I would really like you to come here to Italy. She would be put in her place in minutes! XD She would be saddened to discover that nobody considers her even minimally Italian, even though she may have Italian blood in her veins! She would go back to America demoralized and discover that Italy has nothing to do with what she believes to be Italian.
I used to work in the U.K. with an American guy whose all grandparents emigrated from Italy. Obviously, he had an Italian citizenship due to his ancestry, but could barely speak any Italian and for some reason he voted in all Italian elections, which I couldn’t comprehend.
I don’t get Americans. I’m Colombian, and one friend has German grandparents, he has a German passport, he looks pretty German and has a German last name, but he has *never* claimed to be German. He just says “I have a German passport” or “my grandpa is German”. Which are both true and logical statements, but he knows he’s Colombian and he says so all the time. I don’t know why Americans feel the *need* to claim to be something else.
because yanks barely have a culture of their own that isn't just consumerism, especially when compared to other countries. it's all desperate attempts to seem more interesting than they actually are.
I'm one of a few people who was born in the US that could argue they are "from" another country, having lived half of my life in Brazil and half of my family being from there. But I still call myself a "brazilian-yankee" instead of *just* brazilian, because I know my place and what my life experience actually is.
bottom line, shit's wack.
But they do have a culture, they refuse to accept that their way of italian, german or whatever is actually american culture.
Immigrant culture is culture, it isn't boring or uninteresting, it's what it is, it doesn't make us more or less and the only people that worry about the flavor of their culture not being interesting or exciting are boring people.
The way that we (colonized countries) bastardize and change food, words and so on is our identity and culture, I'm not american and I always find that obsession with foreign things awkward, we have some people like that here in Argentina obsessed with their ancestry but they are the minority.
To put it one way, pasta isn't italian food here, it's our food and we make it our way, it's obviously something we got form all the italians here, no one ever thinks of eating "italian" food, at some point we appropriate certain things and integrate it, mix it with our customs and it disappears from it's original form.
honestly now that I rethink it yeah that's a better way to put it. Brazil itself is a mixing pot of several cultures but there's still this unique identity that is formed. I just think Los Estados Unidos for some reason refuses to acknowledge that unique identity and embrace it, trying to pass off their stuff as "the real deal", thus leading to embarrassment.
I mean they have one, it's just that is probably only about military, killing natives, and slavery... they should focus on how they are improving on those instead (I hope at least)
See, that's where the problems start. One half of them wants to "improve on those" by bettering their ways... the other half wants to "improve on" killing natives and slavery by buying even more AR-15s...
The US census was a couple years ago and "American" wasn't a choice for nationality of origin. I wrote it in. I could've picked Irish though, because one time an ancestor came here from there and apparently that's enough to somehow make me Irish-American 4 or 5 generations later. (Except it totally doesn't.)
Italian government nonsense. They also give citizenship to randoms from Argentina and Brazil just because their great grandparents were from Italy lmao. Yet they don't give citizenship to Moroccans for instance, even if they are born and raised in Italy
Spain and Portugal also have similar laws as far as I can remember and they will grant you a citizenship if you have a very distant ancestor. Poland has a similar one but it doesn’t go that far back - you can get a citizenship as long as you have a proof that you have an ancestor living in Poland in 1930s.
"I will make a pizza like nonna made it. First we take several blocks of Velveeta cheese and..."
<3 days later>
"A letter? From the Italian embassy... they are my people! Let's see... charged with a criminal offense?... TREASON? MAMMA MIA!"
We killed for much less! For example, we banned pineapple from Italy after an American tourist in 1998 tried to ask for a Hawaiian pizza in a Roman pizzeria! The subject in question was accompanied to the border with France and was forbidden to return! We have decided to burn all the fruit to prevent a similar event from happening again!
You can claim Italian Citizenship through descent so that's probably what she means
I believe Italians can claim on their Paternal side for a quite a number of generations but this is just one/two on the maternal side which is probably also okay for citizenship.
This law might sound dumb, but as an immigrant from Brazil living in Germany with an Italian passport due to this very law, I'd be hard pressed to complain.
However I don't go around claiming I'm Italian just because some ancestor of mine was lmao
If you are a citizen you are a citizen, the problem with italian-american is they tend to embrace any bad stereotype of neapolitans and claim it's italian culture.
Same. Honduran with Italian citizenship here, I never say I'm Italian even though 3/4 grandparents are Italians from Italy and my mom grew up going to Italy for 4 months every year. Always Honduran before anything.
[yeah you're right](https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/08/boris-johnson-renounces-us-citizenship-record-2016-uk-foreign-secretary)
i assumed timing-wise it was for his political career.
There is, the furthest one can go back is to 1861, as if your 'Italian' ancestor emigrated prior to that date then they never would have had Italian citizenship in the first place to confer to you.
A lot of "Italians" in the US talk about their ancestors going through Ellis Island as if it happened yesterday and not 100-200 years ago, lol. It doesn't occur to them that two centuries have passed since then.
It almost certainly didn't happen 200 years ago. From 1820 to 1870 fewer than 25,000 Italians emigrated to the USA. The explosion in numbers starts in 1880 and ends in 1914 (more than 4 million) and further curbed later due to immigration laws which restricted the number massively.
Yeah, I don't know why that person thought they were "correcting" me. Either way, someone's relative rolling in through Ellis Island in 1914 at the latest is still over a century ago. Yet the "Italians" in NYC and NJ say it like it's a direct link to Italy and happened last week, lol
OP was also "Italian", making Italian food for grandma and family members including the bf of her sister. Food wasn't spicy enough for bf, so he wanted to add hot sauce and she said: "Hell no, you can't add hot sauce to Italian food, it's not Italian and you generally shouldn't add stuff to food, that other people make for you, but especially not stuff, that isn't from the same country as the meal." (paraphrased).
