Gelato, Cannoli, and an Impromptu Defense of American Food

I don't know how fellow bloggers do it. My blog feed sits empty for days, then suddenly has a hernia as eight new ones come in end-on-end. I suppose I'll join the fun with one of those obligatory posts about the Food.

I will start with the cannolo (that’s the super-trendy, super-Italian singular form of cannoli). Don't moan—it'll be painless and fun. Twelve of the 18 blogs that I read are centred on cooking, and having learned well from them, I promise:

1. I will not intentionally try to make you jealous of what I've eaten. That's just boring and mean. Share the love.

2. I will not rehash the old cliché of “American food = suck; Italian food = omg.” Apart from being very yuppie-snob (see “Stuff White People Like”), it is just no longer interesting to listen to. And it’s not even true, since the organic/local food movement rose to power. As the post-1950s Packaged/Processed Everything fad dies down, America has discovered that it is still awesome at plenty of things—like barbecue, or slow-cooking. And it's always been the gold standard for all sorts of tasty food, from apples to hot sauce to Virginia ham.

So—my cannolo. (Goodness—food always gets me on tangents like these. I won’t apologise because it will inevitably happen again. :D) (Please also excuse my overkill of parentheses (they’re just so useful (and helpful(?)))).

Cannoli.

Every so often you get a brain-shattering experience you weren’t even expecting. I mean, your first taste of Italian pasta—it has to rock, that's just a given. And stepping inside your first real cathedral—that sort of experience you can mentally prepare yourself for.

Other times, you get a mind-job for free. I was coming home one day from class and passed through Piazza VII Agosto, a wide-open, cobbled piazza near the BCSP office, and saw a little string of tents set up. On Fridays and weekends the piazza is crammed full of these sorts of tents for an open-air market that sells mostly shoes and tacky clothes, so I was ready to pass it by without a glance, but instead, I smelled food. And since I had a few euro and a few minutes… I spied a tray of that ever-familiar traditional Italian dessert, cannoli. 

I was biased—I admit. Despite my promises to myself not to bash American food, I couldn't quite squash my visions of horrendous Oreo-chunk atrocities, swimming in whipped cream (or worse, an entire 2-lb. brick of cream cheese). Or jammed into cupcakes and stuffed with frosting and maraschino cherries. Why, America, why!?

Sigh... Publish a gluten-free version in Cooking Light Magazine and pass the diet soda, please.

After some judicious hesitation, I handed over a two-euro coin. “Well,” I said to myself as the girl wrapped it in a napkin, “this’ll probably be pretty okay, I suppose.” I wasn't terribly convinced. They seem too hard to get right. And cannoli are from way-south Sicily, so they surely couldn’t be that good in fairly-north Bologna. But Luca had said that he’d had good ones here…

Then: crunchEPIPHANY.

Crackly, flaky, meticulously crafted pastry shell… dark chocolate gently laced throughout… airy and sweet ricotta filling freshly piped inside… little nuggets of pistachios dotted round the edges… confectioners sugar lavishly powdered on top…

/ / / Wooow... / / /

It stopped me dead in my tracks (in the middle of a busy road, I might add…it was that good), and left me suspended for several long, transcendental seconds in one of those genuinely speechless moments. I think my brain managed to say to itself, «What did I do to deserve this…?»

Fantastico. I waited for the bus with this ridiculously silly grin on my face (I had just won the culinary lottery, after all), nibbling blissfully on this enormous and surprisingly filling confection.

D: ~ <3

And then! (as Emeril would say) and then, BAM!—Pistachio gelato! (Does pistachio have some magical property, or what?)

It was my first gelato ever, not counting the tired, grey soup that someone managed to sell to me as “chocolate gelato.” My pistachio gelato came in a teensy cestino cone (not sure how to translate—perhaps “little basket,” or “little cup”—something terribly cute) and for 2 euro I had almost more than I could eat.

I had expected it to be very light and airy, but instead it was heavy and sweet and treacherously dense, and probably double the calories of our sort. If American ice cream is a dollar-a-box confetti cake, Italian gelato is a sly, murderous torta barozzi. Americans go the way of “cheap and cheerful” (as we say in NZ), while Italian culinary tradition that unless it is so lust-inspiring that you would assassinate your mother for it, it is not worth eating. They are not the same thing AT ALL. Lots of commercial American ice creams are still made with preservatives and artificial ingredients besides the traditional cream, milk, sweetener, and eggs, whereas true Italian gelato is made solely from creamy, thickly-whipped evil.

The shop-girl lavishly dolloped this splendid foodstuff onto a cone (at this point, I was really not caring about the cone) and went about her business with the other customers, hardly realising that she had completely blown my mind with a few careless flicks of her ice cream scoop. The texture! The flavour! Who cares that it was barely 5 degrees Celsius!? It was so sweet and cold that I could hardly taste the pistachio, as if that made a difference.

Woo! Bring on the intolerably hot weather.