’s birthday. We bought tickets to that night’s performance of Phantom for 40% off at the TCKTS box office in Times Square. Right across the street is an Olive Garden and we needed to eat before the performance began. We went up the escalator, told the hostess about the birthday and were seated at a window booth overlooking Times Square. I don’t remember much about the food but the view was spectacular.

I’m sure.

My impression was, because I’ve been broke most of my life and didn’t have the chance to travel, but I’ve dated a lot of rich girls who did, was….

My father was a broke guy who joined the US Navy age 18, and traveled all across the world (peacetime! post-Korea, pre-Vietnam!) before he was twenty, and said…

MY DAD: You gotta see Italy, Paris, and Japan. The rest of it, eh not much, stick to Indiana.

One of my favorite uncles lied about his age and joined the Marines age 16 (the Corps doesn’t care if you’re cool enuf) and he got around and said the best place was Morocco.

Me, I slept in movie theatres in Sherman Oaks and MacArthur Park and Ventura Blvd and the UCLA campus (the f!cking student orchestra used to wake me up all the time while I was trying to sleep). I got rid of MacArthur Park when a naked man covered in tattoos tried to wake me from sleeping under a tree, by trying to jam a cigar into my mouth. I said Okay, enough’s enough.

There were Italian communities in Wisconsin.

At one point Madison was one of the most violent places in America. A small Mafia family from Chicago bought all the judges and most of the cops. The Italian part of town was quite dangerous. The mostly German and partly Norwegian population was outraged, and many Lutherans joined the anti-Catholic KKK.

After the small Mafia family was gone, and the Italians assimilated, Madison became one of the least violent places in America.

In the past few decades newer, non-Italian criminal organizations from Chicago have been moving in. Madison is still extremely safe by American standards, but not as safe as it was 20 years ago

Vince Lombardi was also one of the 1936 Fordham University “Seven Blocks of Granite,” one of the most famous offensive lines in college football history.

As a coach he built the Packers in his own image: tough.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Blocks_of_Granite

I feel bad too for tourists who have heard about “NYC pizza” their whole lives, they are nearly all in Manhattan where really cruddy chains- “No we’re the REAL Famous Ray’s!”- serve up lukewarm barely-okay slices. I don’t know what to say to them. “Take the A Train for 25 minutes up to the Bronx..”

Imagine the hilarity that ensues when they try to take the A train to the Bronx.

I’ve seen that ramen museum on TV but never been to it. On the other hand I used to hit this gyoza potstickers place regularly:

https://whereintokyo.com/venues/25652.html

http://www.cabel.name/2007/02/japan-story-gyoza-stadium.html

It’s an indoor movie-set-like recreation of an early 1960s Japanese backstreet, where most of the shops are gyoza shops. It predates the ramen museum, and has outlived the ice cream village that used to be next to it.

Dean Martin wasn’t Italian, he was Welsh

Dino Paul Crocetti…….hits your eye like a big pizza pie thats-a Mambo Italiano!

Interesting stuff, the actual cuisine and the naming of the cuisine, tied to regional history, and sometimes modern marketing can incorporate the cuisine into its symbolic whole, but sometimes not. Baklava is an Ottoman regional treat first mentioned in a 15th century Turkish poem, but the earlier ‘placenta’, thin, flat dough sweetened by nuts and honey, is referenced in the Odyssey. No baklava being marketed as placenta I’ve ever heard of. And word wise not much of a step from placenta to placentophagy, the eating of ‘not baklava’.

Italian food is best enjoyed at home, surrounded by family, cooked by grandma.

Italy adopted widespread restaurants relatively recently and hasn’t fully embraced the American lifestyle of eating out frequently.

That is the biggest argument against the restaurant reason of immigration. Nothing replaces a home cooked meal, even imperfectly cooked and in exotic, with your relatives.

“Italians taught the world how to eat”
—Corrado “Junior” Soprano

“non-Italian” LOL. Are they Scots? Swedes? Austrians?

Lombardi was son of a Brooklyn butcher.

Well, yeah, nobody’s actually from Green Bay. Except Paul Gigot, who would bump into Packers at the drugstore during his childhood there.

Green Bay is the oldest city in the state, by a long shot, and one of the oldest in the country, appearing early in this video:

https://archive.jsonline.com/sports/packers/115346939.html/

The mob’s ability to flourish in America is more of a critique of American law enforcement and judiciary and self-indulgence than it was the mob. Same thing with the cartels today. The blame for Al Capone and his ilk belongs to temperance movement white lady do-gooder biddies and American drunks, and the party yuppies and junkies for the likes of Escobar and the Narcos. The Mexican cartels today are powerful because TX dimwits luv their guns and gunshows.

Make sure it’s the real thing!

https://wired.me/technology/parmesan-cheese-microchip/

By the way, American pizza in most of the country is better today than it was in the 1970s.

Just to expand on that point, frozen pizza has really made some notable quality improvements over the years, to the point that the higher-end frozen pizzas are now comparable to the lower-end delivery chains, but at less than half the price. In this day and age of rampant food inflation, the $75 pizza delivery bill is not unheard of. Frozen pizza offers a pretty good deal, and you can stock up and make one any time.

I like Screamin’ Sicilian.

I’ve got to agree with nearly all you’ve said, except this:
. Slavs began arriving only in the 7th-8th centuries and have slowly displaced the native Celt/Roman population ever since.

Slavs did arrive in the 7-8th Centuries and slowly displace ( and mix with ) the natives.
But that native population was Illyrian/Roman not Celto-Roman. The Illyrians seem to have spoken a language closely related to modern Albanian. Yup, Croats are just Slavonic-speaking Albanians. That’ll keep them in their place. Take that, Barton Kaldian.

There is a weird, almost child-like conservatism in a lot of leftist thought. Here food should be authentic, original, “pure” and never change. Climate activists want the Earth’s temperature to remain absolutely fixed–1.5 degrees more is the end of the world and cannot be allowed. In the Communist Manifesto Marx preaches that the evolution of capitalism has forced men into robotic, alienated factory work, unlike the authentic, fulfilling work of the medieval artisan.

Both illustrate the same thing.

This scene from the Sopranos does a pretty good job in illustrating perceptions about Italian food in the US compared to italy:

This episode is also the same one that pushes the lie that it’s really the Italian mafia that is responsible for the carjacking epidemic. Negroes are just the unwitting patsies.

Pizza was not a snack for the lazzaroni, it was their meal. It was said that when a lazzarone had earned (or begged) enough money for a pizza and a bottle of wine, he was done working for the day.

Upper class people did not regard a pizza as a proper meal or a snack or anything that they would want to eat.

It’s hard for a modern American to comprehend the incredible, 3rd world level of poverty in 19th century Naples. These people were dirt poor.

https://www.loc.gov/item/2003670987/

In this stereogram they are called “beggars” but this is not quite it. The lazzaroni were street people – they were not exactly homeless – they mostly had some hovel that they could sleep in at night, at least in bad weather. During the day they would pick up odd jobs or beg or steal, whatever it took to keep body and soul together. So begging was only one of their occupations.