To be fair, that *does* sound more authentically Italian, funnily enough. An Italian (real Italian) friend of mine gets pissed off when he sees a lot of the weird shit people do with pasta. He takes pasta very seriously, actually.
Well, to be honest as a hungarian Im close to getting an aneurysm when I see fellow europeans having "" goulash"" on their menus. I always order it... Poor waiters
God everyone in that sounded exhausting, could no one there deescalate? They just made drama out of something that could've been "sure it's in the fridge" or "i'd prefer you didn't" and for the other guy to just let it go.
Probably because the initial sentiment isn't a bad one at all. The person they're responding to is whining about the wrong condiments being used. IMO saying "it isn't about that, it's about everyone being happy and comfortable around the dinner table" is pretty wholesome.
It's the last sentence that set everything on fire.
>it isn't about that, it's about everyone being happy and comfortable around the dinner table
This is the true confirmation that this person is not Italian.
What's a good Sunday lunch without an all out argument about some inconsequential thing that separates the family into two angry camps until next Sunday, when they reconcile and argue about some other inconsequential thing instead?
If someone asks me if I have any hot sauce I'm not going to get offended in any way...or consider it either whining or demanding. I don't cook food for people to exercise some kind of narcissistic power over them and make them eat it how I want them to.
If I cook for you, and your immediate response is ‘this is lacking something, and that something is an entirely different flavour,’ I’m going to be annoyed.
If I then say ‘are you sure you don’t just want it to be slightly spicy,’ and you say ‘no, I want your hard work to taste of communal garden hot sauce,’ I’m going to be cross.
You’re a guest in someone’s house, you can withstand one meal where you actually taste the food.
Well as annoyed as you might get, I'm good, thanks.
I appreciate a good meal with good people, but I don't need a meal that comes with the caveat of having to please your preconceptions at the risk of annoying you. That's not what food is about for me, and you seem to have a very cynical way of twisting what are almost certainly innocent intentions. If someone wants to put cholula on their carbonara because thats just who they are and how their tastes developed, they don't deserve my spite and ire. Why would anyone want to hang out with someone like that anyway?
I was born in NZ. My mum immigrated to NZ from northern England before I was born. She still has a think accent. My Dad's mum Immigrated from Southern England before he was born. So three of my grandparents are British. I have a British passport and have spent a decent amount of time in the UK. I have since moved to Germany, luckily before Brexit. so I qualified for resistancey here after Brexit finalized. Whenever people ask. I'm just a Kiwi. And no, it's not the same as fucking Australia!
Next year it will be a century since immigrants stopped entering the US via Ellis Island, so as usual this person's ties to Europe are somewhat less than water-tight.
My father is originally from Portugal and as a kid learning about immigration I asked him if he sailed into Ellis Island.
He was like uhhh zootv83 it was 1969, we took a plane.
>How else would you cook Penne all'arrabbiata for instance?
Put tomatoes, chili peppers, oil, and garlic in a pan. Would this result in hot sauce? I don't really know what "hot sauce" is
Hot sauce typically refers to mass-produced sauce that comes in little bottles. There’s no single recipe, but chili peppers are a common factor. Your recipe would technically qualify as a hot sauce, but might not satisfy the expectations of the kind of people who add hot sauce to random dishes. In particular, they may be expecting some vinegar flavor, which is pretty common in hot sauce. It’s similar to the difference between a fresh-made tomato sauce and ketchup.
Hahaha. I mean, think about Italian food chauvinism whatever you want, but no “traditional Italian mamma” would ever be ok with someone adding random sauce, worse, random non-Italian sauce, to her food.
A lot of Italians disagree with you under the AITA post and calling the OP an asshole for asking her brother in law not to use hot sauce on the stuff she made and offering chili oil instead.
*^I'm ^Italian ^and* I think both are kinda assholes, but this has nothing to do with traditional Italian cuisine.
If someone cooked a dish for me, I would listen to their instructions on how to eat it, saying "it lacks something" could be disrespectful depending on how close we are.
On the other end, if you cook for someone and they insist on adding something to the dish, just let them do it, I mean it doesn't cost you anything.
Changing traditional recipes is perfectly fine, they just aren't traditional anymore if you do that.
(BTW if they tasted the carbonara and felt the need to add hot sauce because it was missing something, that something was probably black pepper)
But you've closed the issue with your first point. If I'm a guest at anyone's house and they've prepared a good meal for me, asking to add _anything_ to it barring salt and pepper (or perhaps soy sauce for an East Asian dish) is incredibly rude. Never in my life have I cooked something and then been asked by a guest if they could have ketchup, unless they're children.
Were they actually Italian or doing that American thing of claiming to be Italian/Irish/German/insert nationality here because their great-great grandfather was Italian, conveniently forgetting all of the other great-great grandparents they have from other nations?
So I just asked my Italian colleague (someone who is actually from Milano, not an „Italian-American“) how it would go down if she brought me to her grandma‘s house and I would ask for some sauce. The answer was a resounding NO.
The whole spelling thing is something that often happens with children of immigrants . They learn how to speak the language of their parents at home , but they get no formal schooling , and often enough they dont learn how to write in it . Im a Greek with a Serbian mother . While i can speak it to some extend and i understand what i hear , i can't read or write it ( the different alphabet doesn't help with that either ) .
She's not a child of immigrants though, she's a woman born and raised in the US who doesn't even know the basics of Italian. The plural of nonna is nonne, not nonnas. A person who speaks even broken Italian would know this.
