The Italians aren’t really ones for the tapas approach. I’ve often felt rather miserly when, in a market, I might be purchasing a single melon or a solitary bag of spinach. All around me are women (as they invariably are, Italian men don’t really shop, though they do ‘advise’) buying 10kg of oranges, or 5 pineapples, or their own body weight in tomatoes. If Italians are going to eat something for dinner, even if it’s just the contorno (side dish) or fruit for desert, they go for it. Where I might serve up as a starter a single slice of melon, cut into a ’boat’ of bite sized cubes, my Italian counterpart would serve a whole melon, boldly sliced. My side vegetable might comprise 10-20 green beans and a few spoonfuls of peas; theirs 1-200 beans and an entire bag of peas. My chop is their calf.
I don’t think it’s that they’re greedy, or that I am really Jack Sprat-mean, I just think we see these things in a different way. It’s as if (and some physiologist somewhere has probably looked into this) they feel that to make an impression on the body, one needs to provide above a certain quite high base level; 20 beans and you might as well not bother. Five a day? More like five kilos a day. I don’t think I’ve ever eaten more than one orange in a sitting. I’ve seen Italians eat five! Because today is orange day. So let’s make it count.
Apply this same approach to gelato or chocolate and you’ll have found just one of the many reasons Italy is such a lovely place to go on holiday.
