Meal planning

The classic Italian meal includes a primo, the pasta course; a secondo of meat; a contorno, a vegetable side; and fruit and coffee to finish. Special occasions--holidays and Sunday dinners at Nonna's house--may call for an additional antipasto of ham, salame, and cheese, fritters, little salads of meat and vegetables, and other delicacies at the beginning of the meal, and perhaps a dolce, a sweet dessert, to bring the meal to a close. 

Two of our favorite restaurants, Trattoria San Giorgio and Ristorante Ugolini, serve a pared-down version of this menu for their fixed-price lunches every weekday: a primo, a secondo, a contorno, water, wine, and a coffee, all for 12 or 13 euros, or about $14 or $15. That still seems like a lot of food (as well as terrific value). These places are full of working folks, mostly men, filling up before they get back to the job, but I've been left wondering how many Italians really eat this way all the time.

The San Giorgio menu--it's different every day.

So I started asking some of my Italian friends what their usual daily meal plan is. My sample skewed heavily older and female, but the answers were very consistent. No one eats that traditional mult-course meal on a daily basis, which didn't surprise me. But the way they do eat did. 

Breakfast (colazione) for most is coffee, or sometimes tea, and toast or one of those not-very-sweet cookies that crowd the breakfast aisle of the supermarkets here. 

Colazione di campioni.

Lunch (pranzo) was universally pasta or occasionally risotto, with a side of salad or other vegetables. Further evidence that this is standard: a lot of the bars around here offer a "Pausa Pranzo," or lunch break, with menus heavy on pasta, and I enjoy walking by and ogling the bowls of pasta their customers are tucking into. Almost always these folks aren't eating pasta with meatballs or sausages or even ragu bolognese, just a simple sauce with perhaps a few cubes of pancetta but more often no meat at all. 

Pasta at San Giorgio.

Dinner (cena), also pretty universally, is meat or fish, vegetables (the latter sometimes including boiled potatoes), and bread. This seems to be the only concentrated protein of the day, and they don't generally get to it until eight or nine at night.

In the interest of fairness, I should note that there was considerably less unanimity about la colazione than about the other meals. While no one admitted to regularly indulging in a cappuccino in the morning, which is the usual thimbleful of espresso coffee with about a third of a cup of hot milk added, a few have yogurt with fruit and perhaps some oats or nuts, or a rice cake with nut butter instead of a cookie. Eggs were never mentioned, and only one person in my unscientific survey, a young woman, has meat for breakfast, specifically ham and cheese with her toast. (Maybe this signals that younger people are eating differently, but I hesitate to generalize based on an n of one.)

 

Now I am not only an American, but an American raised on the precepts of mid-century nutrition guru Adelle Davis, whose preaching about the virtues of consuming handfuls of vitamin and mineral supplements and huge amounts of protein I followed until I was well into my thirties. When we were young, Danny and I often consumed an entire chicken at a sitting, and breakfasts of eggs, bacon, cheese, and yogurt with fruit were pretty standard. (Strangely enough, we weren't particularly fat in those days. Ah youth!) 

Two kids high on life and protein.

Although we now eat relatively normally, compared to our youthful excesses, to me a meal without some kind of serious protein still seems a little too close to starvation. (Those New York Times "main" dishes of spaghetti with zucchini, for instance.) That this whole country is running on no more than a splash of milk at breakfast and maybe a little grated Parmesan at lunch strikes me as baffling, if not alarming.  Why aren't they out cold by the time dinner and some meat finally arrive?

Years ago I started having oats or other cereal for breakfast with fruit and yogurt, plus coffee with a lot of milk, because getting a generous quotient of dairy first thing in the morning makes me feel well nurtured. So I'm not that far off from some Italians in the breakfast department, although I suspect my heaping breakfast bowl is considerably larger than what my friends are having. But at least it's not a plate of eggs, pancakes, sausages, and grits.

I haven't been interested in following suit the rest of the day, though. When we got to Italy this time Danny and I agreed that we'd try having our main meal midday and a light supper in the evening, instead of having a small lunch and a big dinner. I like this new eating pattern a lot, and we've both lost a few pounds, which is maybe why Danny isn't quite so keen on it. Be that as it may, I suppose we could have considered an inverted version of Italian meals by having meat for lunch and pasta for dinner. But as is often observed, nowhere are cultural prejudices more inflexible than in the food arena. I find myself deeply resistant to not having some kind of protein, preferably animal in origin, at every meal.

  

Therefore we usually eat something closer to the traditional Italian primo-secondo-contorno as our main meal of the day, though being Americans we throw it all on the table at once instead of graciously spacing it out. Here's documentary evidence of a recent lunch.

That's bucatini with Danny's tomato sauce upper left; I'm happy to have vegetarian pasta as long as there's meat elsewhere on the table. Also part of the spread: some young (aged 12 months) Parmesan as a table cheese, plus 24-month Parm in the grater; pickled eggplant that we bought in a store and that I don't much like; romano beans with garlic and mint from the Saturday outdoor market; prosciutto crudo and spalla cruda (raw cured ham and pork shoulder) from the Latteria downstairs, plus some salame from the supermarket; and salad, because it's against my religion to have a main meal that doesn't end with salad.  

For the record, we didn't eat all of this. It took us several days to finish off the salumi and the beans, we've still got a lot of the cheese, and the bucatini were already leftovers. And aside from the disappointing eggplant, it was all scrumptious. 

For supper that night I had a little tuna with some pickled vegetables, a piece of bread, and some vegetable minestrone. Light, but with enough animal flesh to get me through to the morning. (That's another thing that surprises me about my Italian friends' eating habits: nobody seems to eat sandwiches. So who's buying the panini I see on offer at all the bars, and when are they eating them?)

Here is yet more evidence that, whatever my citizenship documents say, I am really not very Italian, nor very willing to give up my American ways. But as I write this, I'm starting to wonder if I really need that night-time protein boost, and why I'm so prejudiced against meat for lunch and pasta for dinner. If I load up on protein during the day, easing into the evening with some carbo-loading might be both satisfying and relaxing. 

Maybe I have something new to learn from the Italians, even if I'd be turning their culinary plan a bit upside down. Maybe I'll get up my courage one of these days and give it a try.