Also, there’s no “Italian cuisine” as such. Every region in Italy has its own culinary tradition that goes back centuries.

Like Pizza round the Bay of Naples. As I write in #58, it has developed and evolved over the centuries and has gone on to conquer the World. Better to say the traditional cuisines of Italy, But in modern Italy, and the modern World, you don’t need to be in Bologna to enjoy Bolognese or in Parma to enjoy Parmesan cheese.

Speaking of lousy pizza in the San Fernando Valley, what was the deal with Barone’s? People used to rave about that place. I always thought the pizza tasted like somebody stuck stale bread in the toaster for a few seconds, then spread tomato paste right out of the can over it.

Maybe a little bit of an overstatement. The Slavs surely came with their own Slavic recipes too. Of course when they moved to the sunny south and met the bounty of the sea and the olive trees and the grape vines they modified their diets but there is no bright line between German, Hungarian and Slavic cooking (nor, for that matter, once you leave out the pork and the mixing of meat and dairy, the E. European Jewish kitchen). Is a cobanac a goulash by another name “stolen” from the Hungarians or is just a stew that anyone in the region would end up cooking given the available ingredients? Did the Croatians swipe the yota from Germans (after all it has sauerkraut in it)?

Keep in mind that most of these recipes are not ancient. Potatoes, beans, tomatoes, peppers and paprika are all New World crops, many of which did not catch on until the 19th century and are frequently featured ingredients. If you subtract the New World crops out of many dishes, you are left with something unrecognizable to modern eyes.

It’s also interesting to see which dishes make the international hit parade and which ones stay local and obscure.

Back in the 80s and 90s, there was this idea that CNN was the neutral option (ironically the result of the now defunct fairness doctrine). So now whenever there’s a TV nobody is specifically watching (airport bars, old folks’ homes, etc), it tends to be set to CNN.

My mother had pizza in France in the late 60s. It was nothing like modern pizza, it was essentially toast with sliced tomatoes and cheese, heated over a can-oven in the back of a truck.

Most European peoples “actually” exist from the 14th -15th C, taking into account their characteristic historical features, cuisine being the least important. Various “deconstructionists” are trying to annihilate numerous European historical identities & this guy seems- I am not acquainted with him- to belong to that category.

Far from being the worst- Umberto Eco was much more suicidal, insisting that Mediterranean peoples like Italians should accept the destiny of being inundated by Muslim and African demographic tides & ethnic swamping. In 1961. there were more than 900 k births in Italy, virtually all of them to natives; in 2022, less than 400 k, perhaps 22% involving one non-Italian parent.

The Sopranos did that but they also have the — not iSteviest but something like that — most X scene ever in recent pop culture — the bit where the SUV gets carjacked and the dad barks that word and the mom upbraids him and the dad demands, who else?

I worked at a mom and pop’s joint in Chatsworth called Uncle Ernie’s Pizza for 4 years. He competed with Domino’s and Pizza Hut operating on the same intersection of Topanga Cyn Blvd and Lassen St. His pizza was the best I had in California. I heard the owner died but his wife still runs it.

The Italian reputation for love of food and skill in the culinary arts didn’t spring up without reason.

I feel bad too for tourists who have heard about “NYC pizza” their whole lives, they are nearly all in Manhattan where really cruddy chains- “No we’re the REAL Famous Ray’s!”- serve up lukewarm barely-okay slices.

This Tamil Trinidadian Torontonian of a scientific bent went to NYC to investigate the city’s reputation. The secret?

Magic Water!

Really. There’s no art to it at all. Like a Seattle complexion.

Italian cuisine is bad because Grandi is a Marxist academic. The purpose of Marxism is to destroy every country they live in. This Marxist specializes in food. Others claim ancient Italians and the Roman emperors were black Africans. Similar to American and other marxists. For example English Marxist now claim the Ancient Britons were really dark brown skinned Africans.

Arthur Avenue is not really on any subway line (one of the reasons why it survived as an Italian enclave) but I guess you could take the #4 up to Fordham Road and then a bus across.

Brooklyn is probably easier (and safer) to get to and TBH the pizza is better (I say as a native Brooklynite). I left Brooklyn when I was 6 and I have only little snippets of memory of it as a child but one of those memories is a pizza man tossing a giant round of dough in the air.

TBH there is good pizza to be had in Manhattan and even the average random slice is better than in most places because the NY style is inherently one of the better pizza styles.

Some Chinese-American dishes are not really found in China at all (General Tso’s chicken) . A lot of them date back only to the wave of “Hunan” and “Szechuan” restaurants that opened in the 1970s. The earlier wave of Cantonese-American dishes (“chop suey”) are now mostly passe. Other dishes (kung pao chicken) actually exist in China but their American versions have been modified to suit American tastes (add sugar!). There are plenty of dishes in China that don’t involve eating insects or strange animals and are based on familiar proteins such as chicken, fish, beef, pork, etc. They just don’t usually have sticky sweet sauces.

His point wasn’t that modern Croatians had been cooking pizza and producing olive oil for thousands of years — his point was that peoples like the Illryrians and Greeks and others who had lived along the Balkan Peninsula had been producing the foods that the modern Italians like to take credit for because of their penchant for marketing.

Ergo, olive oil and pizza-like foods aren’t Italian — but Mediterranean, probably dating back to Hellenic times.

Numbskull autist.

cobanac is obviously cultural appropriation of Hungarian culinary tradition. Smart Croatians.

Also, gulyásleves is a soup, not a stew.

If I were to guess, placenta is the etymology of palacsinta (Hungarian crepes).

Pizza was not a snack for the lazzaroni, it was their meal.

Like the Cornish pasty. That hard, rippled rim was a handle. According to legend, anyway. Pasty eaters in Driftless mines gave their nickname, “badgers”, to their state. Cornish, Italians, and Finns would meet in mines around the world. There are a number of notable Brits with Italian surnames*; some of their grandfathers may have come to mine.

It’s hard for a modern American to comprehend the incredible, 3rd world level of poverty in 19th century Naples. These people were dirt poor.

But they were able to build a funicular:

*Side note: the paternal grandfather of Junior Campbell, who co-wrote some of the best music of the ’90s for Thomas and Friends, was named Cancellari and hailed from the same small city as Puccini and Boccherini. Do they have Magic Water, too?

This is all of a piece with the campaign to convince Europeans that they have no special tie to their own countries, that they don’t really have a culture, that Whites weren’t even the overwhelming – almost exclusive – majority of Europe.

In the past they might have said: you are Bourgeois and your traditions are bad. Now they just say: your traditions aren’t even your traditions – you just halucinated them.

