All national cuisines are myths:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/dec/15/myth-traditional-italian-cuisine-food
The “Italian” cuisine that conquered the world was not the one Italians carried with them when they emigrated. They had no such cuisine to carry. Those who left Italy did so because they were hungry. If they’d had daily access to tortellini, lasagne and bowls of spaghetti as later imagined, they would not have boarded ships for New York, Buenos Aires or São Paulo to face discrimination, exploitation and the occasional lynching. They arrived abroad with a handful of memories and a deep desire to never eat bad polenta again”
“And then something miraculous happened: they encountered abundance. Meat, cheese, wheat and tomatoes in quantities unimaginable in the villages they had fled. Presented with ingredients they’d never seen together in one place, they invented new dishes. These creations – not ancient recipes – are what later returned to Italy as “tradition”. In short: Italian cuisine did not migrate. It was invented abroad by people who had finally found something to eat.”
