Dispelling food origin myths

March 31, 2023 by
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A while back I wrote that I was surprised to learn that I was older than ciabatta. After reading a recent article in The Telegraph about food origins, it would seem that’s not the only Italian food story that I did not know – and that there are other foods worldwide whose accepted origin stories are little more than myths.

While I did know that pasta carbonara was invented in 1944, I didn’t realize that the dish’s creator used bacon, not guanciale as carbonara aficionados would have you believe. Pivoting to pavlova, a dish that both Australians and New Zealanders claim as their own creation, likely existed in England years before the dish was allegedly invented in the 1920s. Another origin story shattered.

I won’t go through all of the commonly accepted origin tales discussed in the article, but I will note that many of them had me raising my eyebrows. For some I really hadn’t thought about the dish’s origins, so it was less like discovering that what I thought to be true was a lie and more like “oh, that’s where it came from.” While the provenance of a dish may add to its charm, what’s most important to me is how good it tastes.

Category: Antipasto

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