American here. This is quite surprising to me - that wouldn't have occurred to me. Pan searing garlic and onion (before adding additional ingredients) is the "omg, what are you cooking?!, it smells _great_!!" starter kit in my home - when it's literally just those two things.
I've worked for a client in Italy, a short guy trying to aggressively assert superiority because of how he drinks coffee is a uniquely Italian experience. Oh and the hands and feet mime English is equally entertaining.
That's a new one for me. No mixing of the two? Surely the very basis of a good tomato sauce is sweated onions and garlic? Ditto for risotto..?
Italian food typically has a lot less garlic in it and if you had it in any of the classic dishes like ragù alla bolognese or risotto alla milanese it would be surprising. Dishes like spaghetti alla puttanesca or aglio e olio are classic examples where it is used.
Marinara sauce of course has garlic as a key ingredient but this is normally thought of as a Italian-American dish and not something you'd typically find in Italy. Likewise if you had a ragu or risotto in the US you'd probably be surprised if there wasn't garlic in it. And let us not forget that other American invention of garlic bread.
One thing I learned recently was that the typical types of garlic available in the US and Italy are different - softneck and hardneck respectively. Hardneck is a _lot_ more flavourful than softneck which I believe goes a long way to explaining why it's used so much more frequently in the US (and in seemingly incredible quantities).
There's a very good YouTube channel [0] about Italian cooking (In Italian, usually with English subtitles available) where on one episode of chef's reacting to other videos of "Italian cooking" they had a laugh about this stereotype of Italians eating lots of garlic.
Does Piemonte cusine also include garlic in common sauces? Is it cooked into a soffrito or included as part of a battuto?
I've still not got around to visiting Piemonte, but this talk is pushing it up my list.
- "Don't worry, the anchovies will cover the garlic smell".
I've been known to put garlic, onions, and shallots into a dish.
You have your cheese for sandwiches and melting, you have your cheese for stuffing pastries, you have your cheese for breakfast, you have a couple of ones with special shapes like the braided ones. And please, try not to mix these up. The white cheese for breakfast is not the one for the pastry, even though it looks similar. And why do Europeans crumble any sort on their dishes and call it Turkish? The nerve!
In some sense, Turks are some of the least "Cheese is cheese" people I met.
And I guess that's the moment when the French "delegation" collectively gasped, and left the table in protest? :D
Then again who are we of all people to judge?
When I was in Italy or France, I took a liking to their coffee. Sure, seems complicated for home use, but nice in a cafe or bar. To me, living in Paris, this was (at the time) good coffee.
So then I met an American, and when I related the above, I was told that the coffee wasn't actually that good at all, and I should try some real artisanal coffee like they do in New York. Luckily, this was getting popular in Europe as well. So, I tagged along to a new and hip coffee place and found, to my surprise, that the mysterious espresso machines had been replaced by good old filters, but with a very arcane and complex production process.
The other difference was that the coffee was weak and tasted more like tea than coffee. I did not like it at all, as I wanted a coffee and not some weak watery tea. I like all sorts of coffees - from espresso to filter to Nescafe - for their own unique taste, except this one.
Anyway, my point is that I found American coffee snobs to be more snobby than French or Italian ones.
The thing is that in India some meanings change with geography and location. For example, for me bhujia meant this [1] for the longest time. However, when I moved to a different part of the country, bhujia also meant potato fritters. Then, there is bhaji which means fried veggies. But some people also call potato fritters as bhaji.
In the U.K. (at least while I was growing up) we had ‘Bombay mix’[1] which included your version of bhujia.
Bhaji and Pakora seem to be interchangeable in British-Indian cuisine. If the bulk is onion it’s called a bhaji, otherwise pakora.
Halwa is another one that can be wildly different, it seems. Though most parts of the world have their own version I guess, all irresistible but very different.
An Italian professor was insistent that I stand up and defend the need for Indian food to use a million spices. He was proud of the fact that delicious Italian food could be whipped up using just three ingredients. I was in full agreement with him, that Italian food was wonderful, and that it was commendable how far they could take simple ingredients. But he was almost demanding (diplomatically of course) that I take the other side and argue that one needed a million spices to make good food.
An Italian friend was aghast that I would suggest putting Onion and Garlic in the same meal. It was strictly either/or for him.