The Great Parmesan Cheese Debate

Slow Burn

Slate Audio

Politics, Society & Culture, History, News, Documentary

4.6 • 25.2K Ratings

🗓️ 26 July 2023

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Parmesan is a food—but it’s not just a food. Italy’s beloved cheese is often paired with a deep craving for tradition and identity. But its history also involves intrepid immigrants, lucrative businesses and an American version that’s probably available in your local grocery store.

After a notorious debunker of Italian-cuisine myths claims this Wisconsin-made product is the real deal, we embark on a quest to answer the question: Has an Italian delicacy been right under our noses this whole time?

Decoder Ring is produced by Willa Paskin with Katie Shepherd. This episode was written by Willa Paskin and edited by Andrea Bruce. We had production help from Patrick Fort and editing help from Joel Meyer. Derek John is Slate’s executive producer of narrative podcasts. Merritt Jacob is our senior technical director.

Thank you to Giacomo Stefanini for translating. Thank you to Fabio Parasecoli, Ken Kane, Thomas McNamee, Dan Weber, Irene Graziosi, James Norton, and Ian MacAllen, whose knowledge and book Red Sauce: How Italian Food Became American were very helpful.

You should also read Marianna Giusti’s article in the Financial Times. If you feel like really nerding out, we also recommend the 1948 academic study Italian Cheese Production in the American Dairy Region.

We also included clips in this episode from David Rocco’s YouTube channel about how Parmigiano-Reggiano is made and from Gennaro Contaldo’s YouTube documentary on the same subject.

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Transcript

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0:43.3	Earlier this year, Mariana Juusti, a journalist at the Financial Times wrote a viral article about food.
0:49.7	The name of the article was everything I and Italian thought I knew about Italian food is a lie.
0:57.5	Mariana had been feeling aggravated by the preciousness around Italian food for years.
1:02.8	As an Italian living abroad, I think you're doubly subject to the huge projections around Italian food.
1:10.0	All the fads, all the tropes, you know, from how carbonara is this ancient, ancient sacred, almost Roman recipe to how pizza has a similar godlike perfection.
1:25.8	A friend told Mariana she should check out the work of Alberto Grandi, an Italian historian, author, podcaster, and general rabble rouser.
1:34.4	As soon as she did, she knew she had to write an article about him.
1:38.7	She also put us in touch.
1:50.0	Grandi studies how traditions are invented.
1:52.5	And when he started looking at the history of many quintessentially Italian foods,
1:57.2	well, he found a lot of inventions.
2:00.0	He spoke to me with the help of a translator.
2:08.7	It's Italian food being myth and legend.
2:12.7	So he became interested in debunking that.
2:16.7	Take a food like pasta carbonara.
2:22.2	It's widely thought to be an historic dish from Rome, but actually in 1944,
2:27.2	an Italian chef making a meal for members of the US army used the rich cream, milk, butter, and bacon of that army to whip up a new pasta.
	...

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