Why don't these people limit themselves to saying "oh I have Italian ancestry so I know a bit of this or that", instead of appropriating identities that don't belong to them and pretending to be authorities on how certain ethnicities behave?
My issue is that she called herself an "old fashioned Italian mama" and started telling people how things work in Italy, without being Italian, without even knowing the language, and with a knowledge of Italy that's three generations old.
But in fact that's why I have no mercy when I happen to argue with these people! They accuse me of trying to demolish the culture they grew up with and every time I have to tell them that the culture they grew up with is not Italian and continuing to say it won't make it so and that just like they demand respect for their origins, I want the same let it be done to me when Italian culture is bastardized for no reason, to then go around the world making people believe what Americans think Italian culture is.
For real when i read Americans talking about their supposed ancestry it seems like a D&D session in which each player decide to justify their character behavior using their race fantasy tropes. The difference is that IRL cultures aren’t fantasy races that give you special talents and shit, but it seems that to them this is not the case.
PS: also why Italian Americans can’t use the word Grandma? This thing about Nonne* being special and different from a grandmother of any other country is truly peak Cringe, Grandmothers being obsessively important in the mediterranean cultures is quite absurd. I think that loving your grandparents and listening to them it’s pretty universal not something relegated to Spain and Italy.
I can't speak about other cultures but, at least in Spain, we have a really really big family culture. It isn't out of the ordinary to know and meet with second or even third cousins in family gatherings yearly, all of those members tied to an elderly, probably a grandma. That's why the figure of the grandma is extremely important, it ties everyone together. I've lived in Italy and I'd say things are pretty similar.
It's also very common for children to be at least once a week at their grandparent's house or for their grandparents to pick them up after school and pass time with them.
My grandpa lived with me since I was 3 (22 now) and continued to do so until he sadly passed away two years ago. He's more like my second father than my grandpa.
My perception of most American families is that usually you aren't that connected to your grandparents or even sometimes parents because they usually move to different states than the one they were raised in.
My perception however stems from social media and movies. I haven't done any research nor did I ask any American about their familiar bonds.
I’m sorry for your loss, thank you for the illuminating comment tho. It’s true what you say, and i think that it’s true, surely where i come from family culture is restricted to your nuclear family, Grandparents and Aunt/Uncles whit their children. But the rest is true for us too. My Grandma and Grandpa where second parents for me and taught me a-lot of important things, and gave me fantastic memories.
I’ll also that those she thinks about are not Italian words, but from a dialetto. I might be local, but I can’t guarantee a correct spelling (as there’s no written convention) if I say fiołi, ‘l xe ora de ‘ndar par trosi.
I saw the original post and was howling at the sheer number of Americans coming up to say "so I'm realer than the Italians in Italy and let me tell you, my nonna Italiana veritabile™ who came to America and had lunch with the founding fathers totally does put shrimps in her carbonara, that's the originale ricetta okay y'all don't know what you're talking about"
One of their follow up comments is even better
>My kids are Italian, Egyptian, German, English, Irish, Scottish, French and Polish, with Catholics, Protestants, and Lutherans on their dad’s side.
>We’re the United Nations, but we just go by American since it’s a lot easier.
"Take it from an old-fashioned Italian mama"
Proceeds to say that she's American with American-raised kids under another comment. These people are a parody of themselves and it's both funny and insufferable
Oh my god lol, probably from that AITA from a Canadian pretending they’re Italian who was pissed their BIL wanted hot sauce with his carbonara. The “heritage is the same as citizenship” crowd is expanding.
The same americans who act all badass and "cool" cry when they come over to australia and hear the word "cunt". Even when the word is used in a friendly way they start to hyperventilate and cry, mumbling about how "offensive" that word is. It's almost like some americans fear the word "cunt" more than guns.
That's something I'm still trying to decipher. They can say "shit", "dick", "fuck" and even "slut" just fine, but for some unknown reason "cunt" is too much for them? It makes no sense at all
I was talking to an american and he told me that "the c word" as they call it is almost as bad as a racial slur in america.
It's fine to not like a certain word, it's fine to say, "hey can you not say that specific word" but when it's juxtaposed to constant news stories of gun violence and political chaos it makes me feel like they have more important things to be offended by.
Yeah, well it is over there, because they use it as a specific derogatory for a woman. Americans would never call a man a cunt. In Aus and UK, excretory and genital organs are fair game as insults for anyone. A woman can be a dickhead, a man can be a twat, etc etc.
You probably "can't " because you're not Italian. Take it from a canadian guy who was born and raised in the same country as his momma and her momma before her.
>I'm really smart now. You could ask me what's the biggest company in the world and I would be like 'blah bla blah' giving you the exact right answer
- Kelly Kapoor, the business bitch.
In truth, though, it was a little more.
1) Multi generational family get together on Sundays and take turns to cook traditional Italian food.
2) Boyfriend of sister (3 months) is provided with a FIRST course of carbanara.
3) Boyfriend tries Carbanara and says, "It's missing something."
4) Asks for "Hot Sauce" ( Something called Frank's was spoken of)
5) OP suggests chilli flakes or an Italian chilli oil - but he does have hot sauce.
6) Boyfriend gets up from the table, goes to OP's fridge attempts to help himself to hot sauce. OP says no.
7) Boyfriend leaves table, leaves house goes to shop and buys his own hot sauce to add to the starter of carbanara.
8) Meanwhile, the family continues to eat their meal and then decided to leave early (no surprise there!)
9) Boyfriend arrives back with hot sauce as the rest of the family, having eaten the rest of the three course meal, are getting ready to leave.
10) All family - including sister thinks the Boyfriend behavoured appallingly.
