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FOOD AND DRINK

Offal and midnight pastries: Six surprising Italian food customs

You may think you're an expert on Italian cuisine - but there are some traditions that will come as a surprise to anyone who's yet to experience Italy's food culture up close.

Published: 12 September 2023 17:21 CEST
Italian pastries: not just for daytime.
Italian pastries: not just for daytime. Photo by Gene Gallin on Unsplash

You’ve learned to keep cream out of your carbonara, and that meatballs on spaghetti is an American invention.

But there are some Italian food customs that you probably won’t pick up on until you’ve spent some time in Italy.

Whipped cream on ice cream

If you’ve ever looked down at your ice cream and thought “this isn’t bad, but what it really needs is more cream”, then Italy is the country for you.

Up and down the length of the peninsula, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a gelateria whose servers don’t offer to put panna, or whipped cream, on top of your gelato.

When and where this tradition began is unclear, but the fact that in Milan it costs extra while in Rome and the south it tends to be free has been the subject of some controversy in the past, with Italian media dubbing the dispute “panna-gate“.

Sauceless pasta

You might think you like pasta…but can you really declare yourself a true pasta-lover unless you’ve tried – and loved – pasta without any sauce on it?

Pasta aglio olio e peperoncino, or pasta (specifically spaghetti, linguine or some other long pasta) with garlic, oil and chilli pepper flakes is a dish that originated in Naples and quickly became popular all over the country as a low-cost, low-effort meal.

While you wouldn’t be surprised to hear this kind of food is regularly served in people’s homes, it’s also not uncommon to find it on the menu in informal restaurants, where diners will part with good money for a plate of pasta with oil and garlic (and maybe some chilli and parsley) on it.

Even more basic is pasta in bianco – in its purest form, plain pasta with a pat of butter on it, and if you’re lucky some cheese – though you’re unlikely to find this offered in a restaurant. Related options include pasta with olive oil and bitter greens, and pasta with butter and asparagus.

Potato on pizza

A country for keto dieters, Italy is not. 

Carbs are king here, so it was only a matter of time before someone came up with the idea of putting potato and pizza together.

Despite how bland it sounds, pizza con patate is actually delicious – a thick and crispy white pizza bianca base topped with well-seasoned, thinly sliced potatoes sprinkled with rosemary.

READ ALSO: Five tips for ordering pizza in Italy

You won’t tend to find this option on the menu at sit-down pizzerias – but go into any bakery serving up trays of pizza al taglio, or pizza by the slice, and you’re bound to see potato pizza sitting alongside margherita and focaccia.

Biscuits dipped in wine

The British are partial to biscuits dipped in tea on occasion, but Italians prefer an altogether more decadent variation: biscuits soaked in wine.

Dipping cantucci (the crunchy dried biscuit that most anglophones refer to as ‘biscotti’) in sweet vin santo dessert wine after a meal is a Tuscan tradition, but it’s popular enough that you’ll see it on the menu at plenty of restaurants in other regions.

The legend goes that vin santo – ‘holy wine’ – is so named because in the 1300s, as a plague swept through Italy, a Franciscan friar in Siena started giving his parishioners altar wine in the hopes of curing them. While the medical science is questionable, a sip of the wine did provide some relief – so much so that people started believing in its miraculous properties.

As for where the custom of dipping biscuits in the wine came from – people probably just realised it tasted nice.

Midnight pastries

If you’re the kind of person who starts craving breakfast at midnight, you’ll want to head to certain southern Italian cities where some bakeries turn out cornetti and other pastries into the early hours.

Don’t expect to find these kinds of nocturnal or 24-hour bakeries in touristy neighbourhoods or the fancier parts of town; they traditionally tend to be based a bit further out, and cater mainly to workers starting or coming off their shift or students who are up all hours of the night.

READ ALSO: Aperol and aperitivo: A guide to visiting bars and cafes in Italy

That doesn’t mean they’re not worth making the journey to if you’re a night owl. An institution like Il Pangocciolaio, for example, in Rome’s Ostiense neighbourhood, serves cream-stuffed sweet breads and mini-pizzas from 7pm until between 3 and 5 in the morning, and is rarely without a lengthy queue outside its door.

Offal

Italians are not squeamish when it comes to offcuts; from tripe to oxtail to tongue and even brains, you can pretty much guarantee that if it comes from an animal and is edible, in some part of Italy, it’s regularly used in cooking.

READ ALSO: From fried brains to ‘sexy’ cakes: The Italian foods you might not expect in Italy

Roman cuisine is particularly known for its emphasis on offal, but it’s far from the only part of the country where you’ll find unusual food items; from Tuscany, where lampredotto cow stomach is a popular sandwich filling, to a range of southern regions where pig’s blood is traditionally used to make the sanguinaccio dolce chocolate dessert.

