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If you’ve ever been to Rome, perhaps you’ve had the signature experience of slipping into a side-street restaurant, ordering a beautiful plate of pasta carbonara, and thinking to yourself: This is the good stuff. Finally, I’m eating like real Italians have for centuries.
Except you’d be wrong. Although pasta carbonara is widely thought to be a historic dish from Rome, it likely wasn’t invented until 1944. That year, an Italian chef making a meal for members of the U.S. Army used the military’s rich cream, milk, butter, and bacon to whip up a new pasta dish. A legend was born.
We know this in part because of Alberto Grandi, an Italian historian, author, podcaster, and professional rabble-rouser who studies how traditions are invented. When he started looking into the history of many quintessentially Italian foods, he found numerous inventions. He’s done debunkings of tiramisu, panettone, cheese pizza, and olive oil; the latter, he says, wasn’t popular in Italian cooking before the 1950s. When he told me through a translator that people in southern Italy used olive oil for lamps, not for eating, I shouted back at him in disbelief.
Needless to say, Grandi’s work is controversial. Marianna Giusti, who wrote a viral article about him for the Financial Times, said that when she interviewed him at a restaurant in Parma, a city in north-central Italy, “he was literally checking behind him as we spoke, being like, Man, people hate me here.”
People hate him specifically in Parma because the city is a bastion of Italian cuisine. Prosciutto di Parma is from there, as is Parmalat, the industrial food giant. And, naturally, so is Parmesan cheese. Parma, in fact, is the center of the only region in the world that makes Parmigiano-Reggiano, those big blond wheels of cheese you see at gourmet food stores that have an official trademark stamped into their sides.
You can make Parmesan elsewhere, but there are restrictions. Namely: You can’t call it Parmigiano-Reggiano—it has to be labeled Parmesan. Parmigiano-Reggiano is a brand. Parmesan is just a cheese.
That is why I had been speaking to Grandi—and why what he has to say about Parmesan is so surprising. “I always say we have the best Parmigiano ever,” the Italian expert told me, “but if you want to eat the original Parmigiano like our great-grandparents used to eat, you should go to Milwaukee or Madison.”
It sounds unthinkable—that Wisconsin Parmesan is more authentic than what you might get in Parma. I’ve walked right by Wisconsin Parmesan hundreds of times while grocery shopping. It’s a staple of American supermarkets, usually tucked between sliced meats and other plastic-wrapped cheeses in the deli case. I’ve always assumed it was a pale copy, more affordable but not as good as the crumbly, complex, Italian real thing.
Had I been snubbing a delicacy? My journey to find out spanned centuries, continents, and the outer edges of taste.
This story was adapted from an episode of Slate’s podcast Decoder Ring. The episode was edited by Andrea Bruce and Joel Meyer. It was produced by Katie Shepherd, who produces Decoder Ring with Max Freedman and Evan Chung, the supervising producer. Merritt Jacob is senior technical director. Subscribe to the show.
By the time Wisconsin became a state, in 1848, Parmesan was already 600 years old. It originated in the region of Emilia-Romagna, which sprawls across north-central Italy. It’s one of the country’s wealthiest areas, with a rich culinary and cultural tradition. Its cities include Bologna, Modena (the home of balsamic vinegar), and Parma, all of which dapple the Po River Valley, where Parmesan was first made.
The 13th- and 14th-century monks who made the cheese from their cow’s milk got so good at producing it that they soon had enough to sell. Parmesan became an early European luxury food, the so-called king of cheeses, eaten and admired by the likes of Henry VIII, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin.
In the 1930s, a consortium of producers and traders began to oversee the Parmesan industry. They demarcated an area around the cities of Parma and Reggio Emilia and essentially trademarked the cheese coming out of that region as Parmigiano-Reggiano.
It has since become an Italian export par excellence, known and celebrated all over the world for, among other things, the traditional manner in which it is made. There are all sorts of quaint aspects to the Italian Parmesan-making process you would never see in American mass production: like an essential cutting tool called a spino, which looks like a cross between a giant whisk and a honey dipper, or workers gathering the early cheese in a kind of cheesecloth hammock and leaving it nestled inside to drain over copper vats like a bulbous, white cheese baby. There’s even a special metal hammer that Italian cheesemakers use to knock on the aging cheese wheels to gauge, by sound, whether they’re developing properly.
