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Comment by helmholtz | Hacker News Reader

I'm Indian, and some of the most amusing conversations I've had about food have been with Italians.

An Italian professor was insistent that I stand up and defend the need for Indian food to use a million spices. He was proud of the fact that delicious Italian food could be whipped up using just three ingredients. I was in full agreement with him, that Italian food was wonderful, and that it was commendable how far they could take simple ingredients. But he was almost demanding (diplomatically of course) that I take the other side and argue that one needed a million spices to make good food.

An Italian friend was aghast that I would suggest putting Onion and Garlic in the same meal. It was strictly either/or for him.

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Re>> aghast that I would suggest putting Onion and Garlic in the same meal. It was strictly either/or for him.

American here. This is quite surprising to me - that wouldn't have occurred to me. Pan searing garlic and onion (before adding additional ingredients) is the "omg, what are you cooking?!, it smells _great_!!" starter kit in my home - when it's literally just those two things.

If you want to be snobbishly criticised about arbitrary food choices by strangers Italy is the place.

I've worked for a client in Italy, a short guy trying to aggressively assert superiority because of how he drinks coffee is a uniquely Italian experience. Oh and the hands and feet mime English is equally entertaining.

> An Italian friend was aghast that I would suggest putting Onion and Garlic in the same meal. It was strictly either/or for him.

That's a new one for me. No mixing of the two? Surely the very basis of a good tomato sauce is sweated onions and garlic? Ditto for risotto..?

Not knowing where you are from, I'd take a guess at American as there is a sharp divide in garlic use between Italian and Italian-American cusine.

Italian food typically has a lot less garlic in it and if you had it in any of the classic dishes like ragù alla bolognese or risotto alla milanese it would be surprising. Dishes like spaghetti alla puttanesca or aglio e olio are classic examples where it is used.

Marinara sauce of course has garlic as a key ingredient but this is normally thought of as a Italian-American dish and not something you'd typically find in Italy. Likewise if you had a ragu or risotto in the US you'd probably be surprised if there wasn't garlic in it. And let us not forget that other American invention of garlic bread.

One thing I learned recently was that the typical types of garlic available in the US and Italy are different - softneck and hardneck respectively. Hardneck is a _lot_ more flavourful than softneck which I believe goes a long way to explaining why it's used so much more frequently in the US (and in seemingly incredible quantities).

There's a very good YouTube channel [0] about Italian cooking (In Italian, usually with English subtitles available) where on one episode of chef's reacting to other videos of "Italian cooking" they had a laugh about this stereotype of Italians eating lots of garlic.

[0] https://youtube.com/user/italiasquisita

In my region (Piemonte) we certainly do. One of the most distinctive dishes is bagna cauda, which is a dip sauce made mainly of anchovies and tons of garlic. It's usually recommended that you eat it before a day where you don't have to go out and interact with other people because you'll smell really badly of garlic :)

There has to be some sub-clause of Cunningham's law referring to the perilous activity about generalising Italian cuisine :)

Does Piemonte cusine also include garlic in common sauces? Is it cooked into a soffrito or included as part of a battuto?

I've still not got around to visiting Piemonte, but this talk is pushing it up my list.

Sounds delicious. I'm surprised I haven't heard of it. I'll have to ask my Nonna about it when I can travel to Entracque again. :)

It's got the bonus nerd connection in that a character on Babylon 5 spent an episode raving about it:

https://babylon5.fandom.com/wiki/Bagna_Cauda

- "Isn't that too much garlic for a dip?"

- "Don't worry, the anchovies will cover the garlic smell".

I work at a foreign language instruction company. Two of the funniest moments happened at the same lunch. The Italians declaring, "Americans use too much garlic." And the Turkish declaring, "Americans have too many kinds of cheese. Cheese is just cheese."

I've been known to put garlic, onions, and shallots into a dish.

@~"Cheese is cheese."

And I guess that's the moment when the French "delegation" collectively gasped, and left the table in protest? :D

Moving to France and discovering that every grocery store always has an entire aisle full of Cheeses was a mind-bending discovery for me. The aisle stinks, mind you, but nothing can beat Raclette after a winter's day out. The other amazing realisation was just how seriously bread is taken in these parts, with that famous No Such Thing observation that bakers in Paris may not take a vacation without putting a sign to the nearest boulangerie.

