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Comment by rich_sasha | Hacker News Reader

> 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..?

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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.

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