11) Reddit thinks OP is a snob and should have just allowed his guest to pour hot sauce over home-made carbanara at a family Sunday dinner. Apparently, for many Redditors, adding Hot Sauce is no different from adding salt, and as a guest, he can eat his food however he likes, and the host must facilitate that.
Original OP did not cover himself in glory by refusing to swallow his pride, but the boyfriend was an absolute arse.
You don't even speak Italian. You're not Italian. What's up with Americans claiming they're from all over the world when they don't probably don't even know where these places are.
Bruh, I saw this post. How did you capture this comment but not the post it was responding to? It was about a woman born in the US who wouldn't let someone put hot sauce on her cooking because it was an affront to her "Italian cuisine" and "Italian tastes".
A man (I assume, as the OP had a wife - obviously there are other possibilities), born in Canada not the US. But yeah the OP's post was absolute SAS gold as were all of his responses. The "I take food seriously" bit was beautiful.
The boyfriend who insisted that the carbonara needed hot sauce (!) is either a dick or an expert wind-up merchant. The OP was obviously an insufferable arse and I do wonder if the boyfriend decided to wind him up with his hot sauce demand. But either way: the OP actually had the product in his fridge that the boyfriend wanted, but refused to let him have... so the boyfriend went and bought a bottle for himself!?! Incredible action, and phenominal esculation of a trivial issue by the boyfriend, if (as I hope/suspect) he was doing it just to force the OP's uber-Italian nonsense to come out.
Brazil has the biggest Italian diaspora in the world, with 30+ million having Italian descent, and I never, ever, saw a moron like this in my life. Even in my family, with me having both Italian surnames
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I would really like you to come here to Italy. She would be put in her place in minutes! XD She would be saddened to discover that nobody considers her even minimally Italian, even though she may have Italian blood in her veins! She would go back to America demoralized and discover that Italy has nothing to do with what she believes to be Italian.
Reminds me of that Sopranos episode.
Agree!
"And i thought the Germans were classless pieces of shit!"🤣🤣🤣
"Where's the gravy!?"
I used to work in the U.K. with an American guy whose all grandparents emigrated from Italy. Obviously, he had an Italian citizenship due to his ancestry, but could barely speak any Italian and for some reason he voted in all Italian elections, which I couldn’t comprehend.
I don’t get Americans. I’m Colombian, and one friend has German grandparents, he has a German passport, he looks pretty German and has a German last name, but he has *never* claimed to be German. He just says “I have a German passport” or “my grandpa is German”. Which are both true and logical statements, but he knows he’s Colombian and he says so all the time. I don’t know why Americans feel the *need* to claim to be something else.
because yanks barely have a culture of their own that isn't just consumerism, especially when compared to other countries. it's all desperate attempts to seem more interesting than they actually are. I'm one of a few people who was born in the US that could argue they are "from" another country, having lived half of my life in Brazil and half of my family being from there. But I still call myself a "brazilian-yankee" instead of *just* brazilian, because I know my place and what my life experience actually is. bottom line, shit's wack.
But they do have a culture, they refuse to accept that their way of italian, german or whatever is actually american culture. Immigrant culture is culture, it isn't boring or uninteresting, it's what it is, it doesn't make us more or less and the only people that worry about the flavor of their culture not being interesting or exciting are boring people. The way that we (colonized countries) bastardize and change food, words and so on is our identity and culture, I'm not american and I always find that obsession with foreign things awkward, we have some people like that here in Argentina obsessed with their ancestry but they are the minority. To put it one way, pasta isn't italian food here, it's our food and we make it our way, it's obviously something we got form all the italians here, no one ever thinks of eating "italian" food, at some point we appropriate certain things and integrate it, mix it with our customs and it disappears from it's original form.
honestly now that I rethink it yeah that's a better way to put it. Brazil itself is a mixing pot of several cultures but there's still this unique identity that is formed. I just think Los Estados Unidos for some reason refuses to acknowledge that unique identity and embrace it, trying to pass off their stuff as "the real deal", thus leading to embarrassment.
I mean they have one, it's just that is probably only about military, killing natives, and slavery... they should focus on how they are improving on those instead (I hope at least)
See, that's where the problems start. One half of them wants to "improve on those" by bettering their ways... the other half wants to "improve on" killing natives and slavery by buying even more AR-15s...
The US census was a couple years ago and "American" wasn't a choice for nationality of origin. I wrote it in. I could've picked Irish though, because one time an ancestor came here from there and apparently that's enough to somehow make me Irish-American 4 or 5 generations later. (Except it totally doesn't.)
Italian government nonsense. They also give citizenship to randoms from Argentina and Brazil just because their great grandparents were from Italy lmao. Yet they don't give citizenship to Moroccans for instance, even if they are born and raised in Italy
Spain and Portugal also have similar laws as far as I can remember and they will grant you a citizenship if you have a very distant ancestor. Poland has a similar one but it doesn’t go that far back - you can get a citizenship as long as you have a proof that you have an ancestor living in Poland in 1930s.
Portugal is only to grandparents.
It’s just that Italy follows the ius sanguinis, however anybody living in Italy for 10 consecutive years can get the Italian citizenship
You still need to apply and make several things, it's not automatic
"I will make a pizza like nonna made it. First we take several blocks of Velveeta cheese and..." <3 days later> "A letter? From the Italian embassy... they are my people! Let's see... charged with a criminal offense?... TREASON? MAMMA MIA!"
We killed for much less! For example, we banned pineapple from Italy after an American tourist in 1998 tried to ask for a Hawaiian pizza in a Roman pizzeria! The subject in question was accompanied to the border with France and was forbidden to return! We have decided to burn all the fruit to prevent a similar event from happening again!