And there’s one more distinctly un-American ingredient: time. An official Parmigiano-Reggiano must be aged for at least two years, and many are aged for longer. The result is a coarse, almost grainy cheese, flecked with white crystals, that has a salty, nutty intensity. Like good wines, no two wheels will be exactly the same.
Global sales for these golden cheeses recently crossed $3 billion annually, and at $1,800 a pop at a minimum, these 80-plus-pound cheeses are worth stealing. In 2016 CBS News reported that $7 million in Parmigiano-Reggiano had been swiped in the previous two years.
No offense to Wisconsin Parmesan, but I have never heard of anyone trying to make off with it. The Wisconsin variety is not made according to any of these exacting Italian specifications. Forget two years—it has to be aged for only 10 months to call itself Parmesan!
Because producing generic Parmesan is so much less exacting, it’s much cheaper than Parmigiano-Reggiano. There’s also a lot more of it. The global market for plain old Parmesan was estimated at $16 billion in 2022, and Wisconsin alone makes 83 million pounds of the stuff. Eighty-three million pounds that, according to the Italian debunker Alberto Grandi, come out of a venerable tradition.
Grandi told me that the story of American Parmesan dates back roughly a century. Between the two world wars, Italian immigrants who had experience making cheese in Italy “found themselves in America and headed to what they heard was the dairy states,” then started making cheese similar to Parmigiano.
Back in Italy, meanwhile, starting in the 1960s, Parmigiano-Reggiano “had an evolution,” undergoing a process of relative standardization that made it what it is today. Grandi said that before this shift, Italian Parmesan used to be softer and fattier, and that it looked different too. The rind was totally black, instead of the deep yellow that now characterizes Parmigiano-Reggiano. It was also more of a cylindrical shape, not a wheel.
Grandi said that Wisconsin Parmesan, not Italian Parmigiano-Reggiano, has “stayed more or less true to the original recipe.” He also told me the name of a Wisconsin company that he thought was making just this type of old-school classic Parmesan: Sartori.
Sartori, founded in 1939, is now a fourth-generation company headquartered between Milwaukee and Green Bay. It sells a variety of cheeses that are likely available in your local supermarket, as well as 72 countries worldwide. And Sartori’s Parmesan does look very different from contemporary Italian Parmigiano-Reggiano. It’s smaller, with that black rind. It also appears to have a different texture.
Frankly—I had to have it.
After I ordered the Sartori Parmesan online, I dived into how Wisconsin and Parmesan became two words you could say next to each other and have them make any sense. It all has to do with taste, inventiveness, and the business acumen of Italian immigrants.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, more than 3.5 million Italians crossed the Atlantic Ocean bound for America. Many of them were from southern Italy and spoke regional dialects. They would not necessarily even have identified as Italian—Italy had become a unified nation only in 1861. They were also coming out of poverty, from homes with dirt floors, with no running water, and where cooking still happened over fireplaces. Their diets would have been heavy in vegetables they could grow themselves. Meat was a luxury. Upon arriving in New York City, some of these immigrants would move on to cities like Chicago and Philadelphia, establishing Italian enclaves across the country.
And in those urban enclaves, these new Americans had to start doing something they had never really done before: buy, instead of grow, their food—something they could, at least, now afford to do. “The food that the American food industry provided them even if they were poor—the white flour, the butter, the eggs, coffee, sugar, beef, and pork—was something that was really special-occasion food for them back in southern Italy,” said Simone Cinotto, a professor of modern history at the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo, Italy.
Using these newly accessible ingredients, southern Italian women started to reimagine dishes from back home. In the process, they began to create Italian–American red-sauce cuisine, in which abundance itself is a kind of ingredient. Think of restaurants with red-checkered tablecloths serving fried chicken cutlets the size of plates and baked pastas slathered in cheese.
It wasn’t just American largesse that fueled this new cuisine. Food companies in Italy also started exporting products to the Italian diaspora, things like canned tomatoes and durum wheat pasta. Many of the newly arrived immigrants had never seen these products before—not even in Italy. And for Italian Americans, they helped create a sense of identity. “The importers had all the interest in convincing the immigrants that they could prove to be Italian, actually for the first time, [by] buying their products,” Cinotto explained.
