So, here is the divide.
It’s not the football final tonight, but that practice of putting pineapple on pizza which divides the Italian side of our family.
Of course, freedom is the freedom to take a very simple and wonderful dish and muck it about as you want.
And I know, because over the years I have fiddled with a whole range of international dishes, congratulating myself on my originality, and flair for cooking, the results of which were only marginally higher than Vesta curry on the league table of messed up foods from around the world.
Made worse by an assortment of unrecognizable bits of meat whose origins are as doubtful as their nutritional value?
Today the London correspondent of la Repubblica mused on the cultural differences between England and Italy in advance of tonight’s cup final.
He concluded that few British people embrace fruit on pizza, but reflected on other differences.*
Still pineapple is there, and led to one Italian friend posting a picture of another Italian in an earlier Euro game holding up a banner with the impassioned message “Stop Putting Pineapple on Pizza”. My friend has over the years also hosted a series of pictures of other awful toppings …….. to bizarre to describe.
So tonight as we settle down to watch the match with Rosa who was born in Naples, and Tina who grew up in Varese, and me from south east London, we may have pizza accompanied with other Neapolitan dishes, or a late Sunday roast …… leaving the pineapple to appear in a fruit salad from a tin and smothered in Carnation milk. After all some English traditions just can’t be bucked.
Location; Chorlton, Varese, Naples and pretty much everywhere.
Pictures; pizza from Naples, 2017, from the collection of Saul Simpson and another type of pizza, courtesy of la Repubblica, July 11th, 2021, pictures of Fruit cocktail and carnation milk courtesy of Morrisons and Nestlé
*Pizza with pineapple, air blow and gesticulation: England and Italy is the challenge of clichés by our correspondent Antonello Guerrera, la Repubblica, Jul 11th, 2021, https://www.repubblica.it/
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