All of this is being done in the service of taking those countries away from those to whom they rightfully belong.

Is there anyone who did not know that flatbreads have been around forever, but what we call “pizza” is an American (Italian-American) creation. (My parents told me this as a kid and they’d never been to Italy.)

The whole content of the article amounts to “Italians were relatively poor, but got an order of magnitude richer after the War and their demographic transition, and richer they have elaborated on their culinary traditions, making more varied, richer and better food. Duh.

We have family “traditions” dating way back to the mid to late 1990s when the kids were little. They are still our traditions, because they are ours.

All of this is being done in the service of taking those countries away from those to whom they rightfully belong.

Bingo.

What’s being done to Italy alone is one of the greatest historical crimes of all time.

But it is not just being done to Italy it is being done to every white nation in the West. It is–far and away, nothing is remotely close–the greatest crime in human history.

Arthur Avenue is not really on any subway line (one of the reasons why it survived as an Italian enclave) but I guess you could take the #4 up to Fordham Road and then a bus across.

Or just walk, it’s well under a mile.

Wouldn’t be caught dead in an Olive Garden

Sounds like you have a similar background to me — often hearing Italian phrases such as “paesan” or “va fan gul” or “melangiana” spoken (though interestingly, I don’t offhand even know what the Irish versions of those interjections are).

Anyhow, I never understood the hate for Olive Garden. It’s certainly better than most chain restaurants.

Forget about marginal issues: https://www.nairaland.com/7990821/13-year-old-girl-raped-pack-7

Catania, Italy – Another horror story, yet another young victim of sexual violence at the hands of Islamic migrants. Catania is in shock over what happened to a 13-year-old girl who was raped by a pack of seven Egyptian boys in a bathroom at the communal gardens of Villa Bellini, one of the Sicilian city’s two oldest gardens.

https://www.ansa.it/english/news/2024/02/04/catania-rape-victim-13-ids-suspects_01cdf06d-ddd2-4166-9b04-87165a22bd8c.html

Catania rape victim, 13, IDs suspects

The 13-year-old girl raped last Tuesday in the public toilets of the Villa Bellini in Catania has identified the two underage alleged perpetrators of the rape, police said Sunday.
The identification took place after a US-style line up of the seven suspected members of the gang., who are all Egyptian, police said.
On the other hand, the girl was unable to identify the other five allegedly part of the group, claiming she had not seen their faces and did not want to accuse innocent people.
But the five were identified by the 13-year-old girl’s 17-year-old boyfriend who was allegedly forced to witness the rape while being held still.

“Reminds me of the British suddenly caring desperately about calling the British Open “the Open” somewhere around 1995”

Fair point. It was around then too that for some reason we were not supposed to call our national flag the Union Jack but were told by various pedants that on land it is the Union Flag.

strictly speaking, red sauce is not traditional cuisine there, since tomatoes don’t come from europe. but they’ve been involved for 400 years, so when does ‘tradition’ start exactly.

same for french fries or bar chocolate or corn products and other things part of the food in europe. the ‘potato famine’ can only be a thing AFTER somebody else brought back potatoes.

all these food inventions kinda fly in the face of magic dirt theory, literally. or maybe they don’t. i’m sure some leftist can concoct an idea where the tragic dirt in the New World was not sufficient for potatoes and tomatoes and cacao to flourish and those hated pale people stole them and planted them in their Magic Dirt instead.

OT:

When I first heard about the American attacks against targets in Iraq and Syria, I switched over to CNN for the first time in at least a year. I was hoping for one of those dramatic on-the-scene reports from an intrepid journalist cowering in his hotel room trying not to wet himself as the bombs kept bursting in air.

I knew I was going to get a big steaming pile of BS, but I was hoping for some entertaining BS or perhaps some mildly-amusing BS….

Instead all I got was a bunch of schlumps regurgitating Pentagon press releases:

From “The Aspiring Novelist Who Became Obama’s Foreign-Policy Guru” (Ben Rhodes, to sell the Iran deal to us):

“All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus,” he said. “Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”

I’ve never liked noodles. But husband and kids do. So here’s a sorta kinda fettuccine recipe very fast to make. Boil some wide noodles. Egg noodles if you have them. Be sure to put two teaspoons of salt and two teaspoons of pepper in te water.

As they’re boiling chop up a lot of parsley like an entire bunch for enough noodles for 4 people or a bunch and a half for 6. Include the stems. Also mince some white onion. Really fine mince about a medium size white onion. A four ounce package of cream cheese cut into four pieces.

Drain the noodles. Put the onion and cream cheese in the pot. Dump in the noodles. Mix throughly. I used two big cooking forks then add the parsley just before you serve it. Because you don’t want the parsley to cook. Fry some thin steaks or pork chops boil a vegetable and that’s dinner in 15 minutes. . Chop up another onion with apples for pork chops and mushrooms for the steak.

I never watched cooking shows. But sometimes read cook books and articles about cooking noodles. Not pasta noodles. Such pretentious crap about a cheap staple food eaten all over the world from China to Germany. Pasta isn’t even an Italian word the Italian word is paste not pasta Al dente pasta pretentious assholes. Remember those homemade noodle making things that were so popular at one time? I wonder if anyone ever actually ever used them?

Noodles are much faster than potatoes or rice. And a lot less work than potatoes. My Mom never made macaroni and cheese or lasagna probably why I don’t make them. I can’t stand macaroni and cheese. Why not just eat the cheese?

In Trondheim Norway I saw a sign on a restaurant advertising “Real American Pizza.”

And 19th century Naples was still one of the major Mediterranean harbors. Always was and always will be.

The lyrics to “That’s Amore” are the work of one Jack Brooks, a native of Liverpool. Italians can claim the tune, however. Harry Warren was born Salvatore Guaragna (which does kind of sound like “Warren” with misplaced stress) to Calabrian immigrants.

He sure looks the part!

Sad notes:

To be fair, all faiths and Holy Books, not just OT, are foundational myths of local tribes.

Steve:

This line makes a great point. I remember some columnist defending immigration with the line “Can you imagine Italy without tomato sauce.” My reply would be “Yes, it was called the Rennaissance.” But more seriously, the writer undercut his own point. Tomato sauce was developed around 1800. At that time there were few Italians in America, and even fewer Native Americans in Italy. Trade alone caused the shift.

Your point about cuisines in the U.S. improving without major immigration is a good one. The biggest culinary revolution in my lifetime has been the spread of sushi despite relatively few Japanese living here. On the other hand there are few authentic Mexican restaurants (mostly Tex-Mex) despite the recent Mexican influx. More pro-immigrant nonsense from the radicals, I guess.

Personally I find the evidence much stronger that Jack D is a ethnocentric know-it-all who doesn’t admit when he’s wrong (tbf, so are many of his haters) than that he is wicked/traitorous/a net negative on society. I also personally find these character traits less annoying than others frequently displayed on this forum: stupidity, narrow-mindedness, incuriousness, overly-literal-mindedness, humorlessness, inflexibility, tone-policing/purity-spiralling, victim mentality, status obsession, etc.

