ASmith1946 extrapolated from data available...


>
> We're back to this discussion -- which I found useful-- so let me try
> again. Are there commonalities among regional Italian foods? If the
> answer is yes, what are they? Does this include dishes with tomatoes
> as ingredients?
>
> If the answer is no, then there doesn't seem to be an "Italian
> cuisine," only local cusines-- or are there just individual
> preferences?
>

My first trip to Italy, 1962 or so, had fortunately been preceded by 6
months in Brooklyn and Manhattan, Brooklyn certainly a locale where one
could safely classify the tomato as king. I know cannoli and clams
Oregenata (sp?)have no tomatoes, but beyond that, Brooklyn, Queens and the
great tomato growing plains of Long Island, a veritable insular Campagna,
are strongly pomidoculturalized.

For serving naval personnel, Italy was largely Southern, and for my ship to
venture North to Livorno or Genoa was as if we were visiting a new land,
after the Vesuvian Bay, Palermo, Taranto - a less tomato-ee cuisine,
Augusta Bay, Catania, Bari and the like including hops to Sigonella. On my
salary at the time, an Enswine's $222 + $47.88 less taxes and messbill
monthly, I and my kind dined modestly, and modest restaurant fare in
Southern Italy was pretty firmly tomato-based....although I did learn to
make a number of sauces, quick and slow, which has seved me well in life,
although trying to convey to my spouse and chirren the differences between
"Tomato Gravy", arrabiata, ameritrice', marinara, puttanesca, etc. can be a
daunting task, much less explaining that even "Cream of Tomato" must have
been an Italian thing invented by some butter gorged Bolognese farting
around with the ragu. Opportunities to eat in Italian homes (other than
the very hospitable poor and modest middle class to whom one brought gifts
in the form of foodstuffs cheap and available to me, expensive and hard
to find for them) in the South were few, although the Navy Officers Club in
Taranto featured a menu that was clearly "Northern", but then the officers
in the Italian navy at the time seemed overwhelmingly Northern in fact or
in pretense.

I'll forward the notion that Italian cuisine can be separated into two
"styles" on some mushy Southwest/Northeast hazy line of demarcation, but
that there are a number of such strongly identifiable regional and even
community cuisines which have an identity of their own...Bologna and
Florence qualify, Livorno's really a littoral region, and some would claim
that Rome even possesses neighborhood cuisines. Clearly, the Northeast
stands either alone or as a Transmontane cuisine. Then there's Venice.....

But even that's not sufficient, for except in small towns (and not always
there), much of Italian restaurant cuisine has become homogenized to fit
the owners' or the surroundings' profile of projected customers, too often
the sort of generic Italoturistico, "Continental, or "Business traveler".

TMO