Eggplant Parmesian

To fill you in on how the Italian American versions of the dish came to be. In Italy cheese is used to take the place of meat in vegetable or pasta dishes, but not all that commonly used along with meat. Italian Americans made the eggplant parmigiana, and realized if they gave the same treatment to a chicken or veal cutlet American diners generally preferred it, even if that was something that they wouldn't have really done back in Italy. (Americans at the time weren't all that familiar with nor fond of eggplant). Also ground beef was cheap in America (and scarce in Italy), so meatballs popped up everywhere, They got the same treatment in sandwiches as well.

Americans loved this because they never saw cheese as a substitute for meat in vegetable based dishes. They liked cheese as a flavor enhancer in sandwiches and casseroles along with meat. That's why American lasagna became alternating layers of meat and cheese against pasta, whereas in Italy meat lasagna doesn't have cheese and cheese lasagna has vegetables and no meat.

Fuck off you inbred fat bitch you're not Italian. Don't ever say that again.

>said I was a southern girl
>never claimed to be Italian, but my grandma is

Very interesting input. It is also interesting to note that tomatoes are a new world crop, therefore tomato sauces aren't really authentic Italian sauces. A lot of what people call "authentic Italian food" is really Italian American food for this reason. True Italian dishes are things like carbonara (made with eggs and doesn't have peas) and seafood scampis. You haven't lived until you've had carbonara in Rome and scampi in Naples.

I digress. I'm not trying to make my eggplant parmesian authentic, because that would negate tomato sauces, but rather improve the texture and help the eggplant shine instead of the mozzarella and sauce that would normally stand on top.

>tomato sauces aren't really authentic Italian sauces.
I wouldn't go that far. Tomato sauces have been made in Italy since at least the late 18th Century. If something has been a part of your cuisine for over two centuries I would consider it legit. Basically Italy has had tomato sauce since around the time Carême codified French Haute Cuisine.I think you can call it "authentic" if you attach any meaning to that word.

I suppose you are right, but a lot of people don't consider American food to be considered a type of food (not just hamburgers but things like hot browns and gumbos) and the age of American food is similar to that of how long tomato sauces has been in Italy and yet that is called "authentic." It's really all up for interpretation and up for discussion.

See the problem is that you don't have a good reason to be the way you want to be with someone who has a problem.

There's a big difference, though. A lot of the foods currently popular in America are 20th Century creations of the food science lab, not expressions of American tradition that goes back very far. You really can't compare stuff like Cajun/Creole, New Endland seafood cookery and various BBQ traditions to stuff like green bean cassrole, Chex Mix and cheese dip made by dumping a can of Ro-Tel tomatoes into a bowl with cubed Velveeta cheese and microwaving it. Totally different worlds. While we have a tradition of steakhouses going out for a cheeseburger and fries is less than a century old (though burgers have been around longer than that). We've had pizza and sub sandwiches in America for just over a century. A lot of our most popular foods are recent arrivals/creations not rooted in our own traditions, but fast becoming part of them.

>Eggplant Parmesian
That was my Armenian landlord's name when I lived in Glendale.

Well that's what's popular with young/poor people. Tradition food is alive and well with the upper middle class and up.

>Tradition food is alive and well with the upper middle class and up.
Only if they're going out for upscale versions of it at New American restaurants. Or just eating these foods occasionally. Because the second half of the 20th Century really scrambled traditional American norms. Traditionally rich people were fat, and working people were skinny. Now the elites strive to be skinny because the poor and working class have become obese. That means eating a traditional diet on a day to day basis isn't going to work for the elites anymore as it flies in the face of their desire to stay trim. They may still be fond of traditional foods, but that's not the lion's share of their diet Wall St guys may love going out to steakhouses, but they're not doing it on a weekly basis.

We call that berenjena (eggplant) a la milanesa.
t. South american

The truly wealthy do not give any fucks, they're too busy being wealthy. It's Upper Middle yuppies that care about their image that you describe.

>eggplant covered in kraft "parmesan"

Didn't even read your post. Have fun eating shit that tastes like snot.

>The truly wealthy do not give any fucks, they're too busy being wealthy.
Those folks generally don't give too many fucks about what they're eating as long as it's "right". Meaning it's what other folks of their age and station are eating. The food at the 21 Club is nothing to write home about. Same goes for any Cipriani place. If you actually like food these are not people you'd want to dine with. They haven't been any fun since the Great Depression. Before that the richest Americans tended to dine rather well.

It's actually freshly grated. I don't like eating wood chips.

Italian guy who posted here.