Of interest to everyone here I’m sure…

Appealing to Tradition, and That’s Bad.

Tradition bad.

Gimme tofu pizza with jelly bean topping.

The Mexican cartels today are powerful because TX dimwits luv their guns and gunshows.

Mexican cartels are powerful because American drug users give them lots of money, not because people can buy semi-auto’s at a gunshow or from budsgunshop.com.

o/t

Les révélations du Irish Mail sur le "business"
de l'hébergement de migrants scandalisent les Irlandais pic.twitter.com/NDxixYEUfp

— Fdesouche.com est une revue de presse (@F_Desouche) February 4, 2024

These past few days I’ve been wondering where the West’s nuke weapons will go. What plans do we have in the US in case of an invasion? We seriously need to think about this stuff.

As I understand it, and this of course is still shrouded in some degree of secrecy and misdirection, modern small size and weight nuclear warheads achieve those form factors using air and clever design for lensing with only two detonation locations vs. thirty two three layer lenses and detonators. Compare to the per Wikipedia Fat Man design that’s 10,300 pounds (4,670 kg), 128 inches [10 feet 8 inches] (3.3 m) long, and 60 inches [5 feet] (1.5 m) in diameter.

And the critical to this question part, tritium for boosting, but you might want to check if we’ve got any warheads in our inventory active or on the shelf, that are U-235 gun assembly devices which can be even smaller or at least narrower.

Tritium is the heaviest hydrogen isotope with two neutrons and one proton, and unlike the others is radioactive with a rather short half life of a bit over twelve years. So for your last question, just releasing the tritium gas would ruin a device for making a big boom, might fizzle and make a local mess but will not blast down a city or part of one and spread a lot of fallout. Otherwise the tritium has to regularly be renewed, and we the US do this for the U.K.’s SLBM warheads.

A straightforward way to breed tritium is to include amongst the fuel rods of a standard light water power reactor some filled with lithium-6, which per Wikipedia and common sense can also replace control rods. Just like after the primary stage of a fission device, neutrons hitting that will generate tritium (and for control, thus soaking up neutrons). After refueling the reactor ship those rods to the Savannah River Site in South Carolina and they isolate the tritium.

And right here we see friction in US society limiting that, at last count the usual suspects were limiting the breeding process to only one TVA power reactor. Among other things there’s a leftover wrong side of the Cold War conceit that “peaceful” and weapons complex reactors etc. should have a strong separation. And as Wikipedia puts it “During the times the reactor does this, it must be fuelled with ‘unobligated’ uranium, (uranium that is not legally or contractually restricted to peaceful-use-only, as most commercial reactor uranium is). Technology and equipment as well as the fuel used to produce it must be of US origin.”

One the Soviets didn’t buy into at all, see the Chernobyl RBMK design, primarily driven by their being better at making high pressure pipes than big reactor vessels as they later mastered, but that without a real containment system allows continuous swapping of fuel rods. To get weapons grade plutonium with a minimum of the two undesirable isotopes, which still can’t use gun assembly thus requiring implosion, you’ve got to harvest the rods fairly quickly, like on the order of thirty days, normal civilian “spent fuel” is worthless for bomb making.

So one bottom line of the above is that our inventory of working devices will shrink unless at least one more reactor is added to the tritium production process. See also a lot of biologists discard their Leftism on this subject, tritium is used for radio labeling of various biological substances. Like a lipid marker used by Pfizer to get an idea of the fate of BioNTech’s COVID vaccine’s (!!!) lipids (which is not the same thing as whole strands of mRNA getting wherever).

TL;DR: Unless we have some working U-235 gun assembly devices lying around, it only takes a matter of years before modern nuclear warheads stop working unless they’re maintained through high tech, high radioactivity methods.

OK, a DIE tidbit, at last count there was only one known negro in the US who had a nuclear science and engineering Ph.D….

The bad news is Team Brown will inevitably get the launch codes. The good news, as TWBT points out, is the nukes will be too decrepit by then.

Sometimes you need a scalpel and sometimes you need an axe.

Their only other child was killed, along with her two grandsons, when their plane crashed into the ocean off Santa Barbara.

From the NTSB report:

“During the final stages of a VOR approach to Runway 25 at Santa Barbara, the MU-2 was seen to make a left turn towards the south, away from the normal approach path. Seconds after this the aircraft was seen in a steep, high speed descent which continued until impact with the water at a point four miles east of the airport.

“The accident happened at night (23:14 hours Local time) but in VMC (when the MU-2 diverted away from the approach path it was flying below the clouds). At the time of the accident a Skywest Metro III was also making a VOR approach to Runway 25 and was apparently relatively close to the MU-2. However, there is no evidence that the MU-2’s turn was a collision-avoidance manoeuvre. The Metro had been cleared for the approach while the MU-2 had not.

“The NTSB determined the probable cause to be: The pilot’s failure to maintain directional control of the aircraft after becoming spatially disoriented. Factors related to the accident were: darkness, low overcast cloud conditions, the pilot’s decision to continue VFR flight into IMC which resulted in a near collision with another aircraft, his self-induced pressure and diversion of attention while coping with the situation that he had encountered.

“All four persons on board (pilot and three passengers) were killed.”

Self-induced pressure, aka helmet fire, aka panic, will get you every time.
“If you can keep your head when all about you /Are losing theirs….”
Stay calm. Stay alive.

I never even knew Harry Warren co-wrote “That’s Amore.” Never much liked Dean Martin anyway.

But I love Frank Sinatra, who does great renditions of several Warren songs, notably “There Will Never Be Another You” and “You’re Getting To Be A Habit…”

Thanks for the info.

“He claimed to be a member of Russia’s royal House of Romanov (sometimes spelled “Romanoff” in English). This was widely known to be untrue throughout his career, but press reports tended to treat the deception as a humorous matter.”

“When I spent a week in Italy in 1980, I only had pizza once, in Brindisi, and it was disappointing. I presume pizza in Italy is much tastier today.”

I had pizza at a fast food place in Rome in 2007. It might as well have been cafeteria pizza from my public elementary school in Illinois ca. 1990.

Yes, Sartori. The Swiss dominated a lot of cheese production in Wisconsin, but some Italian families made inroads.

There’s a very Marxist scene at the end of the Ferrari movie, when Italian-if-you-squint Penelope Cruz delivers a stagey self-righteous speech exhorting him to bribe the journalists. Actually I think this was more like Italianism with Marxist characteristics

Not just Madison or Milwaukee, either. There were Italians in the logging camps “up north.” The town of Genoa on the Mississippi south of La Crosse was also founded by Italians.

Olive Garden: the Denny’s of Italian Food.