Meanwhile, immigrants were sending money back to their families. That meant that a lot of these food products were becoming more affordable and available not just in America, but in Italy itself.
Italian cheese was part of this back-and-forth. By the 1920s, America was importing between 40 and 45 million pounds of it annually. And Italian immigrants in the U.S. were starting to make cheese in their new country. And the center of that effort was in what we now call the Cheese State.
Wisconsin has a long and proud dairy tradition. It makes many excellent cheeses, though it is probably best known for its cheddar, its squeaky cheese curds, and the giant yellow foam cheese wedges that adorn the heads of Green Bay Packers fans.
The state’s Parmesan tradition is a little more niche. The man who seems to have been instrumental in first bringing Parmesan to Wisconsin was named Count Giulio Bolognesi—which, incredibly, you say exactly like the meat sauce.
Bolognesi was an Italian diplomat who became the consul general in Chicago in 1912. He was from northern Italy, not too far from Parma—and he seems to have been a huge hit with Chicago society. There are a lot of newspaper articles about him, his strapping blond good looks, and his willingness to participate in charity tennis tournaments despite never having played tennis. He married the daughter of an Italian immigrant and started looking for land in northern Wisconsin. In 1918 Bolognesi bought a 1,700-acre farm, and pretty soon articles were referring to the kind of cheese he was making there: a Parma cheese.
Bolognesi first sold his Parmesan locally, but with 100,000 Italians living in northern Wisconsin and northern Michigan, there was a bigger market to tap. So he teamed up with another Italian, this one based in Minnesota. Bolognesi’s new business partner had attended agricultural school in the Po River Valley—where Parmesan comes from. In 1929 they opened the largest Italian cheese factory in the United States.
Bolognesi and his partner made frequent trips to Italy to study cheesemaking and even brought 10 northern Italian cheesemakers back with them. They also staffed their business with immigrants. One of them was Paolo Sartori, who eventually left to found his own cheese company: Sartori, which made the Parmesan I bought online.
Pam Hodgson, a Master Cheesemaker with Sartori Cheese, poses for a portrait in the company’s original cheese cave, in Plymouth, Wisconsin, in 2017.
Toni L. Sandys/The Washington Post via Getty Images
Alberto Grandi’s story was checking out. There really were Po River Valley immigrants thriving in Wisconsin by re-creating Italian Parmesan!
But remember what else Grandi said: that Wisconsin Parmesan hadn’t changed. That, after a century, it was still being made the same way, while Parmesan in Italy had evolved. Did that check out? Although I couldn’t go back in time 100 years to taste them both, I could taste the current versions side by side.
So that’s what I decided to do—with the help of the cheesemonger Aaron Foster. Foster has been in the cheese business for over two decades, and he owns Foster Sundry, a café and upscale grocery in Brooklyn with big glass windows and a long, well-stocked cheese counter. In an office in the basement, one of the employees of Foster Sundry had put together a blind cheese tasting for us. There were two plates laden with eight different Parmesans in all shades of yellow. While we tried all eight—including Argentina’s own Parmesan descendant—I was going to stay laser-focused on the two cheeses this whole test had been set up for: the Parmigiano-Reggiano and the Sartori Parmesan.
Though we tried a number of cheeses that looked like Parmigiano-Reggiano, early on, we tried a craggy hunk of pale crumbly cheese with some white flecks in it that sure looked particularly like an Italian Parmigiano-Reggiano.
Foster detected some floral notes. He also said that it was on the younger side, and still quite moist.
I observed, sophisticatedly, that it was “like Parmesan.”
“Not only is it Parmesan, it’s good Parmesan,” Foster said. “I hope that it’s good Parmesan.”
Remember, this was a blind taste test, so we didn’t want to be overconfident. But this was good, with a lovely, crumbly texture.
And then there was the other cheese, a perfectly smooth isosceles triangle.
“Unremarkable appearance,” Foster said.
My review: “Weird. Very sweet, and a weird package-y taste.”
