(English): I was informed by this Eater.com article that cornetto/cornetti wasn’t the default breakfast item in Italy until the 1970s, in fact it implied the cornetto was largely unknown until the 1970s. Is this true or an axaggeration?

15 comments

1. yeah, before probably it was more traditional to make a proper breakfast and not necessarily sweet. it’s probably a thing born from the economic boom as was the invention of tiramisù, being people richer they could afford supermarket premade stuff instead of poorer (and overall healthier and more complete) things. my dad used to make breakfast as a kid with salad, raw veggies, eggs, cheese and some cured meat. nowadays the average breakfast is a mix of yogurt, sweets and coffee/tea

2. If I am not mistaken, the cornetto has been present in Italy for quite some time. However, bakery products were neither common nor accessible to the poorer masses. Additionally, the concept of a sweet Italian breakfast is a relatively modern development. Historically, breakfast was more likely savory, often consisting of leftovers from previous meals or whatever was readily available

   Both croissants and cornetti became widely popular only relatively recently. For example, the croissant, despite being introduced to France in the late 17th century, only became a common and iconic pastry in the 20th century—nearly two centuries after its arrival. The same could be said for the cornetto. While cornetto as a breakfast staple may be a relatively recent trend, its origins as a pastry likely date back much earlier, perhaps to trade connections between Venice and Austria

3. Per chi volesse approfondire

   [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tS8_kmtiJ9I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tS8_kmtiJ9I)

4. My grandparents from the north used to eat leftovers from the day before with bread and milk… or wine

5. If you watch movies that were made before the 70s, you’ll see that most rich people used to eat brioches or some other sweet and fruits fro breakfast, whereas poor people just dunked some plain bread in their caffellatte or brewed barley, in the rural, poorer communities where coffe wasn’t sold yet. My mother only drank coffe for the first time when she went to a bigger city to attend high-school and only ate her first Cornetto in the 80s, so… Yeah. Most things we consider “traditional” aren’t traditional at all and we only started making/eating them after WWII.

6. When i was a child my breakfast in italy (tuscany) was a piece of bread with jam or bread sugar and red wine or bread and milk, sometimes yogurt; my father used to have a raw egg sucked from the shell but for me it was disgusting

7. Nanni Loy candid camera from 1964 featuring cornetto makes me press x for doubt

   It also should be noted that breakfast with cornetto is something you mostly do at a bar when you can’t have it at home.

8. [La zuppetta 1964](https://www.raiplay.it/video/2024/09/Cento—Le-candid-camera-di-Nanni-Loy-la-zuppetta-19f0e9f7-568f-4e47-be2e-eb5fff5eb063.html) Nanni Loy

   This is from the TV show Specchio Segreto (candid camera) It’s 1964 and Nanni Loy is eating a cornetto.

9. I’m not old enough to remember anything before 1984ish, but going by what my grandparents told me and what they still did later in life, I can safely say cornetto/brioche wasn’t the default Italian breakfast until the time mass-produced baked goods flooded the market.

   Pastries were a treat reserved for the Sunday lunch (typical stop at the local patisserie on the way home from Church), and standard bakeries didn’t offer much besides, maybe, shortbread biscuits, cakes or spongecakes.

   So most regular people just dumped old bread into their milk/coffee (and coffee wasn’t much of a common thing until the economic boom in the 60s, with people still drinking “surrogate” coffee made with barley or even carubs). Homemade cakes or biscuits could be a cheap alternative for those who had a sweet tooth, but again, it mostly depended on how much time and money family had.

   And of course people working tough jobs (or poor people in the countryside) just ate nutritious savory food that sustained them until lunch. Usually leftovers of the previous day’s meals, if there was any. Or just bread with salame or other cheap cured meat.

   My mother used to have “pane, burro e zucchero” as the default snack: a piece of bread with a bit of butter and some sugar poured on it. The fancier alternative had jam instead of sugar. And when there wasn’t any butter, it was bread dipped in water with some sugar.

   Then Nutella arrived on the market and it changed things forever.

   But even then, the stereotypical “cornetto + cappuccino” breakfast was far from the norm for at least a solid decade or two.

10. Article is correct, until the seventies for breakfast the lucky one were getting something from the day before, made 80% of bread, the less lucky some dried figs, and the least lucky nothing at all. Asking my grandmother in the fifties also milk and sugar were rare. Cornetto is something quite recent that unfortunately disrupted the healthier Mediterranean diet, unfortunately not so common nowadays.

11. I think the Italian public was and still is being brainwashed that they should eat sweets for breakfast by marketing firms and food companies

12. I think you answered your own question. The frozen cornetto was inteoduced in 1970, and became popular afterwards. 

    Before it was just an exotic thing that was rarely made

13. I think bread in wine was probably more likely

14. I don’t think people used to eat breakfast in the bar before the 1970s. Anyway, people usually don’t eat Cornetto at home.

15. Pretty much anything you know as Italian “cuisine/tradition” is made-up marketing from the 60s-70s.

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