Admit it – Italian food is rubbish

Every year I’m summoned to a gathering which I strive to avoid. My first cousin, who loves a boozy party, assembles the extended clan in an Italian restaurant for a convivial lunch. I fear that my list of excuses – ‘back pain’, ‘gout’, ‘baptism in Scotland’, ‘last-minute undercover journalism assignment’ – is wearing a bit thin and I’ll have to show up this year.

It’s not my relatives that I dislike. It’s the stuff on the plates. No sane human could feel any fondness for a cuisine whose leading dish, pizza, can’t be eaten with a spoon. The most exquisite foodstuffs such as honey, caviar, baked beans and Nutella appeal to our animal instincts because we can scoop them straight from the container into the mouth. Using cutlery is like wearing sunglasses at the Prado. It omits a minor but crucial part of the experience.

Italian food is devoid of taste, of course, although their chefs and financial backers have hidden this from the rest of the world for centuries. What Italians call ‘ingredients’ are just building materials. Anyone who’s had to chisel hardened gnocchi from the base of a burned-out saucepan understands this. The average plate of warm carbonara looks exactly like wallpaper paste because that’s what it is. And it performs the same job perfectly. In our hallway dangles a flap of unattached wallpaper which I recently fixed while a tub of vermicelli was boiling on the hob. My housemates watched as I dipped a paintbrush into the bubbling pan, soaked the hairs in starchy gloop and spread it across the fugitive leaf of unattached paper. I then smoothed the moistened tatter back into place. It stayed put. Hey presto. Job done.