Still, it’s probably better than Taco Bell, which serves up synthetic substances that no longer even have a notional relation to Mexican food,………..or even just food, for that matter.

https://www.theonion.com/taco-bells-five-ingredients-combined-in-totally-new-way-1819564909

https://www.theonion.com/taco-bells-new-green-menu-takes-no-ingredients-from-nat-1819594832

When I spent a week in Italy in 1980, I only had pizza once, in Brindisi, and it was disappointing.

Rutgers alumnus Alexi Lalas was the first American soccer player to play professionally in Serie A, the top-flight Italian league. When he got to Italy, he ordered a pepperoni pizza and was quite surprised to learn that it was topped with red bell peppers.

I have a couple of seventysomething neighbors with whom I converse regularly. The husband was a loyal Fox viewer for decades until Rupert gave Tucker the heave-ho. Now he’s an avowed Newsmax devotee.

I wonder how much of FOX’s ratings are down to men who tune in just to ogle the FOX News* babes like Sandra Smith, Emily Compagno, or Julie Banderas.

*The word “News” used here loosely; what FOX serves up is propaganda, which of course is what most “News” is.

Reminds me of the British suddenly caring desperately about calling the British Open “the Open” somewhere around 1995, and gaslighting people into believing they were completely wrong for using any other name. It was never called “the Open” even by the Brits in the 20s and 30s.

Even the Americans have bought into this nonsense, with ESPN referring to the tournament as The Open Championship on its ticker. In a similar vein, the corresponding tennis tournament is referred to as The Championships, even though the rest of the world colloquially refers to it as Wimbledon.

My favorite feature of Wimbledon is that they would use formal names on the scoreboard for the ladies for many years, with Chris Evert being referred to as Mrs. J.M. Lloyd. Billie Jean King used her married name professionally, but was still referred to as Mrs. L.W. King officially in the records. Her maiden name was Moffitt, with her brother Randy pitching for the Giants for most of the 70s.

Blessed are the cheesemakers.

And the purity of New Yawk wahtuh is overrated.

The video I just linked to above explains that the water is the secret to “New York pizza”, and Catskill reservoir water just happens to have the perfect mineral mix for good pizza dough. It’s the luck of the draw.

Will Stancil is a weenie, an obtuse bit of human flotsam…

Our downtown PA just played “We Gotta Get Out of This Place”. It was tempting to think that Stancil’s just jealous that Steve got to interview Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil* and he didn’t. On the other hand, he may just assume it’s an old black blues tune, not emanating from a Brill Building he never heard of.

*Revue is still misspelled in that article. Proofreading was well along its downslope in 2002.

I mean, what did Italy ever accomplish before Italians immigrated here? The Roman Empire, the Italian Renaissance, fellas like Galileo…

You left out the Mafia, the origin of your moral philosophy, and the only white people who ever embraced it.

Oh, and that related “the ends justify the means” guy.

One interesting historical footnote – Mussolini despised pasta. He thought it was an effeminate dish from the backwards South, and the Fascists tried to discourage Italians from eating it

Italian restaurants are for women whereas Indian restaurants are more for men, because eating a hot curry is manly but eating pasta is not.

I think you’ve got this asshole’s number.

What bullshit. “Croatians” have not lived in modern Croatia for thousands of years. Slavs began arriving only in the 7th-8th centuries and have slowly displaced the native Celt/Roman population ever since.

Nonsense. The native population wasn’t displaced. There’s a reason Croats don’t look like Poles or Russians. Some 40% of Croats’ ancestry is not Slavic. The continuity of Mediterranean lifestyle and tradition (especially basic stuff like making olive oil, something done everywhere where olives are found) in the area certainly goes back thousands of years, even as language and (partially) genetics have changed. Yes, the Venetian influence on the coast is strong, even in areas where there’s never been much of a permanent Italian population, but Croats (by then a Croatian-speaking population of mixed Slavic and Illyro-Roman descent) in those areas were already Mediterranean in culture and lifestyle before they came under Venenetian rule or influence.

Istria and Dalmatia still had large indigenous Italian populations right up until 1945.

Dalmatia certainly didn’t have a large Italian population (with the exception of the city of Zara or Zadar). In the 19th century it had had many Croatian-speaking upwardly mobile families of little to no Italian descent proclaiming themselves Italian for pragmatic reasons, but that trend quickly ran out of steam and those families went back to being the same old boring Croats they’d always been.

Istria – where many had actually switched to speaking Italian (more precisely, Venetian – not very indigenous of them) – was the one region that did, though Croats were still the majority in the part of Istria that’s now in Croatia (in Istria, Croats were largely rural, Italians largely urban). And more like “Italianized” than “indigenous Italian”. Some have some actual Italian ancestry (not indigenous to the territory of Croatia), others are Italianized families of purely Croat descent. The only indigenous Italians whose presence predates that of Croats are those in a few towns in Western Istria. Interestingly, even they are today genetically no different from Croats, due to the many centuries of intermarriage since the Slavs’ arrival.

Wouldn’t be caught dead in an Olive Garden in the northeast; there are great Italian restaurants everywhere.

Yes, but you have to know enough to separate the wheat from the chaff. The dirty secret that most people don’t care to admit is that the Olive Garden is perfectly serviceable Italian food, even in the northeast. On most nights, especially Friday and Saturday, there will be a line out the door, as Olive Garden is smart enough to limit their reach and not have one in every other town.

Thank you, Steve, for deconstructing the gastronomic deconstructionists!

Around this part of the country, there are so many Italian-American families and Italian family-owned restaurants that it gets a little tiring. One thing I have noticed about Italian Americans is that they are most comfortable with their own cuisine, whatever it is, and they are proud of it.

We had an Italian-Connecticut girl over for dinner with her boyfriend who worked with me. My wife cooked Cornish game hens. The girl could barely touch the little birds, and then she asked us if we had any olive oil and bread!

I ran out of editing time, and I wanted to add this:

The history of “Cornish” game hens is yet another funny one from right here in Connecticut.

From Wikipedia:

According to SFGate, Saturday Evening Post credited Alphonsine “Therese” and Jacques Makowsky of Connecticut with developing the small fowl in the mid-1950s. The couple crossbred Cornish game cocks with other varieties of chicken and game bird, including the White Plymouth Rock hen and the Malayan fighting cock, to produce a succulent bird suitable for a single serving.

The pianist and comedian Victor Borge was an early investor in and promoter of the concept, leveraging his personal popularity to transform the dish from an exotic menu item into a common household meal.

OT — It is happening again.

https://theaircurrent.com/feed/dispatches/united-finds-loose-bolts-on-plug-doors-during-737-max-9-inspections/

I once trekked down into the wonderful shithole that is Naples to sample “authentic Neapolitan pizza” — and…meh.

Once? Well, meh yourself.

Before covid hit, I made it a habit to be in Rome, for Natale, & Naples, for Capodanno through Epifania.