As you might’ve guessed, the first cheese—the “good Parmesan”—was indeed a Parmigiano-Reggiano. The other, somewhat disappointing cheese was the Sartori Parmesan.
After tasting these two cheeses side by side, I found it hard to believe that Italian Parmesan had ever tasted like today’s Sartori—so smooth and sweet. They were just so different.
All my research had convinced me that a century ago, Italians and Italian Americans had been going for the same thing: How had they diverged so dramatically? And where did that leave Grandi’s claim about Wisconsin Parmesan—that it was the one that tasted most similar to that 100-year-old ancestor?
The answer to these questions could be found in the mid–20th century, in the moment that would turn Parmesan into a multibillion-dollar business.
Parmigiano-Reggiano became famous globally after World War II, during a period known as the “Italian economic miracle.” After the war, Italy experienced tremendous economic growth, and millions of Italians became middle class in a hurry. But in the years leading up to this “miracle,” Italians had lived through multiple periods of incredible disruption, including endemic poverty and war. Now, amid all this dizzying growth, tradition—or the idea of it—became very alluring.
It was during this period that a number of dishes came to be seen as traditionally Italian, even though they had been created or popularized thanks to the new (or newly affordable) ingredients the economic miracle provided. Think of the aforementioned carbonara, made with luxe ingredients regular Italians would not previously have been able to afford. Or tiramisu, which is made with a supermarket cookie first introduced in 1948.
It was also during this period that a consortium of producers and traders that oversees Parmigiano-Reggiano began running advertising campaigns for it. “The first advertising after the war, in the 1950s, more or less said that the Parmigiano-Reggiano is made as it was made seven centuries ago,” said Stefano Magagnoli, a professor of economic history at the University of Parma. “Of course, it is not true. It was a marketing [technique] to attract and to communicate the idea of tradition.”
Believe me, I’m not trying to insult Parmigiano-Reggiano—to dethrone the king of cheeses. But of course it’s not being made the way monks in the 13th century made it! Those monks didn’t have electricity; they didn’t have running water; they didn’t have copper vats; they didn’t have an international trade network and a million other things besides.
More to the point, Parmigiano-Reggiano is not being made exactly how it was when that Italian consortium of producers and traders first standardized it in the 1930s. Back then, the process was barely industrialized. One very visible example of this is the black rind that Grandi has mentioned, and that Magagnoli has confirmed the cheese used to have.
Magagnoli said this color formed naturally on the surface of the cheese. But in 1963, the consortium members decided to start scraping it off so they could leave markings directly on the now blond rind. The rationale for this change was that it made Parmigiano-Reggiano harder to counterfeit. The consortium changed the cheese so it could keep control of it and help grow it into a bigger business.
Meanwhile in America, something else was changing for Parmesan in the postwar period: the people eating it.
When Italian immigrants had first started arriving earlier in the century, they were derided as swarthy garlic eaters. But as they became assimilated, so did their food. By the 1950s, you have Dean Martin—born Dino Crocetti in Ohio—crooning “That’s Amore” and Disney’s Lady and the Tramp smooching over a shared piece of spaghetti. Pizza was spreading out of cities and into the heartland, and frozen lasagna too. Magazines had to teach people how to pronounce these words.
These new mass-produced products, like Chef Boyardee spaghetti sauce, made it possible for everyone to bring a little bit of Italy into their kitchen. These products didn’t necessarily taste Italian, or even particularly good. One notable example: green cans of pre-grated Kraft Parmesan cheese that didn’t even have to be refrigerated.
Those Kraft canisters, which became available after World War II, were a staple of American life, nearly as recognizable as a Campbell’s soup can and advertised all over TV. “Think we’re only good on Italian food?” says the voice-over in one commercial from 1969. The ad then shows the green can getting shaken over soup, salads, and pizza before finishing with the line “Kraft Parmesan is as American as pizza pie.”
Italian Americans had created the domestic market for Parmesan, but then an American company started selling a homogenized version of it to the rest of the country: simply as American food.
By the 1970s and ’80s, Italians had something to say about this Americanization of Parmesan.
The Parmigiano-Reggiano consortium and famous cookbook authors like Marcella Hazan began to tell Americans that this cheese they thought was Parmesan was not very good and that they should try the real thing. There were waves of articles about Parmigiano’s pronunciation and virtues—how excellent it was, how gourmet, how authentic.
