UPDATE: Just to clarify: I certainly realize that Italians eat packaged foods and other “porcheria” like anyone else and that Italian companies make (in my opinion) junk (like Barilla sauce, which we also have here) My point is this: Regardless of what you name it or who makes it or where you may have learned it (Olive Garden) it doesn’t make it authentic. Barilla is an Italian company in every way…. but jarring ready to eat pasta sauce is not authentic Italian (profitable maybe but not authentic) Olive Garden may send it’s chefs to Tuscany to learn the secrets of Italian cooking but one glance at their menu and there’s nothing authentic about it. Bertolli’s sauce in a microwavable bag…. well, as Maria from Philly would say, “WTF is that??” 
So to any company who emails me or any other blogs to ask us to promote your products, I say this: Take a look around, what do we post about? How are we branding ourselves?
Original post:
For the second time this year, I’ve received an email from a company asking me if I would mention their product on Italyville and in exchange they would send me some of their product for free. I don’t have a problem with mentioning products or services that I use or am interested in or products that are authentically Italian…. but they have to fit in with brand Italyville.
So let me just list a few things that authentic Italians would NEVER DO.
- We don’t buy ready to serve jarred tomato sauce regardless if it’s “Old World Style” or “the way Mama used to make” or “Nonna’s secret recipe” …. We’ve all thought of starting our own brand maybe but WE DON’T BUY IT.
- We don’t understand how in the world ANYONE could think that a sauce like Prego or Ragu is good or how in the world anyone would eat it. Seriously.
- Some of us may use microwaves to heat up leftovers or for popcorn but never as a primary cooking appliance. (My mother uses hers to store bread)
- We don’t buy or eat frozen dinners. We plan life meal to meal… so why would we waste one on a frozen entree?
- We’ve changed many of our friends’ habits and lives by having them over for dinner. I guess they just didn’t know what food was supposed to taste like ????
- We often describe pre-packaged products as schifo or porcheria.
Traditional? Who’s tradition are they talking about?In addition, I would like to add a few Italyville “Brand Italy” facts:
- Just because your company or brand was originally Italian, started by an Italian, has an Italian name and makes a product that you think is Italian…. doesn’t make it Italian.
- Chances are, if you’ve been bought by Unilever, CSC, Kraft, General Mills, etc….. you’ve probably lost some Italianess.
Here are a few examples of “sorry but your brand trying to be Italian isn’t working”
- Burger King’s Italian Chicken Parm Sandwich (really? stick to burgers BK)
- as mentioned above, Prego and Ragu (enough said)
- Bertolli’s microwavable sauce in a bag…. (what the? a double negative doesn’t make a positive in this case and believe me, there are no real Italian chefs getting upset at any of Bertolli’s products ANYWHERE.)
- Olive Garden (first of all, I don’t believe there is a cooking school in Tuscany that their employees go to…. and if there is, who’s running it? not a real Italian chef!!)
Those are just a few, I would love to hear about your favorite “Trying to be Italian” brands.
You tell’em Joe! To be fair though, it is painfully true that a large percentage of people wouldn’t know what real italian food is unless they’ve spent some time here and went beyond the spaghetti mentality. They just can’t, and I’ll grant them that. What irks my mind are places that serve “italian” food but at portions that are so HUGE you could feed two dogs with the leftovers. What’s with all the extra cheese, sauce and whatnot? You know they don’t do it like that over here…
The embarrassing thing is the stuff that italian food blogs are saying about american re-makes on italian classics. I wouldn’t wanna flame anybody, but man, it kinda stings!
I agree Rowena… the true Italian restaurants here are few and in between. There is a BIG difference between Italian restaurants and Italian-American restaurants. If your primo is HUGE, there’s no room for secondi…. and we don’t want that!
I wondered if the “Culinary Institute” was real so I looked it up. There actually is a “school” in Tuscany that Olive Garden chefs go to called Riserva Di Fizzano. It appears to be a restaurant that is Italian owned that gets rented out by Olive Garden in the winter. Here is the link: http://www.riservadifizzano.com/farm_holidays_vacations_Chianti/Restaurant.aspx
Now tell us what you really think…
I particularly loved your comments about the microwavable sauce in a bag – doesn’t sound very appetising, does it?
Ha! Funny stuff Joe.
I couldn’t have said it better myself. Being from Philadelphia, we have a lot of Italians from South Philly and boy do they think they are “real” Italians! It drives me nuts they call sauce gravy, and thing all pasta is macaroni and the all time meal is speghetti and meatballs! Little do these people know is that you will not find speghetti and meatballs on a menu in Italy anywhere!!! They have no clue what real Italian food is. Or how about fettucini alfredo, and Olive Garden’s favorit “stuffed chicken limone” WTF is that????? GROSS! You couldn’t pay me enough to eat at those places!
Those “Italian” food products you just simply have to ignore. Living in Texas, it is sometimes pronounced “Eye-Talian”. Yes, makes my head explode. But I have no problem with Italian-American cuisine in moderation. My whole family is from Philly and my father’s mother used to spend all day in a kitchen the size of a broom closet cooking the best sauce (yes, we call it gravy) ever. The woman would get up at 6:00 AM to start it! My father’s side is from the Abruzzo region so there was a lot of mainland influences in our Italian-American dishes. Back in the day my ancestors butchered their own meat in the basement and rolled their own pasta. Sadly, my mother’s side of the family (Irish) has yet to accept the lameness of Ragu and microwave ovens. At least she stays away from Olive Garden and Macaroni Grill.