Interestingly, Turks have broadly one type of cheese (not really true, but compared to France let's go with it) per use. So cheese really isn't just cheese.

You have your cheese for sandwiches and melting, you have your cheese for stuffing pastries, you have your cheese for breakfast, you have a couple of ones with special shapes like the braided ones. And please, try not to mix these up. The white cheese for breakfast is not the one for the pastry, even though it looks similar. And why do Europeans crumble any sort on their dishes and call it Turkish? The nerve!

In some sense, Turks are some of the least "Cheese is cheese" people I met.

Indian food was the first cuisine I thought of when reading GP's comment. Indian food is, at least in my opinion, just as incredible and delicious as Italian food while utilising many spices and ingredients. You also get unique kinds of flavours that are impossible to achieve using European approaches to cooking, and to miss out on these because of culinary snobbery seems extremely sad.

This is food-as-fandom, isn't it? It's not enough to enjoy your own tastes, you have to get out there and tell people that your taste is superior to theirs. You can see it playing out even in this thread.

I have had similar conversations with Italians about food or coffee. They're very passionate about both and - at least when it comes to coffee - will also get into heated discussions over it with other Italians, not just foreigners. I think it's just the culture.

I'm Spanish, not Italian, but we also talk quite loud. Maybe all discussions look heated to foreigners.

Italian discussions literally look very heated to, say, Northern Europeans, due to the very animated body language.

In Portugal there's a saying: "he/she shouts like a Spaniard".

Then again who are we of all people to judge?

I have a different story. I come from a Northern country where there was no "good" coffee for decades, just regular filter coffee, usually too strong. We accept our inferiority in this regard.

When I was in Italy or France, I took a liking to their coffee. Sure, seems complicated for home use, but nice in a cafe or bar. To me, living in Paris, this was (at the time) good coffee.

So then I met an American, and when I related the above, I was told that the coffee wasn't actually that good at all, and I should try some real artisanal coffee like they do in New York. Luckily, this was getting popular in Europe as well. So, I tagged along to a new and hip coffee place and found, to my surprise, that the mysterious espresso machines had been replaced by good old filters, but with a very arcane and complex production process.

The other difference was that the coffee was weak and tasted more like tea than coffee. I did not like it at all, as I wanted a coffee and not some weak watery tea. I like all sorts of coffees - from espresso to filter to Nescafe - for their own unique taste, except this one.

Anyway, my point is that I found American coffee snobs to be more snobby than French or Italian ones.

Indian food is one of my favorites, saag being my top choice. I'm amazed at how many ingredients go into it.

FYI 'Saag' is just a generic name to refer to gravy dishes, that are eaten with chapatis. There are hundreds of varieties of saag.

Thanks, I always thought saag was any sauce made primarily from leafy greens

I'm Indian and for me saag is "leafy greens" too. Spinach to be more particular.

The thing is that in India some meanings change with geography and location. For example, for me bhujia meant this [1] for the longest time. However, when I moved to a different part of the country, bhujia also meant potato fritters. Then, there is bhaji which means fried veggies. But some people also call potato fritters as bhaji.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bikaneri_bhujia

Aha that makes sense, thanks

In the U.K. (at least while I was growing up) we had ‘Bombay mix’[1] which included your version of bhujia.

Bhaji and Pakora seem to be interchangeable in British-Indian cuisine. If the bulk is onion it’s called a bhaji, otherwise pakora.

Halwa is another one that can be wildly different, it seems. Though most parts of the world have their own version I guess, all irresistible but very different.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombay_mix?wprov=sfti1

Saag is just a kind of spinach.

I wonder if they meant saag paneer. The first google result for that recipe lists 21(!) ingredients and a 1 hr 20 minute prep time, but a difficulty of "Easy".

I think you mean palak paneer [1] and with 21 ingredients you're certainly looking at a complex and the "party" version of the dish.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palak_paneer

That's funny, when I googled it the first result was showing a 5 minute prep time and 15 minute cooking time. I've noticed that with Indian food there's many ways to skin the cat. If you start with fresh spinach you'd have a different prep time than with frozen spinach.

The one that showed up uses frozen spinach - https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/aarti-sequeira/saag-pane...

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