Mario: “Hey, Brian… What the hell are you eatin’?”
Brian: “Peanut butter and jelly on white bread.”
Mario: (shaking head in disbelief, muttering) “Effen’ mangia cake.” [1]
When I was a kid growing up, I knew Italian moms put a lot into the food they made for us, figuratively and literally. At noon, my friends and I at St Mary’s Elementary School got oohs and aahs from some of our more ethnically-challenged classmates. The exotic ingredients, let alone the sheer size and volume of our mama/nonna-prepared lunches, astonished the non-European student body.
The Polish and Hungarian kids knew what it was to have such love-stuffed goodness. They smiled at us and nodded with respect, displaying their own mouth-watering treasure troves.
The Irish, Scottish and English kids… or the ones whose great-grandparents, regardless of nationality or mix of nationalities, immigrated so long ago that their families had been put through a kind of ethnic deflavorizor… merely stared at us with barely concealed envy, then looked with sadness at their butter and peanut butter and white bread sandwiches. These miserable blonde, ginger or red-haired freckled children had no ‘garlic’ left in their veins, if indeed there ever was any in them to begin with.
In the collective Italian imagination, these poor souls never knew what ‘real food’ was like. They were more to be pitied than anything else. Having grown up with tasteless bland fare, when given a choice between a magnificent dinner of minestrone, spaghetti, meatballs, sausages, Italian bread and a variety of cheeses… these sad deprived wretches would just as soon eat cake.
Hence the expression ‘mangia cake’… cake eater.
Mangia cake is neither a racial slur nor is it a term of hatred, exactly. While derisive, derogatory and even somewhat contemptuous in nature, it is more an expression of pity than anything else.
Deep down, we felt sorry for them. “Eh, c’mon! It’s not their fault they’re mangia-cakes. I mean, who’d ever CHOOSE to be that way?”
So for all you cakes out there, and Lord knows there are an awful lot of you… this is a cute YouTube video recorded a few years ago at The Rivoli on Queen Street West in Toronto…
The Doo Wops singing “Mangia Cake Girl”
Enjoy!
(You effen mangia cakes!)
😀
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[1] Mangia Cake (also spelled ‘mangia-cake’ and ‘mangiacake’). [Literally, ‘cake eater’]. A derogatory Italo-Canadian term for white people of British (especially WASP) or mixed Anglo-European descent, especially those whose families have been in the country for several generations. Italians would view the typical daily diet of Anglo-Canadians to be based on refined white flour and sugar and concluded these people had a preference for ‘cake’ as opposed to ‘real food.’
Mangia Cake at this end………through no fault of my own. Heck, 3 out of 4 grandparents were Canadian born. Long live PBJ and KD…….we all need comfort foods.
The thing is, you SO don’t look mangia cake at all. We need to do an intervetion! Don’t you realize that according to my parents’ generation Kraft Dinner is the enemy?? I think if my mother ever saw a box of KD or can of Chef Boyardee in the house, she would have gone insane. As for my nonna… I think the mere thought of cheese in a powder form would have sent her over the edge too. My family is so Abbruzese that even the thought of cooking in butter is something competely foreight to them.
My father’s roots are Abbruzese as well…….my mother side, from around Rome…and Sicily……now you made me feel bad bout the KD….’ll trade it in for Angel Hiar with Oil and Garlic…and lots and lots of PARM!!!!
Here’s one Scot/Irish kid who knew what she was missing. My best friends were Eastern European or Italian so eating overcooked meat and vegetables when I could be at their homes eating homemade perogies and cabbage rolls or homemade pasta with homemade sauce just killed me.
Every now and then we managed to get my mom to cook spaghetti but the sauce was always Ragu. In her defence, she did make homemade macaroni and cheese. We didn’t get KD in the house till the youngest were in high school and even then I still would make homemade macaroni and cheese rather than eat that stuff.
My proud moment came in high school when we were rationed to 2 baloney sandwiches, a couple of store bought cookies and an apple for our brown bag lunch. (To this day I steer away from baloney and apples). I discovered one of my Italian friends brought beautiful lunches, really yummy. She also had an easily queasied stomach. A group of us sat at the same table, A couple of us would start talking about dissection in biology and she would actually give up eating! Very sweetly I would say “Are you going to finish that?” and totally enjoy what a lunch should have tasted like. She did catch on after a while, and just brought me my own serving. 🙂
One of my best friends was Polish and Italian. Going to her house to eat was heaven! He dad made this tomato sauce that had this je ne sais quoi flavour to it that I kept begging him to tell me the secret to and he wouldn’t. FInally, just before I left Welland for good, he told me the secret. Now I can make sauce like Con’s. Never as good but pretty close.
Ahhh, those were the days. I wasn’t born to be a mangia cake. That’s why I like Toronto. There is no excuse to be a mangia cake here, too many foods waiting to be eaten. PB and J will never set foot in my kitchen. Sadly, some misguided company has started making a gluten-free KD style pasta though. Sigh.
TIme to go curry some chicken, I think!
PS: As a teacher, I come to the defence of students who bring in ethnic food many times. The smells are sometimes, umm, unique, I’ll grant you, but every kid deserves to feel good about their culture’s food. (Except mangia cakes!)
Flyfisherjo: Thanks for that great insight into how Italian culture is experienced from a non-Italian point of view. I always wondered what others thought of us! And I love your cunning plan on how to gross out your friend into giving you her lunch! I am so proud of you… and also her to think of bringing you your own serving.
I can see her explaining the situation to her mother only to have Mama exclaim, “Dio mio! È morta di fame, questa povera bambinal! Tony!! Vai perdermi mortadella e salami!! That girl, she gonna eat tomorrow, ‘atsa fo sure!!”
Now THAT’S Italian! 🙂
Yep, I expect that is just how it happened. I know she was never rationed on sandwiches.
Another benefit of taking interest in Italian food in high school when my siblings took none was I knew the names (back then). When we’d have our sibling squabbles we weren’t allowed to swear within earshot of our mother so I would say Italian food names. They never knew. I remember one time yelling “Ah, scampi a la modini!” and my one sister said “Quit swearing at me in Italian!” Lol.
I just walked back to my room with a big grin on my face. If I had know the expression I might have even said “Friggin mangia cake.” 🙂
One more Italian lunch story. Strawberry picking in the summer holidays. Those blissful innocent times before the seltbelt laws when a big truck would make the rounds of the Welland neighbourhoods picking up the serious and “let’s make some pocket money” berry pickers. We would sit on wooden benches in the back of the truck till we got to the farm, pick all morning, some of the best straying straight into our mouths, :), then lunch. Me, same old baloney. The Italian kids? Succulent sandwiches, cheeses, and, wait for it, a bottle of wine to wash it all down! How decent is that? Their parents took the drinking age law as seriously as the need for seat belts, at least no one was driving. The nicest part was they shared the wine, if only so we could all get through the afternoon still picking berries instead of snoozing in the sunny straw strewn beds! Ahh, good times.
My mom is from Scotland and I was exposed to real Scottish treats (and no that did not include haggis! lol) growing up. Unfortunately, however, my mom wasn’t so much into preparing my school lunches so that duty fell upon my father. He is VERY Canadian of Irish/Swedish/
English descent and terrified of spices and flavour in general! The man made me cucumber sandwiches for goodness sakes! They were literally slices of cucumber in between white bread with nothing else!
As you can guess, I traded lunches quite often as a kid! 😉
Cucumber slices and white bread. Yeah, that’s a double helping of angelfood cake, Pauline! 😀
Glad you found someone to trade lunches with!! 🙂