Croissants aren’t French and pizza sauce isn’t Italian – the national dishes that aren’t from where you think

The news that the world has America, not Italy, to thank for the tomato base on pizza has gone down about as well as putting cream in carbonara among Italian gastro-nationalists.

In a new book called La Cucina Italiana Non Esiste (literally “Italian Cuisine Does Not Exist”), food historian Alberto Grandi claims, among other things, that Italians only discovered tomato sauce when they emigrated to the Americas, where tomatoes are native, in the 19th century.

“Pizza became red in America,” Grandi told La Repubblica newspaper. “Before that it was plain focaccia, sometimes adorned with pieces of tomato.”

It’s not the first time that Grandi, who teaches business history and the history of European integration at Parma University, has taken to the press to debunk myths about his own country’s (famously defended) cuisine. He’s made a career out of it.

In an interview with the last year, he said that everything