5 Italian-American dishes that have never existed in Italy

In recent years, videos of Italians reacting to obscene reinterpretations of their national dishes at the hands of any foreigner have become a genre in their own right on YouTube, Instagram and TikTok. And, to make a long story short, even if the aforementioned reactions are funny, Italians are right 100 per cent of the time. The ease with which many American sites include bacon and butter in their 'definitive carbonara recipes', the sight of tourists cutting their spaghetti with knife and fork, and especially the crime against humanity of putting cheese on seafood pasta are simply shocking. Nevertheless, a culture is alive when it spreads, mutates and gives birth to new sub-cultures. And this is the case with the Italian-American dishes you will find in this list: they may be Italian overseas, but here in the Old World there is just no trace of them. But if you want to know where those dishes come from and how to distinguish them from the originals pay attention, we will try to explain.

So here are the 5 Italian-American dishes that have never existed in Italy.

Mac ‘n’ Cheese

Let's start with the most popular. Mac 'n' cheese is a great comfort food classic and is also sold by Kraft in packages that can be assembled in minutes. The only problem: compared to Italian cheeses (note the plural), American cheddar does not have the same intensity of flavour. The Italian version of the dish that comes closest to mac 'n' cheese is Quattro Formaggi gratinata, itself a fusion of the classic Quattro Formaggi with baked pasta, which is a bit of a wild card in Italian cuisine. The recipe you see above, made by an American, describes well how an Italian would cook mac 'n' cheese, with béchamel sauce and four different cheeses. It should also be noted that the term 'macaroni' in Italy means a different format of pasta in each region, and the variation is considerable, whereas in the USA it is really a type of short pasta that, in Italy, no one would dream of using for classic baked pasta.

The Chicken Parmesan

This is a dish that leaves Italians quite puzzled, to say the least. If in fact aubergine parmigiana is a monument of Southern Italian cuisine, present in different forms depending on the cook's private choices and the 'house rules' that change from family to family, nobody has ever heard of 'chicken parmigiana'. Especially since the US recipe calls for a rather crazy mix of breaded chicken, Parmesan, tomato, provolone and mozzarella. Little clue: in Italy, cheese is always used a lot but almost no dish has all these cheeses together, baked together with the meat and tomato. The idea of breaded chicken together with cheese, however, is a variation on the theme of the valdostana and especially the cotoletta petroniana from Bologna - both of which are, however, made with veal.

Spaghetti meatballs & bolognese

Ragù is a sacred thing in Italy. And it has to be said that the American recipe for its counterpart 'spaghetti bolognese' follows its basic elements with measure, even some of the online recipes are very faithful. Nevertheless, in America, the obsession with seasoning every single dish with every imaginable spice always leads to mistakes: some online recipes call for basil, oregano, red chilli pepper, Worcestershire sauce and garlic among the ingredients that do not exist in any ragù from any region - since ragù varies according to location. The same goes for 'spaghetti meatballs' whose origin is probably the classic meatballs in sauce to which spaghetti is added. In Southern Italy, the pasta served with mini meatballs is the one with broth, in which the meatballs themselves are cooked.

Chicken & Gnocchi Soup

This recipe never fails to cause any Italian a little nausea. A dripping of watery cheese with chicken and gnocchi floating in it is something intolerable - and what's more, Americans consider it a 'healthy' dish because it is a soup, when in Italy gnocchi and cheese are not healthy food at all. Firstly because the cheese soups we have in Italy (such as the Graukase soup from Alto Adige, the panade from Friuli and the Valpellinese from Val d'Aosta) are relatively 'pure', i.e. ate at best with vegetables or small croutons, but practically never with pasta and above all never with gnocchi, which are certainly cooked with cheese but not as a soup; secondly because if soup and gnocchi are part of the course called 'first course', chicken is always a 'second course'. Nobody would ever dream of putting chicken in pasta (except chicken broth), which can instead be seasoned with beef or pork-based sauces. Why? A Quora user explained it perfectly:«Because chicken meat lends itself poorly to giving flavour to pasta, and is best eaten roasted or stewed on its own, well flavoured. Pasta is an excipient, and if we put another excipient on top of it, we have something that doesn't taste like much. On the other hand, chicken entrails, livers and giblets, are used in traditional cooking to make various ragùs and baked pastas typical of many regions, especially in northern and central Italy».

Garlic Bread

This is perhaps one of the few foods that Italians envy the Americans. Nevertheless, Italian it is not. On this side of the ocean, in fact, it is more usual to toast bread and then rub a clove of garlic on it, which tends to melt in the heat, to make bruschetta - which is among the tastiest things in the world. There are also several regional variations of bread seasoned with oil, salt and oregano, as well as simple cheeses and tomatoes that belong to the so-called 'cucina povera', or that gastronomic tradition of the countryside of each region that makes extremely simple but always tasty dishes. As a rough guideline, however, any Italian will shudder at the sight of a huge mass of butter used as the only condiment, to quote Black Panther: «We don’t do that here»