Pizza in Roma? Wouldn’t cross the street for it.

Pizza in Napoli? Now we’re talking. The thing is, despite all the attempts at regulation & standardization, it’s extremely variable. You just have to look around for the right maestro at the right ristorante.

To separate the sheep from the goats, order up a Margherita (the basic) & a Capricciosa (the crazy) and compare and contrast.

I thought tiramisu was Japanese. I still do, a bit

I got rid of MacArthur Park when a naked man covered in tattoos tried to wake me from sleeping under a tree, by trying to jam a cigar into my mouth.

Was there a cake laying out in the rain?

The best pizza and bagels in the New York city area are in New Jersey.

Who needs immigrants when you had Marco Polo?

It’s amusing how leftists will go on and on about 40-year-old “traditions” with something like, say, rap music, like they’re talking about the stone tablets taken directly from the Ark of the Covenant. But a 70-year-old tradition they don’t like is “fabricated” and presents a “mythic version of the past that never existed.”

What can I say other than: it’s overrated. And you’re a sucker for not seeing that.

even though the rest of the world colloquially refers to it as Wimbledon.

With the exception of a particularly annoying sub-set of dumb americans (but I repeat myself..) who refer to it as Wimbleton.

I got rid of MacArthur Park when a naked man covered in tattoos tried to wake me from sleeping under a tree, by trying to jam a cigar into my mouth

Be thankful it was just a cigar.

People under 30 (or whatever) don’t really watch broadcast TV at all anymore as far as I can ascertain. Which means no news output. I’m not sure where they get their ‘news’ from exactly since they stick to the propaganda (((slop))) from Netflix, Amazon and so on.

… and just his mouth

Ah yes, us Brits who represent a completely monolithic entity, a hive mind. We all agree about everything!

The pedantry goes back way further than 1995. Said he, pedantically.

A general point here is that all modern cuisine is vastly different than what was formerly eaten by average people.

Of course some staples are the same. Most fruit and veggies, though now much bigger and usually better. Rice, come grains, though even those are modern and better now.

People in the past ‘lived locally” and only ate what was cheap and available. That meant not very fresh other than in season. Little protein or variety. Cooked over fire or primitive stoves,or eaten mostly raw. Whatever could be grown and delivered by horse/ox wagons, or toted by laborers or family farmers and farm hands.

Like mutton (grown sheep) or goat? Few choose that now. Meals were monotonously the same every day, every meal. So the local specialty food for religious festivals at harvest time became the popular local dishes, eaten once or twice a year. No refrigeration so it was dried or otherwise spoiled quickly. Canning is a 19th century technology.

Things that would not spoil over a long winter in cold storage, or in summer absent refrigeration, were usually not very good.

Of course most people were shorter smaller. Few were fat. Many were chronically sick diseased. Some would starve even if families tried to nourish them.

Few can find Scandinavian restaurants and if so, few patronize them. Harsh cold climates not good for food variety. Likewise, “African” food isn’t much found. Though what there is can vary widely. Flavors, like southern Asian cuisine. heavy on very hot peppers to disguise spoilage or monotonous starchy base.

Re-enactors sometimes do “authentic” historical medieval meals or ancient Roman stuff. Even when carefully prepared and updated, mostly awful. Fresh fish or young chicken, veal are okay but were rarely eaten by the ancients or middle Agers other than nobles.

So there is a lot of food snobbery and ignorant claims about “authentic” cuisine. Fresh and clean yes, but those were rare before modern times.

Read some Mark Twain or any real historical account of the traveler’s meals. AS lot of artificial nostalgia for “good old days” that never were. Hike in the woods for a couple of weeks even now and see how you fare. Without freeze dried, etc. it’s tough going.

The ways things are going, our descendants will be lucky to eat real meat…

You can’t have sourdough without San Francisco fog. Period.

Now flavored with that earthy street excrement umami under tone and ever-so-subtle fentanyl pungency.

That humidity really packs a wallop…’

Green Bay is the oldest city in the state, by a long shot, and one of the oldest in the country, appearing early in this video:

Well, that was clumsy. This tells you which is the oldest city in your state. (Unless you’re in Australia or India.) And these, by the same Portogee Lusitanian gentleman, will tell you the oldest company in your state or, if you’re lurking from abroad, the oldest in your country.

Steve, perhaps you miss the point.

If I’m not mistaken, the historian isn’t saying that innovation is bad.

He’s saying that using distortions of history as a weapon (such as using made-up history as a pretext to prevent pork-free items from being on a menu) is bad.

Never bothered to pay attention to Charlie Kirk.
Read a bit of Mencius Goldbug/Curtis Yarvin some years ago but thought the discourse was too “inside baseball” and I was on the outside.

But in this interview,

https://omny.fm/shows/the-charlie-kirk-show/the-real-way-to-dismantle-the-deep-state-with-curt

Yarvin sounds like a normal, unpretentious human being.
But more importantly, Yarvin and Kirk agree on a genuine understanding of, and the importance of, Machiavelli.

One imagines Yarvin appreciates Machiavelli too much to both squashing like the insects they are the two psychologists who “borrowed a few phrases from The Prince” and included Machiavelli as one of the points of the “dark triad.”
Somebody should.

What Canadians Paulhus and Williams did to Machiavelli is worse than stuffing tortelinni with Canadian bacon.

Totally off topic Mr. Sailer, but I thought you might get a chuckle from John Podhoretz’s X post. He called Thomas Massie an antisemitic “filth” for opposing the Israel aid package pending in Congress.

Benjamin Franklin agrees with you.

“And for one I confess that if I could find in any Italian Travels a Receipt for making Parmesan Cheese, it would give me more Satisfaction than a Transcript of any Inscription from any Stone whatever.” (Benjamin Franklin to John Bartram, 1769.)

I was born in Italy, and was always under the impression that we were sort of considered “honorary Whites”. I have old documents from relatives who emigrated to the US as far back as a century ago and the US immigration documents always listed us as White. Those documents also used to have a category for complexion and even my blue-eyed father had his complexion described as dark.

Yes, everyone knows that the kinds of foods available to any given people have varied over time.

The Italians got pasta from the Chinese, but they made it their own. Tortellini isn’t the same as Ramen. And what the Italians did with it was uniquely their own. They only got tomatoes in, what, the 18th century probably, maybe the 19th. Potatoes only started to be eaten in Europe in the 18th century. But various european cultures have done a lot with it.

But cheese is a largely European invention, which almost no other culture has adopted. Certainly nobody has the variety of cheeses that Europe has.

It was the Portugese who introduced deep-fried fish and vegetables to Japan, but the Japanese made it their own. Tempura isn’t Portugese. It’s Japanese.

Just because a tradition is not ancient doesn’t mean that it is not a tradition. What these cultural deconstructors are trying to do is to deny that Europe has anything of it’s own. They are trying to erase European culture.