That explanation doesn't make much sense to me. For one, why would Italians in America call a dish of breaded eggplant cutlets 'eggplant parmesan' when the Italian cognate of that word, 'parmigiana' means 'layered casserole' and not 'cutlet,' when the Italian word for 'cutlet,' 'cotoletta,' is instantly recognisable to English-speakers as being cognate with it and when parmigiana di melanzane is a different-looking dish altogether, utilises different techniques to compose?

I don't know why eggplant cutlets are called 'parmesan' abroad but nor does your post "fill me in" on how the dish "came to be" called that at all.

Why apologising? I like seeing how seemingly related foods change with geography. For example, scapece/scabece, escoveech and ceviche are all related dishes from the same root word with the same base ingredients (fish cooked with an acid of some sort along with peppers and onion), but differ in the way the ingredients are put together and the way the dish is prepared.
Scapece, the Italian version, a cleaned, whole fish is poached in a vinegar brine with peppers and onions, in escoveetch, the Caribbean version, the fish is deep fried before being dressed with a vinegar brine in which the peppers and onions have been simmered and ceviche, the South American version, the fish is raw, chopped and marinated in a lime and/or vinegar brine with peppers and onions.
I like the fact that these dishes share a common ancestor and linguistic history, just as I like that eggplant cutlets are called parmesan in the US south. I think it's cool.

Oh, and your whole 'Italians don't eat lasagne with both meat and cheese in it!!!!!' claim is just straight up bullshit. We do. I've never see vegetable lasagne except for as new cuisine. It's only about 25 years old in Italy, so it's still relatively new to us and many Italians will have never eaten one.

The traditional versions are either meat, cheese or both. Veg lasagne was created abroad, based on Italian sensibilities, and came to Italy in the 90s either by Italians traveling abroad trying it or by first or second generation Italian-speaking American/Australians.
We like it and have adopted into our repertoire but, like barbecue chicken pizza, it's not something that's considered a traditional dish at all. Still good, though.

The hell are you talking about? 'Seafood scampi?'
Scampi is plural of 'scampo,' a type of long, lobster-like crustacean that we eat, not the name of a particular preparation of seafood. The phrase 'seafood scampi' makes about as much sense as 'poultry pollo.'

I agree with you 100%.
But in the US (and I've also seen it in the UK), "scampi" often refers to a specific recipe rather than the crustacean. It's very common to see "shrimp scampi" on the menu of an American Italian restaurant. It's basically a saute using garlic, butter, and white wine.

I'm not defending the practice, just explaining.

Yeah? I'd had no idea.
If you come to Italy and ask for 'scampi' at a restaurant, the waitstaff will be confused because they won't know what preparation you want them done. In Naples in particular, scampi and other similar crustaceans are typically halved (while still alive, mind you), drizzled with oil and cooked over open flame. Then, they're plated and dressed with lemon juice and parsley, with garlic being common, but not mandatory or, alternately, serviced with parsley and garlic sprinkled on top and lemon wedges on the side for diners to add as they wish. Simple preparation and very common the summer months.
Oddly enough, for how common it is for us, I never see Neapolitan grill or roasts abroad, just sautées and pasta.

The dish you're describing is called 'X al vino bianco' where X is whatever shellfish you want, scampi included, though, shrimp/prawns are also common as is mixed shellfishes (frutte di mare).

In Naples, though, we'd use olive oil and/or lard rather than butter, but same basic idea.

>I don't know why eggplant cutlets are called 'parmesan' abroad
In America Italians arrived when immigrants were looked down upon even more brazenly than they are today. My grandfather refused to go to his daughter's wedding because she married a guy of Italian heritage. But the food they made won people over, even those suspicious of immigrants (as is so often the case). But the language was given zero respect, maybe because it was too close to Latin in a mostly Protestant country where many were suspicious of Catholics. In English Italian plural nouns are relentlessly used as singular. I think there was an active resistance to the language and an intentional effort to mispronounce and misuse the foreign words. Also immigrants often did not teach their children their language in an effort to get them to integrate quicker. So by the third generation the language was Sopranos level mangled.
>your whole 'Italians don't eat lasagne with both meat and cheese in it!!!!!' claim is just straight up bullshit.
Not the way Americans do. The bechamel sauce on Italian meat lasagna is replaced entirely in America with a mixture of ricotta, mozzarella and other cheeses. My point was Americans put meat and cheese together in ways Italians normally wouldn't. We put chicken in Alfredo sauce. We melt mozzarella over cutlets and meatballs jammed into sandwiches. BBQ chicken pizza is a perfect example of how crazy we get. We have no sense of restraint or quality control because we're not reigned in by tradition and food is cheap here. So anything goes. The result is Italian American food ends up way heavier and over the top than Italian. Our exuberant use of cheese is right in line with that.