Italy is widely celebrated for having vigilantly preserved its food culture, with the result that many dishes there are still prepared in more or less the same way they have been for centuries. When you taste Italian food at its best, you taste history — to borrow the name of a Youtube channel whose success has revealed a surprisingly widespread enthusiasm for the cuisine of bygone eras.
But some of Italy’s most globally beloved comestibles aren’t quite as deeply rooted in the past as people tend to assume: there are no records of tiramisu, for instance, before the nineteen-sixties; ciabatta, the Italian answer to the baguette, was invented in the early nineteen-eighties.
