Cheese on seafood: ask a French chef, a Chilean or a Filet-o-Fish fan and they’ll say ‘yeah, why not’, but ask an Italian and you might get an impassioned NO. I asked one of the most knowledgeable authorities on Italian food in the country, Pendolino executive chef Nino Zoccali, about exactly that. 

“We’ve grown up with this idea you can’t mix fish and cheese, it’s like a law. I did a bit of reading on it; it sounds like it’s come from northern Italy. In northern Italian restaurants, it’s strictly adhered to. I don’t think they care too much about it in the south.” 

He talks about a Sicilian dish, swordfish involtini, as an example. “Traditionally they’d put provolone or cacio-cavallo or something like that on the swordfish. And the other big one is the use on seafood pasta. Every region in Italy is very different and they’ve very particular. Italy is really a country of many countries and cuisines.” 

But why do we care about the rule here, in a country with a long history of southern Italian migration? “In Australia, the really expensive high-end Italian restaurants have really been driven by northern migrants, more than southerners. There has definitely been an air of superiority, I would suggest a degree of arrogance there. They would have had a big impact on what high-end Italian etiquette is.” 

But Zoccali says: “I talked to a mate from Veneto and he reckons some people would still put cheese on seafood, particularly pasta in the home. Someone in the family will go ‘you don’t do that’ and they’ll say ‘I don’t care, I like it’ and they’ll still do it.” 

“A little bit of knowledge is really dangerous. You can have a lot of non-Italian people now telling you what the Italian rule is around eating seafood and cheese, they won’t hold back in letting you know. ‘In Italy you don’t do that’. Yeah, that’s the commonly held belief but in reality, if you look a bit more deeply, a lot of cheese is eaten with seafood in Italy.”

So, there you have it. Pass the Parmigiano-Reggiano, please.

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