A new year’s eve delicacy from Emilia Romagna is zampone – a pig’s trotter stuffed with pork meat – while in Puglia and in Catania on Sicily’s eastern coast, you’ll find horse meat widely available at food stalls and in restaurants.

Member comments

  1. I asked for linguine with aglio olio e peperoncino,in my local restaurant only to be told in no uncertain terms, “NO! You must always use spaghetti for this dish.

    While we are on the subject of plain pasta dishes, my local restaurant also serves pasta with sage and butter. Delicious.

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OPINION

Doggy bags and sharing plates: Why Italy’s last food-related taboos are dying out

Italy is famous for its strong culinary traditions and unwritten rules around eating, but as Italians embrace doggy bags and informal dining, Silvia Marchetti argues that the last food-related taboos have been broken.

Published: 25 April 2024 09:40 CEST
Updated: 28 April 2024 08:31 CEST
Doggy bags and sharing plates: Why Italy's last food-related taboos are dying out

Italians are deadly serious when it comes to eating or, as they say, “mettere le gambe sotto il tavolo”, meaning ‘putting your feet under the table’.

Three meals per day remain sacrosanct at home, but at restaurants the eating etiquette is changing, particularly in big cities where globalisation has an effect.

I recently discovered, much to my surprise, that Italians are embracing doggy bags. When I was a kid, many many years ago, to us Italians it always seemed like something only foreigners could do, especially Americans.

We would never have asked a waiter to give us a paper bag to bring away the food for the next day, it just would never have popped up in our minds: you eat what you are served and if you no longer wanted what you’d paid for, well too bad, you’ll leave it on the plate. It would’ve been embarrassing to walk away with a doggy bag.

So I was shocked when recently at a restaurant in Rome I saw Italians taking away bags of leftover lunch food, including cold pizza slices and meatballs. It almost knocked me off my chair.

READ ALSO: Are doggy bags still taboo in Italy’s restaurants?

When the waitress came to our table to bring the cheque, and saw that we hadn’t finished our fried  fish and spaghetti alle vongole, she asked if we wanted a doggy bag. My jaw dropped. It was a first for me.

Yet what really shocked me was that the restaurant was not in the city centre, but in the countryside where traditions tend to survive, or at the very least, take longer to die.

It struck me how it’s no longer foreigners asking for doggy bags, but even Italians have overcome the stigma of this former faux pas.

The sad truth is that it’s not just because of globalisation and the economic crisis following the pandemic. There’s been a fall in the cultural level of many Italians, so asking for a doggy bag is also a way to avoid having to cook for the evening or for the day after, rather than to save money.

Sadly, this trend is not an exception, nor a one-off, and in Italy it’s not driven by concerns over food waste (we’re really not that ‘green’) or the cost of living.

Italian restaurants are simply becoming more generically European and international, adapting to global habits and the requests of foreign clientele.

In Rome’s touristy spots, restaurants showcase photos of dishes outside the restaurant to lure customers, or display real plates of gluey carbonara. This is something I had never seen in my childhood.

I have noticed that other restaurant eating taboos and etiquette rules have fallen away, too.

A few (well-off) friends of mine bring their own bottles of wine along when they eat out so that they don’t have to pay for these at the restaurant. I find this very inappropriate, but it usually happens when the restaurant owner and customers are friends or know each other.

READ ALSO: Want to eat well in Italy? Here’s why you should ditch the cities

Trends in restaurant etiquette are changing. There are eateries that serve pizza at lunch, which used to be something you could only order for dinner unless you’re in Naples.

The standard three courses which we normally have are also being messed up: appetisers, first, second and side dishes are eaten in a disorderly way – something which would make my granny turn in her grave.

I have seen Italian families first order a T-bone steak and then pasta or a slice of pizza, while many couples share plates. The man orders one type of spaghetti dish, the woman orders another kind of spaghetti and half-way through the meal they switch dishes. This was something very unusual in the past. Before in restaurant there were boundaries in eating habits and in the eating culture, which are now blurring.

My parents taught me it is rude to poke your fork into someone else’s plate to curl up some spaghetti for yourself. My dad always looked sideways at anyone who did that: not only is it extremely improper, he thinks, but it is also very unhygienic.

There are no more rules left in Italian restaurants nowadays, and all taboos have been broken.

To adapt to foreign clients many restaurants tend to stay open the whole day, especially in very touristy areas, and the untouchable hours of lunch and dinner now overlap. Some taverns even serve breakfast.

READ ALSO: Why do Italians get so angry if you mess with classic recipes?

In the north, I’ve noticed that bread and extra-virgin olive oil are often missing from the table and you have to ask for them, which is something very atypical of Italian standards.

To find the traditional Italian eating code in restaurants where there are rules that will never die, one must go deep into unknown spots, and travel to remote villages no one has ever heard of. It’s always harder to find such authentic, untouched places.

I really hate to say this, but wherever there is mass tourism local traditions tend to die, particularly food-related ones.

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