Ciao
Hey, Joe, you are so right! I don’t even own a microwave and I store my plastic containers in the dishwasher. Sauce in a jar? Unless Mamma canned it, that’s a sacrilege.
You might want to take a stroll through a supermarket in any big city in Italy- lots of the atrocities you mentioned (frozen food, canned sauces) are actually used by many modern Italians in Italy nowadays! There’s a whole line of pre-prepared frozen foods here called “That’s Amore” and “Quattro Salti in Padella” and I can assure you that if you go to the grocery store you’ll see plenty of real Italians (not the old school kind) buying them. Same is true for those sauces… Barilla in Italy makes lots of canned sauces that seem to be a hit here.
I would personally never buy or eat them… BUT modern Italians are very different from the small-town, old world ones. Sad but true!
You tell ‘em Joey kid!
Joe,
gran blog, buoni articoli, gran blogger (tu), grande idea – Italyville.
Complimenti.
Ti linko.
(Any English speaker wanting to understand all what I wrote? Come to my blog and start or refine your Italian, of course for free…)
Okay, I confess. I eat a jar sauce from Gia Russa but only the flavor with artichokes. It ain’t bad. But, it is made in Ialy. The rest? Yech!, even those “artisan” sauces. Doesn’t anyone ever taste those things. As far as the pasta, sometimes I used to get a deal at Long’s Drugstore for a package of spaghetti, imported from Italy, 2/$1 but I think those days are over.
I think your next rant should be about American-made biscotti. Now, there is another insult to my taste buds.
Oops, and I forgot to say that when we made homemade ravioli with the ex’s nonna, we called the sauce gravy, too. Later, his aunt called sauce, sugo but that had slow cooked meat in it. Both delice!
Amen my friend… amen…
thanks for all the comments! I updated the post with a bit more clarification on the point I wanted to make.
LOL!!! So true!
I was going to add something along the lines of what Lisa said; there are *tons* of prepared sauces and meals here in Italy and they seem to sell just fine. Many Italians are just like the rest of the world with microwaves and picking up a pizza to bring home instead of cooking. It’s not the Old World here anymore!
Also, my Italian-American grandmother was of the maccheroni and gravy school, and I used to tease her about it all the time. Now I just wish she were here, and I’d happily call it whatever she likes.
I’ve always believed, like you Joe, that “gravy” came from the logic of meat in the ragù. Since being here, though, my personal take has changed. In my part of Calabria, sauce (with or without meat) is often colloquially called “brodo,” which, in standard Italian, is actually broth. But here it’s used as a catch-all for anything in any way liquidy that goes on pasta. “Vuoi più brodo?” at my table means “Do you want more sauce?” and it can be anything from a seafood dish to a traditional ragù. Interestingly, it is also the word my OH uses whenever I make American-style gravy from chicken, turkey, etc.
Sooooo, my thinking is that in the New World, some Italian-Americans (from the south) may have adopted that catch-all word, brodo, for their sauce as well, and then only used one translation in English to express it: “gravy.”
Just a theory, but I was really taken aback when my OH called (American) gravy “brodo.” It was like a light bulb went off in my head
Way to go Joe! I’m with you on all of this. You don’t have to be Italian to understand it you just need to love food.
This post and the comments made me LOL, I love a good debate, don’t you?:)Amanda
I still can’t eat sauce from a jar (unless of course it is homemade and just stored in jars). I was very lucky that my mom made us homemade sauce every week – Wednesday, Prince Spaghetti day. I make my own sauce now. I do admit that I tried the jarred variety but it just ain’t as good. Now when it comes to other packaged products, yes, I buy them to save time but homemade sauce is sacred.
I’m sorry I missed this when it was new. Olive Garden is a bugaboo of mine. I work sometimes as a personal chef to travelers and once I was asked for a menu that was straight out of Olive Garden. I have since recovered and I at the time asked them to please choose something Italian instead.
The bad news is that there are bottles, cans, fridged and frozen instant food here, too. At least the bags of frozen primi have no preservatives.
The restaurant thing in the US at least is troublesome. If you serve people Italian sized servings, they accuse you of cheating them. I can’t figure on a 4-5 ounce meat serving because US and UK clients find that laughable. I bend over backward to provide way too much pasta/risotto, etc., because the expectation is Falstaffian. Most feel underserved if they are not moaning afterward and looking at piles of leftovers. There have been times when I have feared clients were doing themselves harm.
I agree about not eating sauce from a jar…Corn syrup/oil? Soybean oil? Hell, I don’t even put sugar in my ‘gravy’ (my father is from Mulberry St in NYC’s Little Italy and his parents were from Cracco, in the ankle of Italy)…I would probably starve to death before I ate sauce from a jar…The only possible time I might is if it only used olive oil and added no sugar or corn syrup…All that being said, lately there is something that is REALLY aggravating me to no end: It’s bad enough people only say Chicken (or veal) PARM now, it’s also being called Chicken Parmesan and not Parmagiana!!! If you’re making a (supposed) eyetalian dish, why would you use the french variation of the word??? Sigh…
Joe, I think you’ve actually hit something that I have inherited culturally from both my Italian and English/Irish families — but which I find sorely lacking on a lot of vegan blogs.
Many vegans are incredibly reliant on packaged food — it’s pretty sad and I am constantly disgusted and dismayed at the “What’s in Your Refrigerator” feature in the back of Veg News… I guess I need to find more Italian vegan bloggers to read…