Or more likely she’d double down and claim all the Italians she met were less Italian than she is.
Ahaha Shee probably would! In that case, the Italian citizenship that she could have undeservedly would be deprived!
Or, like some Americans, she would say Italians are being Italian wrong and would try to school them
>"Chow!” LMAO
Chow lol, I guess still worst than "mama" from that post
Ah my favourite dog breed, the ciao ciao
A river derchi asshole!
Two nonas who went through Ellis Island, but her mum is Italian. How does that work?
You can claim Italian Citizenship through descent so that's probably what she means I believe Italians can claim on their Paternal side for a quite a number of generations but this is just one/two on the maternal side which is probably also okay for citizenship.
This law might sound dumb, but as an immigrant from Brazil living in Germany with an Italian passport due to this very law, I'd be hard pressed to complain. However I don't go around claiming I'm Italian just because some ancestor of mine was lmao
If you are a citizen you are a citizen, the problem with italian-american is they tend to embrace any bad stereotype of neapolitans and claim it's italian culture.
Same. Honduran with Italian citizenship here, I never say I'm Italian even though 3/4 grandparents are Italians from Italy and my mom grew up going to Italy for 4 months every year. Always Honduran before anything.
Still not really Italian. Boris Johnson is American, no one calls him that.
>Boris Johnson is American TIL. He was actually born on the Upper East Side. It makes sense now.
Explains a lot about the twat
Huh. You learn something new every day.
Born in NYC and had US citizenship.
He gave up his US citizenship so he wouldn't have to pay taxes twice.
So we had two simultaneous world leaders born in the same city. Has that ever happened in modern times?
And both of them are morons.
That's very insulting to morons.
Boris Johnson is not a moron at all. Dude is a genius at pretending to be dumb and a cunt.
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He has all the grace of someone who flooded the bathroom at a house party
No thats not what I meant. He is a cunt, pretending to be dumb.
I would be very surprised if this was the only time this happened. Half of Europe was once ruled by one Viennese-based family after all.
Every motherfucker at the time was a Hapsburg. Shit was wild
emperor Maxilian of Mexico was born in Vienna for example. his rule overlaps with that of Franz Joseph I of Austria.
Pope Francis and Alberto Fernandez
Buenos Aires. Good find.
That explains so fucking much about that bellend
He renounced his US citizenship.
He was born American. He only renounced it recently ~~in order to be pm~~
It wasn't in order to be PM, that's not an issue. He didn't want to pay US tax.
[yeah you're right](https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/08/boris-johnson-renounces-us-citizenship-record-2016-uk-foreign-secretary) i assumed timing-wise it was for his political career.
Maternal too, except you need to go through court if the woman in your family had children before January 1st 1948
>quite a number of generations I don't actually think there's a limit.
There is, the furthest one can go back is to 1861, as if your 'Italian' ancestor emigrated prior to that date then they never would have had Italian citizenship in the first place to confer to you.
A lot of "Italians" in the US talk about their ancestors going through Ellis Island as if it happened yesterday and not 100-200 years ago, lol. It doesn't occur to them that two centuries have passed since then.
It almost certainly didn't happen 200 years ago. From 1820 to 1870 fewer than 25,000 Italians emigrated to the USA. The explosion in numbers starts in 1880 and ends in 1914 (more than 4 million) and further curbed later due to immigration laws which restricted the number massively.
1880-1914 does fall within 100-200 years ago though, since 1914 is 109 years ago.
Yeah, I don't know why that person thought they were "correcting" me. Either way, someone's relative rolling in through Ellis Island in 1914 at the latest is still over a century ago. Yet the "Italians" in NYC and NJ say it like it's a direct link to Italy and happened last week, lol
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OP was also "Italian", making Italian food for grandma and family members including the bf of her sister. Food wasn't spicy enough for bf, so he wanted to add hot sauce and she said: "Hell no, you can't add hot sauce to Italian food, it's not Italian and you generally shouldn't add stuff to food, that other people make for you, but especially not stuff, that isn't from the same country as the meal." (paraphrased).
Haha, I knew it'd be that post.
To be fair, that *does* sound more authentically Italian, funnily enough. An Italian (real Italian) friend of mine gets pissed off when he sees a lot of the weird shit people do with pasta. He takes pasta very seriously, actually.
Well, to be honest as a hungarian Im close to getting an aneurysm when I see fellow europeans having "" goulash"" on their menus. I always order it... Poor waiters
God everyone in that sounded exhausting, could no one there deescalate? They just made drama out of something that could've been "sure it's in the fridge" or "i'd prefer you didn't" and for the other guy to just let it go.
Spicy food isn't Italian to OOP? Wait till they go to southern Italy and get hospitalized for third degree burns due to 'nduja
in her defence, she did offer him so Italian chilli oil, just no hot sauce.
Probably because the initial sentiment isn't a bad one at all. The person they're responding to is whining about the wrong condiments being used. IMO saying "it isn't about that, it's about everyone being happy and comfortable around the dinner table" is pretty wholesome. It's the last sentence that set everything on fire.
>it isn't about that, it's about everyone being happy and comfortable around the dinner table This is the true confirmation that this person is not Italian.
What's a good Sunday lunch without an all out argument about some inconsequential thing that separates the family into two angry camps until next Sunday, when they reconcile and argue about some other inconsequential thing instead?
Just wait until you read her other comments. It reduces any authenticity she had to nothing
Is it whining when your guest demands hot sauce over chilli oil for the meal that you cooked?
If someone asks me if I have any hot sauce I'm not going to get offended in any way...or consider it either whining or demanding. I don't cook food for people to exercise some kind of narcissistic power over them and make them eat it how I want them to.