The ways things are going, our descendants will be lucky to eat real meat…

The people who are pushing the “you vill eat ze bugs” agenda are also pushing the “you have no real history” agenda. It’s all part of the same program.

Following cultural homologies, Italians are not “actually” Romans from a later period. They are new people with different temperament, proclivities, talents & weaknesses. I would say that Chinese are doubtless the same people as historical Chinese we read about in books; Persians are definitely not the same as Zoroastrian Persians of Cyrus & the Empire; Jews are somewhere in between, but I think they’re, give or take, rightful heirs to post-Biblical Hebrews of the 2th C AD; Greeks are a mystery, but they are & are not heirs to Byzantine Greeks, and to a much lesser extent of classical Greeks of Plato & Alexander. In the Greeks case, as far as we can see, racialists are wrong because contemporary Greeks are genetically almost the same as the ancient ones; just, their cultural physiognomy is greatly altered.

Germans are not “real” descendants of pagan Teutons, but they are heirs of Carolus Magnus, arrested development taken into account; French & English are relatively new products, while Spaniards are not quite a people (Castillans, Catalonians,..).

I think the same could be said of American restaurant food and drink in general. And that’s not primarily because of an influx of immigrants. Americans’ palates just got more sophisticated. If I even get a hamburger in a bar these days that isn’t excellent, I feel cheated. I guess it must be because of a rise in affluence in certain groups, and the plebs desire to emulate those groups. Or something.
Whatever the case, from the-chef-as-rockstar to micro-distilled vodkas, American dining has come a long way since the 70’s.

Remember that Dr. K piano player incident in the UK? It’s spread through the world.

What restaurant food does taste like traditional food eaten at home? KFC in no way compares to chicken that is soaked overnight in buttermilk brine and fried in a cast-iron skillet with a bit of bacon fat added for taste, and paired with skillet fried squash or okra, green beans pressure cooked with a slice of pork belly (I prefer onions and garlic), creamed corn, okra gumbo, steamed cabbage with garlic and onions, new potatoes in a light cream sauce, or any sort of greens? Creamy deviled-eggs with a but of horseradish on the side, or a cold vinegar cucumber salad are also common. And biscuits that are more like scones than hockey pucks, but also very airy and fluffy with a taste of buttermilk.

None of that is canceled out by modernity, though it doesn’t look or taste much like the deep-fried, freeze-dried, and canned canned versions served in most restaurants. Even industrial pork and chicken changes the taste of many foods.

Thanks, that’s a lot to digest. And as a liberal arts guy, my microbiome may not be up to the task. I remember being at underground bunkers and seeing those maps and adjustable charts for predicting destruction and fallout… Very primitive comms.

And right here we see friction in US society limiting that, at last count the usual suspects were limiting the breeding process to only one TVA power reactor. Among other things there’s a leftover wrong side of the Cold War conceit that “peaceful” and weapons complex reactors etc. should have a strong separation. And as Wikipedia puts it “During the times the reactor does this, it must be fuelled with ‘unobligated’ uranium, (uranium that is not legally or contractually restricted to peaceful-use-only, as most commercial reactor uranium is). Technology and equipment as well as the fuel used to produce it must be of US origin.”

BTW, I’m consoled by the fact that so many of the folks working at Fed nuclear facilities are “foreign.”

Color me sentimental for some of the Cold War conceits 🙂 We’ve gone from extreme security to extreme laxity (laxness?), if not complete abandonment of standards. Who was that Brinton fellow they hired?

One fun memory from the Cold War days is the Cheliabinsk event, documented by the brothers Medvedev. Early Soviet wartime and post-war nuclear work gone awry. The bros M. used published Soviet scientific papers to reconstruct what happened. That was a fascinating book back in the early ’80s, because it demonstrated how using publicly available news and studies from a “closed” society could be used to piece together what was really happening. That was the lesson. Whether or not the results were to believed was another matter 🙂

In many instances this is true, but here are three elements that coexist uneasily: genes (metaphorically), culture & waves of migrations. When Croats arrived in the 7th C they were already a diverse bunch, as were Romance language speakers. There was a friction among them, and culturally it was most visible in the script. Croats refused to use the official language of the Church, Latin, and instead spoke Croatian Slavic written in Glagolitic script. I’ll post a humorous English text in Croatian Glagolitic, and it is literally a translation of “English produced empirical sciences, empire, popular music and bizarre orthography”.

This was a type of script used by Catholic priests, at least sporadically, until the 19th C in Istria.

As far as Croatian and Romance integration went, it was a complex process; most Romance speakers were assimilated by the 14th C, but Venice tried to revive their “older cousins” (with some success); also, many Croats studied in Italy in various city-states. It was basically a symbiosis, but what really altered the state of affairs were numerous Croatian migrations from the hinterland with evidently stronger & taller people & leading a more patriarchal, rustic way of life that didn’t find nascent Italian culture too attractive; also, some newly arrived Italians from Italy went native (along with Germans & some other Europeans) romanticizing & inventing some mythic Tolkienesque Croatian past (Goths, Sarmatians, Scythians,..) from times immemorial- even many educated people believed from the 15th to the early 19th C in those stories.

The real split came in the 2nd half of the 19th C & the rest is history.

LOL I have wasted a lot of time yakking about golf on the internet, and in every case where I’ve argued that “Open Championship” is fake retconned history I have been mercilessly attacked as a “blinkered American” or some other canned “insult” the Brits pass down from generation to generation, like a moth-eaten rug. They will argue with you about this for days. Their venom tells me I’ve hit a nerve, and am definitely correct.

By the way, American pizza in most of the country is better today than it was in the 1970s.

That’s true. I had pizza the other day is a small-town restaurant that looks like Boss Hogg’s retreat that was better than the good pizzas that I ate in restaurants on Arthur Ave in the Bronx. It’s just not that hard to do. The also make good poutine, po’ boys, Vietnamese bar-b-que, prime rib and burgers.
No need for immigrants. The owners and staff are all white locals.

Marxism reduced to scraping the bottom of the barrel of relevance.

But even what he says doesn’t make sense. Foods that were popular in one part of the country naturally wouldn’t spread around the country in the old days. That they have spread recently doesn’t make them any less legitimate.

Yeah I can see the casuistry he’s employing – Italian cuisine is quite regional, and many things didn’t become “Italian” in the sense of migrating from Bologna to Naples until the advent of mass culture and cheap travel. In other respects, dishes which were formerly a product of extreme poverty got serial improvements when richer and formerly more expensive ingredients became available. None of this means that Italy’s food culture is fraudulent, as this man claims.

If he was really brave, Grandi would write that the first slave in the Americas in 1619 did not in fact shake Lawry’s Seasoned Salt into a roiling pot as many believe, but that Lawry’s was an invention of the industrial food producer McCormic Company in the postwar era.

But cheese is a largely European invention, which almost no other culture has adopted. Certainly nobody has the variety of cheeses that Europe has.

