To me, only bagnetto or salsa verde for boiled meat justify its existence in cooking. Otherwise, it could easily leave the kitchen and I’d live a happy life anyway. In fact, I’d live a better one because I would no longer need to ask chefs to avoid it. I hate it for a simple reason: it is almost always used as a pointless decoration, with the leaves picked from the stalk a moment before the seafood pasta or a meat dish leaves the pass to be served. Pure banality, because it only adds colour, but not flavour.

It is for this reason that Matteo Aloe – the creator, with his brother Salvatore of the beautiful Berberè chain, 12 pizzerias in Italy and three in London – surprised me. I hadn’t realised before this August spent in Milan but the substance is unchanged: one of the three ingredients in their Marinara is parsley, with garlic and chilli pepper. People would protest in Naples, and indeed they still haven’t opened in the liveliest city in Italy, though the temptation is strong.

Basically there is no version around the world that includes parsley in pizza Marinara and even Matteo himself didn’t follow any culinary taste. It’s the oregano’s “fault”. On the 8th of December it will be 10 years since they opened the flagship pizzeria in Castel Maggiore right outside Bologna and at the time what happened was that oregano was used to aromatise too many pizzas «so we decided to remove it from Marinara and replace it with parsley».

The summer menu also includes Salamino piccante with fiordilatte and tomato, an incredible pizza thanks to its rich flavours, while Marinara, is too minimalist, it's basically too poor. I don’t like parsley also because it brings me back memories from the Sixties, early Seventies when I, born in 1955, still lived with my family. At the time, you ate what you were served and if you didn’t finish everything, you could not leave the table, and if you really had to leave, then you’d end up eating for dinner what you hadn’t finished for lunch.


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Paolo Marchi
source: https://www.identitagolose.it/ermes/newsletter/?id=339

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