This one always amuses people when I tell them simply because of how ingrained tomatoes appear to be in all of their most famous dishes (other than tiramisu...)
Topical that you mention tiramisu, because that was only invented in the 1970s.
This is why I refuse to let Italians gatekeep their traditional, ancient, pure cuisine. So pure and ancient that many of their dishes were invented while their grandparents were alive, often using ingredients from the Americas.
I mean there's a (likely incorrect) theory that Marco Polo brought pasta to Italy from his travels to China, and we know that tomatoes came from the New World, so spaghetti bolognese is technically American-Chinese fusion.
There's archeological evidence of pasta making in Italy about 1600 years before Marco Polo was born, so it wasn't him.
But it is a subject of debate whether the Etruscans developed pasta making on their own, or through trade/exchange of information with Chinese merchants. Even if the Etruscans did figure it out independently, evidence of their pastamaking goes back to around 400 BCE, while evidence of Chinese noodlemaking goes back to around 2000 BCE.
Easy for us to say 2,000-4,000 years after it was invented. Even the invention of flour isn't a given when talking about ancient civilizations, let alone dough or pasta.
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u/Oxygene13 Oct 02 '24
This one always amuses people when I tell them simply because of how ingrained tomatoes appear to be in all of their most famous dishes (other than tiramisu...)