Probably because dairy was big. Lots of breeds of dairy cattle from Europe.

Why? Likely because of a genetic mutation that got big in Europe: lactase persistence. The ability to digest milk as adults.

In most of the world only babies can digest milk.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactase_persistence

Arthur Avenue, okay. Just like Little Italy, lots of Albanian’Italians.’

Wyndham Clark. Pebble Beach. 60.

We’ve gotten into the habit of making our own when we want a pizza. Restaurants and pizzerias around here will sell you a lump of their dough to take home and play with, and it’s fun.

We’ve never been able to quite duplicate the dough they make. It’s some kind of magic.

We have a pizza stone, and I’ve discovered that I can get the covered grill outside a lot hotter than the oven in the kitchen, and that’s good for pizza. We like what we make now better, usually, and it’s fun because it’s always a little different.

In the campus cafeteria where I worked as a college student, I made 96 pizzas every other Thursday night.

Exactly, because for him and other U.S. pros, “the Open” meant the U.S. Open as it should. That caused the British great agita–how dare they call their national championship what we (informally) call ours? So the plan was to formalize what used to be an informal name, and insist that others obey this new rule. But U.S. pros never will, and neither will pros from South Africa or even Ireland. It will always be “the British,” as in, “I’m going to play the British in July, I already have a suitcase filled with Cottonelle, I hate the sandpaper they have there.”

Indian restaurants are more for men, because eating a hot curry is manly

Only if so hot it causes rivers of snot to run down one’s muzzle and neck, to the visible horror of your classy date at your own depraved indifference.

“Croatia is arguably a country with no indigenous cusine. The coastal food is clearly Italian, inland traditions are mostly Hungarian and German based.”

I’m guessing a fair number of Hungarian or Austrian “peasant” or country dishes are probably more precisely wholly or partly Croatian or Serbian dishes (or in the case of Hungary, maybe Slovakian or Romanian), just like a fair number of Russian peasant dishes might well be more correctly regarded as Ukrainian. I suspect that where the dish is first marketed or entered into a recipe book is often what determines the so-called “origin” of a dish.

That being said, peasants most everywhere don’t tend to have elaborate “cuisines” as such. When I visited the Dalmatian coast, there was lots of grilled fish (and other grilled seafood) on the menu — bizarre varieties of fish I did not recognize. It was usally served simply, maybe with a side of herb-sprinkled boiled rice or potatoes. I don’t recall a lot of pasta or distinctly Italian dishes in the smaller restaurants where I ate, as opposed to bigger hotel restaurants, though there was usually some kind of risotto available. Lots of figs, too, now that I think of it and local varieties of wine unique to the region. I don’t know who gets to claim any of that as “ours” since it was probably identical to (or a minor variation of) what people all along the Mediterranean were eating for many millennia. Oddly enough, what I liked best about eating there was the local chicken soup and the bread — no deli or restaurant I’ve come across elsewhere quite matched up. The local seasoning, which I eventually tracked down in several supermarkets with an “ethnic” aisle, turned out to be heavily fortified with MSG, so maybe that was what did it for me.

Arguably any European rice dish (including the above-mentioned risotto) is Spanish, since rice was first introduced into that part of the world by Andalusian Arabs, but I doubt the Italians would agree.

“Using Twitter is not good for JPod’s soul. ”

Nothing to do with soul, just SOP for the tribals.

I just didn’t like the sound of a Marxist historian.

But I am prepared to admit that I don’t know much Italian food: never been there. Not much of a food connoisseur in general so I’ll grant your point.

BTW, I’ve even made smoked pizza outside on the grill. (I often put wood chips — hickory, mesquite and such — under the grate to grill smoky things.) I’ve never had a smoked pizza anywhere else. It’s good.

Supposedly, Dino still owed several hundred thousand (mostly interest) to guys who ran illegal poker games around Steubenville when he passed. Stories I heard were he needed to sneak in to see his family; also he played certain dumpier bars at the height of his singing career because the owner had kept his knees from being broken by locals he owed money to.

Ainsley Earhardt.

She’s dating Sean Hannity.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11950689/Intimate-photos-confirm-Sean-Hannity-Ainsley-Earhardts-years-long-secret-relationship.html

They started out as ‘best friends’ – two of the highest profile hosts on Fox News – but now, DailyMail.com can reveal that friendship has bloomed into a committed relationship so strong they’ve blended their lives and their families.

Seen in these exclusive images obtained by DailyMail.com, Sean Hannity, 61, and Ainsley Earhardt, 49, have now settled into domestic bliss, with the couple stepping out and traveling together as a family unit, three years after setting off dating rumors.

The two have always remained tight-lipped about their romance that has been growing day-by-day amid years of speculation, but now these pictures are doing the talking.

Arm-in-arm over breakfast at a Waffle House in South Carolina in January, or cozying up over corn in the cob at an Oyster festival on Long Island last Fall, these never-before-seen photos give a glimpse of just how undeniable their bond has become.

I don’t think of panettone as the be all and end all of Italian food.

I’m totally opposed to open borders/illegal immigration, but I also love the fact that there’s so many quality taquerias in my hometown, Chicago. More Mexicans won’t improve the taco/burrito situation here.

the origin of your moral philosophy, and the only white people who ever embraced it.

Are you saying the ADL and its donors aren’t White?

Anyway, loyalty – giving the most severe punishment for treason – goes back to the beginning of human history. Human beings are a social species.

That’s true even for Whites . But you’ve been blinded by hatred for White people for at least 20 years.

Steve:

1. You sound like a liberal, really with the sneering “And that’s bad because” remarks. It doesn’t have to be Holocaust bad. It’s interesting. It’s noticing. It’s hypocrisy. It’s not the end of the world…and the guy joked about Salman Rushdie thing. But why the heck can’t he point out the difference between true history and invented. That’s INTERESTING.

2. And there is a little bit of a financial subtext here. EU is rife with product setasides and names that can’t be used outside of region. So, an invented tradition is not really a deep cultural artifact. And pointing it out puts some $$ at risk if they lose the special name monopoly.

3. FWIW, the post WW2 change really resonated with me as I had a 1940-ish born mother who experienced hunger and the like. When they went on school vacation, they would get the thrown out sandwiches of American tourists and grin and eat them. Even in the 1970s, when I visited, I noticed the dramatic differences in casual consumer wealth versus the US. Now…it’s all like the US. Too much in some ways (miss the walking to church a mile up a hile, literally). Heck, it’s all like California. Maybe you don’t know any different, you late boomer, Cali kid, only child. But at least realize that there are other things than you and your experience.

4. Go to the library and pull out and read Don Camillo (Little World and Comrade Don Camillo are probably the best volumes). In addition to the light anti-communism, there is also something of the change in modernity, going on, that is a theme. Get off the Internet and get off your sneering California quiz kid attitude and go read something and experience something.