Slop and Slab and a Mappazzone

This holiday season, remember that you are what you plate

My son Harper loved him some slop. Now he runs food tours in Italy.

An American friend named Fish, an artist and thus attuned to matters of composition, once pronounced during a drunken evening that all the world’s cuisine can be divided into two categories: slop and slab. So proud was he of this revelation that he slammed his empty shot glass on the bar, folded his arms and yielded to questions.

Slop? That would be any dish eaten with a fork or spoon, including soup but also various casseroles and most Indian and Chinese dishes (although not Chinese dishes in China, more about that later). Not to be confused with the current social media trend of slop bowls although they would count.

Slab? Steaks of course but also roast chicken, confit de canard, whole fish, anything requiring a knife at table. From here we can argue. The slab taxonomy might include discrete pieces of food brought to the mouth by hand or chopstick, thus bruschette and sushi and dim sum. Oysters? Sure. And while we’re at it, escargots—let’s call that little fork an extraction tool. Cheese plates. Lobsters.

Proper slab.

My friend, firmly on the side of slab, invented this culinary yin-yang some forty years ago (way before the current slop-bowl meme) but it has stuck with me through thick and thin, slop and slab—although in recent years, living and cooking for friends in Rome, I’ve had to reconsider it. Because Italians have a different plate taxonomy. In their culinary universe there are beautiful presentations—by definition anything Italian—which could include both slop (let’s be honest, pasta) and slab (veal Milanese).

And then there is the mappazzone.

Like the German Schadenfreude, English has no one-word equivalent for mappazzone, which is roughly translated as a big sloppy pile on a suffering piece of dinnerware. The typical American Thanksgiving plate—groaning under turkey, stuffing, green beans (out of season), mashed potatoes and yams, cranberry sauce, gravy, with everything oozing together into a brown delta—that’s a mappazzone.

You won’t find mappazzone in a standard Italian dictionary because it’s regional slang from Bologna. It derives from an actual dictionary word, mappazza, which means heavy indigestible food. In Italian the suffix -one (pronounced OH-nay) indicates something really big—thus a lavorone is a “really big job.” And so we have mappazzone. In recent years the word has been championed on MasterChef Italia by one of the judges, Bruno Barbieri, himself from Bologna; thanks to Chef Bruno, it’s now used throughout Italy.

I’m sensitive to accusations of mappazzone because my Roman companion Alexandra often accuses me of making one. In particular, my adventures in Asian cuisine are often greeted with: “Max, this is delicious but…it’s a mappazzone.”

“It is not a mappazzone! The ingredients are carefully chosen for perfect harmony, there’s a minimal sauce which unites the flavors in a whole greater than the sum of its parts! It’s slop, but it’s not a mappazzone!”

“It’s a mappazzone.”

Our affectionate bickering aside, the disconnect reveals much about the Italian food mindset. By now the world knows that Italians favor simple, straightforward dishes with minimal ingredients, the better to appreciate il protagonista—the main ingredient, which must always be at maximum freshness and never obscured under heavy sauces or a kitchen-sink agglomeration of herbs (basil or parsley, not both) or (the ultimate sin) too much garlic.

But another, related side of the Italian palate is their strong distress around arranging too many servings on the same plate. Thus the vegetable (il contorno) is always served as a separate dish. Likewise pasta is served first, followed by the meat or fish dish. The Italian-American concoction of spaghetti-with-meatballs is abhorrent in Italy; in fact tourists are regularly warned never to order it. Pasta first, meatballs second. Plopping meatballs on top of spaghetti is the definition of a mappazzone.

Don’t order this in Italy.

And yet spaghetti, even without meatballs…that’s some slop. No problem, as long as it’s not a mappazzone. In Italy, that means minimal ingredients in the slop. Daily I read, with an interest bordering on obsession, the comments posted in the New York Times cooking app—mostly by American cooks who can’t leave well enough alone: “I doubled the garlic, threw in some frozen shrimp and added spinach, mint, basil and Tabasco. Delicious!”

Well.

Ten years ago, as a journalist in China researching a novel illegally (possesing neither a journalist visa nor a Chinese driver’s license), I had two epiphanies: the first, non-culinary, was that a tinted visor on my motorbike helmet would hide my Caucasian eyes and allow me to pass through road controls without surveillance.

The second was that in China, main courses are not the slop that we Westerners have been served as “Chinese” food since the 1960s—those classic takeout boxes of chop suey. Which is not Chinese, nor are the takeout boxes which are obviously origami.

I was in a restaurant in a hutong north of the Forbidden City in Beijing, having landed after fifteen hours in flight from Detroit, when this epiphany came to me. It came to me in a volcanic mountain of pork strips, charred in the wok (you could taste the fire) and velveted in rice wine like lava, reduced over the flame. Then came a plate of tatsoi, stir-fried with garlic and oyster sauce. This was not slop, nor mappazzone. This was proper slab.

Today of course you can find authentic wok-fired Chinese slab from Boston to Berlin, if you know where to look. Less so in Rome, where most Chinese restaurants cater to the Roman aversion to spicy food, or anything not noodly. In Italy, traditional Western-style Chinese slop is just fine. So long as it’s not a mappazzone.