For Someone who Finds Variety of Diet a Bit Disconcerting

For someone who finds variety of diet a bit disconcerting, travelling in Europe may lose some of its appeal. France is probably little problem, we find that we are eating steak frites in France unless we take care not to – not that we have anything against steak frites, nothing whatsoever at all, it just can get a little boring. And to be fair a French restaurant will always have something other than steak frites, it’s just that for those who want it, it’s usually there, and sometimes you need to search the menu for the alternatives.

Germany is more varied, though you can almost always get a piece of meat and some potatoes, often bratkartoffeln, which I am rather partial to, that is potatoes fried with onions and bacon fat, though in Swabia, in south-west Germany, you are more like to get spätzle, which are pasta noodles. Quite why spätzle should be a speciality of that area, a kind of joke speciality like Welshmen eating leeks, I have no idea. 

Meat or fish can sometimes be drowned in sauces in Germany, sometimes grossly so.

Italy is more particular. Pizza and pasta are available everywhere, though pizza often not at lunchtime. And fish restaurants tend to serve mostly just fish. As with everything, Italy does need a bit of expertise or luck.

Our local taverna here in Santa Vittoria does typical, ordinary, non-fancy food typical of this area. For antipasto there is slices of prosciutto crudo, that is cured uncooked ham, sometimes in Britain called Parma ham, even if it doesn’t come from Parma, which you can have with melon as an option; slices of different types of cured meat, called an affetato or sliced; bruschette, little bits of toast with something spread on them, my favourite is very simple, you can do it at home, it is butter and a couple of small fillets of tinned anchovy, surprisingly tasty yet so simple. And also, very local I’ve never seen it anywhere but this area, corata, which is lamb’s heart and possibly liver chopped small in scrambled egg.Not everyone likes that but I do. At the taverna you choose what you want, each item is priced separately, eg one piece of bruschetta, one euro.

Then there’s pasta, different types of pasta with different flavours of sauce. My favourite is what the older folk all say they were fed on as children, when there was little money around, spaghetti with olive oil flavoured with garlic, with a few flecks of peperoncino, dried chilli. Very simple.

Then there is meat, which in Italy tends to be served by itself on the plate, and you order a side plate of vegetable or salad separately. The meat might be some lamb chops, or, my favourite if they have it at the Taverna which they don’t always: grilled pigs liver. In Italy there will never in my experience be a sauce with the meat.

Red meat – i.e. not chicken or rabbit – is always served with a wedge of lemon, and it’s amazing how nice that is. Squeezed over the grilled meat – I don’t know why you never see that in Britain. Though actually I do: in Britain the tradition is to serve meat hot in thin slices. In a restaurant this is practically impossible without a gravy as the meat would cool before it got to the table and then the customers would complain it was cold, so meat served in that way will always have a gravy on it, which being water-based retains the heat. You wouldn’t want lemon with gravy. In Italy it’s more likely to be a chunk of meat, which therefore stays hot, or if it isn’t then it’ll be acceptable to serve it cool. 

Salad in Italy is often too salty for our tastes (and in Germany it is too much covered with some slimy dressing, though you tend to get a big portion which mitigates the gloopy substance a bit), in fact eating in restaurants in Italy always sees us glugging gallons of water during the night. The Italians eat too much salt.

Vegetables are whatever you ask for.  Thin green beans, fagiolini, are in season at the moment. Then there’s cicoria, which looks a little bit like rocket when on the shelf but is cooked and has a bitter greens taste. Italians tend to love it because they were fed it as children. Brits find it a bit too like bitter greens, but I quite like it. You normally order vegetables individually, none of this rubbish of a half-moon dish with a bit of carrot, a bit of cauliflower, a few East African-grown sugar snap peas. If you think you have problems with food overseas, imagine what it’s like for an Italian coming to Britain.

And of course for the children and the Brits, there are patatine, chips.

There is, probably, something for everyone – in Italian restaurants there’s little formality, if you want just a main course you can have just a main course. But finding that something can be, as I suggested, a little experimental.