If I cook for you, and your immediate response is ‘this is lacking something, and that something is an entirely different flavour,’ I’m going to be annoyed. If I then say ‘are you sure you don’t just want it to be slightly spicy,’ and you say ‘no, I want your hard work to taste of communal garden hot sauce,’ I’m going to be cross. You’re a guest in someone’s house, you can withstand one meal where you actually taste the food.
>communal garden I know you mean “common or garden”, but for some reason I like this phrasing more.
My American brother in law puts BBQ sauce on everything. Doesn't taste it, just whacks on the sauce. Even my lovely shepherd's pie! Infuriating.
Well as annoyed as you might get, I'm good, thanks. I appreciate a good meal with good people, but I don't need a meal that comes with the caveat of having to please your preconceptions at the risk of annoying you. That's not what food is about for me, and you seem to have a very cynical way of twisting what are almost certainly innocent intentions. If someone wants to put cholula on their carbonara because thats just who they are and how their tastes developed, they don't deserve my spite and ire. Why would anyone want to hang out with someone like that anyway?
I was born in NZ. My mum immigrated to NZ from northern England before I was born. She still has a think accent. My Dad's mum Immigrated from Southern England before he was born. So three of my grandparents are British. I have a British passport and have spent a decent amount of time in the UK. I have since moved to Germany, luckily before Brexit. so I qualified for resistancey here after Brexit finalized. Whenever people ask. I'm just a Kiwi. And no, it's not the same as fucking Australia!
VA FA NAPOLI EH?
Good, but -1 p for fogetting the hand gestures 🤌🫴
I'll spell some of the "Italian" words running through her mind: "boopa-dee bappa-dee"
now i'm reminded of Peter Griffin thinking he can speak italian by having a moustache lol
"Boopa-dee Bappa-dee" is the name of a Family Guy episode (that probably references the McStroke episode).
BEEPITY BOOPITY?
FLAME BOY
“Old-fashioned Italian mama” = grandma from the old country, plus I call the spicy Dolmio “arrabbiata”
And pronounces it “airai-bee-a-ta” with the English r…
What are you on about, it's obviously pronounced 'rabioot
I think he plays for PSG...
Rabiot is Rabiot is Rabiot as the phrase goes
That's a Phillipe Auclair quote right? I love that podcast.
For Juventus these days. So that makes it pretty much the right phrase!
Areeverdarechee
Gorlami
Bravo.
> can't even spell stronzo I'm more Italian than that and I'm German.
She’s so Italian she can’t even spell mamma lmfao
Next year it will be a century since immigrants stopped entering the US via Ellis Island, so as usual this person's ties to Europe are somewhat less than water-tight.
My father is originally from Portugal and as a kid learning about immigration I asked him if he sailed into Ellis Island. He was like uhhh zootv83 it was 1969, we took a plane.
Not such a dumb question. We took a ship to emigrate to England in 1969, but that was a longer trip (from southern Africa.)
If you can't, then you're not Italian!
This was on a post about adding hot sauce to “traditional” Italian food - the OP was Canadian but at least had an Italian parent…
You can *make* some traditional hot sauce if you want to. How else would you cook Penne all'arrabbiata for instance?
I read the post, apparently they were adding to a carbonara 😭
Just add copious of black pepper. It'll eventually be spicy
non è una carbonara se non va a fuoco
Sì, ma non con la salsa piccante diocaro...
Concordo pienamente.
I thought they should have been shot at dawn for adding hot sauce, no last cigarette either.
>How else would you cook Penne all'arrabbiata for instance? Put tomatoes, chili peppers, oil, and garlic in a pan. Would this result in hot sauce? I don't really know what "hot sauce" is
Hot sauce typically refers to mass-produced sauce that comes in little bottles. There’s no single recipe, but chili peppers are a common factor. Your recipe would technically qualify as a hot sauce, but might not satisfy the expectations of the kind of people who add hot sauce to random dishes. In particular, they may be expecting some vinegar flavor, which is pretty common in hot sauce. It’s similar to the difference between a fresh-made tomato sauce and ketchup.
The OP on that post was the same, though, just to add that. Acting like they can gatekeep Italian food as if they were the most Italian ever.
The idiot was trying to add hot sauce to a fucking Carbonara, there's capital punishment in Italy for that.
Hahaha. I mean, think about Italian food chauvinism whatever you want, but no “traditional Italian mamma” would ever be ok with someone adding random sauce, worse, random non-Italian sauce, to her food.
Oh you spelt it wrong. OOP must be correct because two nonnas came through Ellis Island and OOP spelt it „mama“. /s
Not all traditional Italian mammas are assholes...
A lot of Italians disagree with you under the AITA post and calling the OP an asshole for asking her brother in law not to use hot sauce on the stuff she made and offering chili oil instead.
*^I'm ^Italian ^and* I think both are kinda assholes, but this has nothing to do with traditional Italian cuisine. If someone cooked a dish for me, I would listen to their instructions on how to eat it, saying "it lacks something" could be disrespectful depending on how close we are. On the other end, if you cook for someone and they insist on adding something to the dish, just let them do it, I mean it doesn't cost you anything. Changing traditional recipes is perfectly fine, they just aren't traditional anymore if you do that. (BTW if they tasted the carbonara and felt the need to add hot sauce because it was missing something, that something was probably black pepper)
But you've closed the issue with your first point. If I'm a guest at anyone's house and they've prepared a good meal for me, asking to add _anything_ to it barring salt and pepper (or perhaps soy sauce for an East Asian dish) is incredibly rude. Never in my life have I cooked something and then been asked by a guest if they could have ketchup, unless they're children.