The Wisconsin cheese company Sartori had to navigate these new circumstances. Mike Matucheski, a retired master cheesemaker who was born and raised in Wisconsin, told me that when he started at Sartori in the 1990s, the company was experimenting. It wanted to make something yummier than Kraft’s pre-grated Parmesan, a cheese that was up to Sartori standards and that also pleased American consumers. But the company’s customers weren’t necessarily familiar with the taste of Parmigiano-Reggiano. They’d hadn’t grown up eating it.
“There’s always a battle between the cheeses for who’s better or whatever,” Matucheski said. “And it’s just like, Well, people in different places have different taste.”
Matucheski laughed at the idea, put forward by Grandi, that the Parmesan being made in Wisconsin hasn’t changed over the decades. It absolutely has, and it’s become its own thing: Wisconsin Parmesan.
“We found that our customers tended to prefer our cheese because of its own attributes—that it was sweeter and fruitier and less salty than Reggiano,” he told me.
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Matucheski explained that Sartori’s black rind was meant to appeal to customers too. It turns out it’s not a rind at all. It’s a decorative wax that is put on late in the process, and it’s meant to evoke the Parmesan from Count Bolognesi’s day. That is, it’s meant to look traditional—in the Italian–American Wisconsin way.
Matucheski, as an American cheesemaker, can also appreciate a traditionally made Italian cheese. During our interview, he started reminiscing about a 9-year-old Parmigiano-Reggiano he’d eaten on a trip to Italy. “It was just amazing. Absolutely amazing. One of the best cheeses that I’ve ever had in my life,” he said. “You would never see that cheese in the United States. Absolutely never.”
You would never see that 9-year-old cheese in America because it wouldn’t pay. There isn’t really a market for high-end American Parmesan. Italy’s got that cornered. Simply put, Parmigiano-Reggiano is a gourmet product that commands gourmet prices. American Parmesan is an industrial product. It’s made faster, and in much larger quantities. That means it’s more affordable and it reaches a lot more people. They’re both very successful products. But they are also very different cheeses.
I had one more thing to do: reach back out to Alberto Grandi. I needed to tell him that I had, unintentionally, out-contrarianed a contrarian. He was wrong: Wisconsin Parmesan is not the same cheese it was 100 years ago. And although its Italian cousin, Parmigiano-Reggiano, was different too, it’s … less different.
When we did speak, Grandi continued to insist that Wisconsin Parmesan looks more like its cheese ancestor than Italian Parmigiano does, thanks to that black wax. But he was otherwise a very good sport. He basically agreed with Wisconsonite Matucheski that it’s all about different people in different places having different tastes, and how all of those factors merge to create something authentic to them.
What Grandi had wanted to underline, he said, “is this absurd pretense that Italians have to plant an Italian flag on Parmesan and say, ‘You shouldn’t even call it Parmesan,’ because they are clearly different cheeses with clearly different markets and different prices and different taste.”
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There’s a real irony to what Grandi had to say about Wisconsin Parmesan: that it hadn’t changed. Because what’s driving his provocative debunkings of Italian food myths—the bogus origin stories of carbonara, tiramisu, and olive oil—is his conviction that Italians need to understand that foods are constantly changing, just like Italians. His whole mission, he explained, “is to tell people that you cannot freeze identity, because if you freeze identity and tradition, at one point you end up killing it.”
Sometimes we invent traditions to preserve a connection to our past. To make the things we love feel permanent and unchanging, whether that’s a cheese or something less tangible, like where we’re from. But traditions are only as unchanging as we are—which isn’t very.
The traditions that endure are the ones that keep up with us—Parmesan included. It started as an Italian tradition, but when you make something this good, people are going to spread it, adopt it, change it, and make it into a tradition of their very own.
Special thanks to Derek John and Giacomo Stefanini for translating. Thank you also to Patrick Fort, Fabio Parasecoli, Ken Kane, Thomas Mcnamee, Dan Weber, Irene Graziosi, James Norton, and Ian MacAllen, whose knowledge and book Red Sauce: How Italian Food Became American were very helpful.
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