How to Start a Fight in Italy (Just Mention Carbonara)
You can cheat on your taxes, maybe even your spouse — but not on the recipe.
If you want to start a fight in Italy, don’t mention politics. Just ask someone how to make carbonara.
Within seconds, they’ll turn into constitutional lawyers of cuisine. Only guanciale. Pepper, not chilli. And whatever you do, don’t mention cream or you’ll be chased through the streets by an angry mob and possibly beaten with ladles.
There’s this brilliant Neapolitan comedy group called The Jackal who made a sketch about it:
If you watch it, make sure to select the original audio (the auto-dubbing is beyond horrific). If you set the subs to English, note that panna was mistranslated: it’s cream, not sour cream. Yes, it matters.
In the video, two guys are making carbonara but can’t be bothered with the proper ingredients. They improvise. Take shortcuts. “Ma chi cazzo se ne frega,” they say. Who cares. And every time they get something wrong — add cream, use bacon instead of guanciale — an Italian chef dies. It’s a culinary massacre.
That’s the kind of guilt you’ll find here. I’ve heard a lot about Catholic guilt, but never from Italians. The guilt here isn’t moral; it’s gastronomic. The only real sin is messing with the recipe. You can cheat on your taxes, maybe even your spouse, but put cheese on fish and you’ll be remembered in hell.
In fact, another comedy sketch renders this perfectly. Countries from around the world are having dinner as an analogy for the geopolitical situation. Wanna know how ISIS are represented? As the guys putting cheese on fish. Yes, it’s considered an act of culinary terrorism. (The video is here if you’re interested. But beware: it’s political satire, and doesn’t have subtitles. I just wanted to tell you about the fish).
Food isn’t just part of Italian life — it is Italian life. It’s what people talk about at the gym, while drinking coffee, at work, over dinner, while planning the next dinner. I’ve never met an Italian who didn’t have an opinion about it, even if they couldn’t tell you who the minister for interior is. Priorities.
And yet, even though food is undeniably the national religion, nobody actually agrees on what “the right” recipe is. There is no one Bible — just a never-ending debate about how to do it properly. Every region has its own doctrine, every family its gospel.
A whole scholarly book came out about this a while back — Why Italians Love to Talk About Food — and I do recommend it if you want to learn everything there is to know. If you can’t be bothered, here’s my take: food is the glue holding Italy together. Italians will complain about pretty much everything else about their country: the politics, the job market, the football, the national mail. Self-deprecation is king. Even the expression all’italiana (Italian-style) is often used as a synonym for “shoddily-done”.
Until you touch the pasta. Then suddenly: “We are the greatest civilization in history.”
You can insult the government, the Vatican, or the Eurovision results, but say Italian food is overrated, and you’re public enemy number one.
And maybe that’s why it works. All the chaos — sorry, all the liveliness — of Italian life finds its order in the kitchen. Food is where Italy finally agrees with itself. It’s religion without dogma, nationalism without flags, politics without parliament. And of course, it’s fucking delicious.
Buon appetito.
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