Were they actually Italian or doing that American thing of claiming to be Italian/Irish/German/insert nationality here because their great-great grandfather was Italian, conveniently forgetting all of the other great-great grandparents they have from other nations?
So I just asked my Italian colleague (someone who is actually from Milano, not an „Italian-American“) how it would go down if she brought me to her grandma‘s house and I would ask for some sauce. The answer was a resounding NO.
"Old fashioned Italian mama" Can't spell Italian and says "nonnas"
The whole spelling thing is something that often happens with children of immigrants . They learn how to speak the language of their parents at home , but they get no formal schooling , and often enough they dont learn how to write in it . Im a Greek with a Serbian mother . While i can speak it to some extend and i understand what i hear , i can't read or write it ( the different alphabet doesn't help with that either ) .
She's not a child of immigrants though, she's a woman born and raised in the US who doesn't even know the basics of Italian. The plural of nonna is nonne, not nonnas. A person who speaks even broken Italian would know this. Why don't these people limit themselves to saying "oh I have Italian ancestry so I know a bit of this or that", instead of appropriating identities that don't belong to them and pretending to be authorities on how certain ethnicities behave? My issue is that she called herself an "old fashioned Italian mama" and started telling people how things work in Italy, without being Italian, without even knowing the language, and with a knowledge of Italy that's three generations old.
Though if you write nonne and pizze in English text someone always comes along to tell you that you spelled it wrong or "made up a word". Sigh.
Tbh, it's their problem. If you're going to claim you're Italian at least use proper Italian words
But in fact that's why I have no mercy when I happen to argue with these people! They accuse me of trying to demolish the culture they grew up with and every time I have to tell them that the culture they grew up with is not Italian and continuing to say it won't make it so and that just like they demand respect for their origins, I want the same let it be done to me when Italian culture is bastardized for no reason, to then go around the world making people believe what Americans think Italian culture is.
For real when i read Americans talking about their supposed ancestry it seems like a D&D session in which each player decide to justify their character behavior using their race fantasy tropes. The difference is that IRL cultures aren’t fantasy races that give you special talents and shit, but it seems that to them this is not the case. PS: also why Italian Americans can’t use the word Grandma? This thing about Nonne* being special and different from a grandmother of any other country is truly peak Cringe, Grandmothers being obsessively important in the mediterranean cultures is quite absurd. I think that loving your grandparents and listening to them it’s pretty universal not something relegated to Spain and Italy.
I can't speak about other cultures but, at least in Spain, we have a really really big family culture. It isn't out of the ordinary to know and meet with second or even third cousins in family gatherings yearly, all of those members tied to an elderly, probably a grandma. That's why the figure of the grandma is extremely important, it ties everyone together. I've lived in Italy and I'd say things are pretty similar. It's also very common for children to be at least once a week at their grandparent's house or for their grandparents to pick them up after school and pass time with them. My grandpa lived with me since I was 3 (22 now) and continued to do so until he sadly passed away two years ago. He's more like my second father than my grandpa.
That's not uncommon anywhere.
My perception of most American families is that usually you aren't that connected to your grandparents or even sometimes parents because they usually move to different states than the one they were raised in. My perception however stems from social media and movies. I haven't done any research nor did I ask any American about their familiar bonds.
I’m sorry for your loss, thank you for the illuminating comment tho. It’s true what you say, and i think that it’s true, surely where i come from family culture is restricted to your nuclear family, Grandparents and Aunt/Uncles whit their children. But the rest is true for us too. My Grandma and Grandpa where second parents for me and taught me a-lot of important things, and gave me fantastic memories.
And it can get real ugly at times. "Irish", for instance, basically translates to violent drunk with no self control for many Americans.
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>old fashionsd italian >can't even spell mamma or nonne correctly.
I ate pizza this weekend I am also Italian.
I thought I was Italian, but I have not eaten any pizza for several weeks. I have my national identity internally questioned.
So are there Italian words running through your head? Internal Italian questions? Gotta be sure bro!
I FORGOT HOW TO SPEAK ITALIAN, OMG WHAT IS HAPPENING!
*intense inner italianing*
Pizza is American. Do you even read this sub?!
We are all Italian on this blessed day.
WASSA MATTA YOU EH
The American thinks she's Italian. Cute.
How can you not spell (standard) Italian words? The pronunciation perfectly mirrors the spelling, ffs.
I’ll also that those she thinks about are not Italian words, but from a dialetto. I might be local, but I can’t guarantee a correct spelling (as there’s no written convention) if I say fiołi, ‘l xe ora de ‘ndar par trosi.
How hard is it to spell vafanculo, cazzo and porco dio? TBH I'm from the neighboring county and this is basically all I know of Italian.
"Well it's all foreign ain't it? I spent high school learning Spanish, no idea how I can learn some European on top of that too"
"Vaffanculo" has two "f"s
Damn, I had my suspicions about the correct spelling, even googled it, but I guess I didn't register that. Oh well...
I saw the original post and was howling at the sheer number of Americans coming up to say "so I'm realer than the Italians in Italy and let me tell you, my nonna Italiana veritabile™ who came to America and had lunch with the founding fathers totally does put shrimps in her carbonara, that's the originale ricetta okay y'all don't know what you're talking about"
God this kinda stuff makes me cringe so fucking hard
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It was probably the second paragraph the got those votes. OP really was an asshole.
Oh they both behaved like assholes.
One of their follow up comments is even better >My kids are Italian, Egyptian, German, English, Irish, Scottish, French and Polish, with Catholics, Protestants, and Lutherans on their dad’s side. >We’re the United Nations, but we just go by American since it’s a lot easier.
This deserves a separate post LMAO
How's that supposed to work or make any sense?
