Two weeks ago, after a wine tasting in Colli tortonesi, my friends took me to lunch.
The most appealing dish on the menu was clam spaghetti.
Western cuisine impression
My earliest memory of Western food is steak. There were quite a few steakhouses in my neighbourhood when I was a kid. Occasionally my family and I paid our visits to each one of them, where steak was served on a hot cast iron plate, with a sunny-side-up egg, some noodles and a mix of diced carrot, sweetcorn, and peas, all sizzling to the max. The steak plate was then accompanied by corn chowder, buns and gently sweetened iced black tea served in a soft, white plastic cup.
Then a few years later, I remember every Friday night we would drive to Chung-Li, a town next to ours, for a steak dinner. The combo on the cast iron plate was similar, only the chowder was topped with a layer of puff pastry, which gave it an expensive feel.
As far as I can remember, pasta was not in my childhood Western food archive. At senior high, on one school fair, me and my classmates were to sell pasta (I mustn’t have been the one making that decision because I knew zero about pasta back then). My mum cooked me a few packets of colourful fusilli bought at a supermarket. I brought them to school to mix it with the ragù made by one of the classmate’s mum. See how effectively our pasta assembly line worked?
When my mum was boiling those fusilli, I was right there watching. Not much detail I can remember except for the tremendous amount of time needed for the pasta to be cooked through.
It was only after I went to university my exposure to pasta took off. Just outside the uni there were several pasta restaurants. It was not unusual for me to eat pasta for both lunch and dinner on one single day. I was in love with it.
The steak I grew up eating, although the steak itself is Western food, all the sides are put together by Taiwan steakhouse owners with the influence of the Yōshoku (Japanised European cuisine) culture.
In Italy, when you order a grilled T-bone steak, what you get is literally a plate of T-bone steak with no sides. You want any? You’ve got to order them separately. While in Taiwan, we prefer a fuller, more colourful plate presentation with a more complete nutrition pool: steak and eggs give you proteins, noodles carbs, the mix of carrot, sweetcorn and peas has fibre. The chowder shows once again the Yōshoku influence, because a Yōshoku set menu usually includes a soup, which anyway coincides with our soup-in-every-meal ritual. And black tea is a treat for children, well, at least for me. When I was little, my home never stocked any beverages. Only special occasions and steakhouse visits gave me an access to them. (Black tea was first introduced by the Japanese from Assam, India, and had been mainly planted in Sun Moon Lake in central Taiwan. Black tea has always been regarded as a Western drink in Taiwan. No wonder it’s been associated with steak.)
As with steak, the pasta I ate at uni was also a mix of Taiwanese creativity and, again, the Yōshoku cuisine. But I only realised this after moving to Italy.
Pesto pasta culture shock
In Italy, pasta with pesto is literally pasta and pesto with no meat. Pine nuts are crushed and stirred into the pesto, so you get the flavour of pine nuts without the need to chew them. While the pasta with pesto I ate at uni had not only whole pine nuts, but also juicy chicken dices all over the plate. Since this pasta with pesto image had long been imprinted on my mind, you can only imagine how culturally shocked I was when I had my first pasta with pesto in Italy! On the one hand, I found the Italian version too simple; on the other hand, I finally realised the pasta I had been having thoughout my life in Taiwan was actually a fusion.
Aside from the pasta toppings, the consistency of the sauce is also very different. At uni, every time I finished a pasta dish, I remember seeing a small pond of broth (in which there was more liquid than oil) at the bottom of the plate. In the case of clam spaghetti, you can lift the plate up to your mouth and bottom up the broth (or scoop it with a spoon if elegance is your thing). And that, is a delightful garlicky clam broth.
As for the Italian counterpart, the amount of olive oil used to sauté the garlic, parsley and clams is not small, so the final sauce is much more oily than liquidy. (If you ever have a chance to see how freely the Italians pour their olive oil pre-sauté, you will have a good idea about the texture of their pasta sauce.) Despite a thicker sauce, and despite the European flavour of olive oil and parsley, I still almost always order the clam spaghetti whenever I see it on the menu here in Italy, simply because the garlicky clams remind me of a Taiwanese dish, much so that even the lack of a heavenly Asian basil called “nine-floored pagoda” is bearable. With the Italian garlicky clams, my Asian palate is more than happy.
*In case you didn’t already know, Taiwan had been colonised by Japan for 50 years (1895-1945). Hence its Western food culture is largely in line with the Japanised European “Yōshoku” style.
