Years ago in Florence, I let an Italian take me to dinner; I knew he was hoping for more than dinner but we’d met at a museum so how awful could he be?
When our small portions of pasta arrived, before the main course as is the custom, he launched into a diatribe about what barbarians Americans are. Who but a barbarian, he wondered in fluent English, would eat pasta for a main course? And who but a barbarian would drown it in sauce? We would, I replied calmly in entry-level Italian.
So when he escorted me to my hotel I did not invite him in — he wasn’t that cute or interesting — but I’ve thought about his remarks so often. For the most part, he’s right. We do eat huge portions and too much sauce.
I’m sharing a recipe tomorrow that uses 8 ounces of pasta and serves four. If you look on a box or bag of pasta, you’ll see 2 ounces is the recommended serving. Eight servings per pound. I won’t pretend I’ve never eaten more than two ounces, but a recipe I ran across online recently really jolted me.
It uses two pounds of pasta, 1 1/2 quarts of half and half and seven kinds of cheese – 2 5/8 pounds in all. The poster’s recommended servings? If, for some reason you are standing, please sit down now. The recipe said: Serves 6 – 8. That’s not a typo – 6 to 8. As I was wondering whether the recipe should be called Cardiac Ward Pasta or Reach for the Ex-Lax, I read a comment by someone who felt she could probably get 10 – 12 servings from it.
This is how much of America really eats. No wonder we’ve got national obesity and heart disease problems.
Tomorow’s recipe is good enough that it will only serve three in this house, but it’s a main course here. I don’t remember the name of the guy in Florence who insulted me and every other American in one fell swoop but I do remember this: when he was talking about World War II in the good English he was so proud of, he repeatedly pronounced both “b’s” in “bombing.” It was “bom-bing.”
And I never bothered to correct him.
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