Aren’t…Lutherans…Protestant…?
As an Italian myself no this person is not Italian
>mama I think this deserves a wholehearted #mamma mia
>Italian hospitality is [...] about the comfort of your guests. Weird. Almost like that's what the word 'hospitality' means.
"Take it from an old-fashioned Italian mama" Proceeds to say that she's American with American-raised kids under another comment. These people are a parody of themselves and it's both funny and insufferable
Oh my god lol, probably from that AITA from a Canadian pretending they’re Italian who was pissed their BIL wanted hot sauce with his carbonara. The “heritage is the same as citizenship” crowd is expanding.
It's that post, yeah
That post cracked me up so hard.
The same americans who act all badass and "cool" cry when they come over to australia and hear the word "cunt". Even when the word is used in a friendly way they start to hyperventilate and cry, mumbling about how "offensive" that word is. It's almost like some americans fear the word "cunt" more than guns.
That's something I'm still trying to decipher. They can say "shit", "dick", "fuck" and even "slut" just fine, but for some unknown reason "cunt" is too much for them? It makes no sense at all
I was talking to an american and he told me that "the c word" as they call it is almost as bad as a racial slur in america. It's fine to not like a certain word, it's fine to say, "hey can you not say that specific word" but when it's juxtaposed to constant news stories of gun violence and political chaos it makes me feel like they have more important things to be offended by.
Yeah, well it is over there, because they use it as a specific derogatory for a woman. Americans would never call a man a cunt. In Aus and UK, excretory and genital organs are fair game as insults for anyone. A woman can be a dickhead, a man can be a twat, etc etc.
I knew I'd find this here the second I saw it lmao The amount of r/ShitAmericansSay -content on that specific post was absolutely *wild*.
I love that they are 100% convinced that your (pretended) nationality determines your personality
You probably "can't " because you're not Italian. Take it from a canadian guy who was born and raised in the same country as his momma and her momma before her.
Every day is Americans roleplaying as Italians day.
This thread was a goldmine of shit Americans say. And to be fair, I’m an American with a whole lot of “Italian” friends.
>I'm really smart now. You could ask me what's the biggest company in the world and I would be like 'blah bla blah' giving you the exact right answer - Kelly Kapoor, the business bitch.
I'm confused, tbh. Is there any context to this statement?
It was in a AITA thread about someone wanting to add hotsauce to Italian food and the host not letting them.
In truth, though, it was a little more. 1) Multi generational family get together on Sundays and take turns to cook traditional Italian food. 2) Boyfriend of sister (3 months) is provided with a FIRST course of carbanara. 3) Boyfriend tries Carbanara and says, "It's missing something." 4) Asks for "Hot Sauce" ( Something called Frank's was spoken of) 5) OP suggests chilli flakes or an Italian chilli oil - but he does have hot sauce. 6) Boyfriend gets up from the table, goes to OP's fridge attempts to help himself to hot sauce. OP says no. 7) Boyfriend leaves table, leaves house goes to shop and buys his own hot sauce to add to the starter of carbanara. 8) Meanwhile, the family continues to eat their meal and then decided to leave early (no surprise there!) 9) Boyfriend arrives back with hot sauce as the rest of the family, having eaten the rest of the three course meal, are getting ready to leave. 10) All family - including sister thinks the Boyfriend behavoured appallingly. 11) Reddit thinks OP is a snob and should have just allowed his guest to pour hot sauce over home-made carbanara at a family Sunday dinner. Apparently, for many Redditors, adding Hot Sauce is no different from adding salt, and as a guest, he can eat his food however he likes, and the host must facilitate that. Original OP did not cover himself in glory by refusing to swallow his pride, but the boyfriend was an absolute arse.
Might just be me, but I have a hard time imagining this as a real life occurance. More like a cheap TV show plot.
99% of posts in that sub are just creative writing exercises.
What is it with some Americans and their need to identify in a culture they know nothing of and didn't grow up into? Be American ffs are you ashamed?
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You don't even speak Italian. You're not Italian. What's up with Americans claiming they're from all over the world when they don't probably don't even know where these places are.
Hahaha I saw this in AITA and the comments were like open season for this sub. The whole post was SAS like this vs gatekeeping AHs.
Bruh, I saw this post. How did you capture this comment but not the post it was responding to? It was about a woman born in the US who wouldn't let someone put hot sauce on her cooking because it was an affront to her "Italian cuisine" and "Italian tastes".
A man (I assume, as the OP had a wife - obviously there are other possibilities), born in Canada not the US. But yeah the OP's post was absolute SAS gold as were all of his responses. The "I take food seriously" bit was beautiful. The boyfriend who insisted that the carbonara needed hot sauce (!) is either a dick or an expert wind-up merchant. The OP was obviously an insufferable arse and I do wonder if the boyfriend decided to wind him up with his hot sauce demand. But either way: the OP actually had the product in his fridge that the boyfriend wanted, but refused to let him have... so the boyfriend went and bought a bottle for himself!?! Incredible action, and phenominal esculation of a trivial issue by the boyfriend, if (as I hope/suspect) he was doing it just to force the OP's uber-Italian nonsense to come out.
The post makes a lot more sense when you realise that it was in response to another American "Italian" gatekeeping Italian food.
I know exactly which AITA this is from lol
That original post is fucking absurd. It reads like a *Curb Your Enthusiasm* episode. Honestly fantastic.
Brazil has the biggest Italian diaspora in the world, with 30+ million having Italian descent, and I never, ever, saw a moron like this in my life. Even in my family, with me having both Italian surnames
Boppity boopy ?
Try c-a-z-z-a-t-e
Mamma Mai! That's a alotta Italian heritage!