Tortellini with cream and prosciutto, bow-tie pasta with crab meat, pennette with vodka and salmon, beef filet with green pepper, veal escalopes with mushrooms, mayonnaise and gelatin, arugula always and everywhere. When I think of food in Italy the ’80s, these are the first images to come to mind. I am an ’80s girl through and through, having grown up with frozen food and pre-cooked risotto in a bag, pouring cream on everything, and believing that shrimp cocktail and profiteroles were the foods to order if you wanted to sound up-to-date, like a real food connoisseur. Looking back at those dishes now, they and their ingredients still suffer a sort of social stigma. Many Italian chefs have admitted that the problem back then was not in the ingredients themselves, nor in the pairings—cream and prosciutto is still one of my favorite combos—but in the carelessness applied to cooking. Professional cooking was …