Italian Identity in the Kitchen, or Food and the Nation 9780231535083

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ITALIAN Identity

in the Kitchen , or Fo o d a n d t h e N at i o n

Arts and Traditions of the Table

ARTS AND TRADITIONS OF THE TABLE: PERSPECTIVES ON CULINARY HISTORY Albert Sonnenfeld, Series Editor Salt: Grain of Life, Pierre Laszlo, translated by Mary Beth Mader Culture of the Fork, Giovanni Rebora, translated by Albert Sonnenfeld French Gastronomy: The History and Geography of a Passion, Jean-Robert Pitte, translated by Jody Gladding Pasta: The Story of a Universal Food, Silvano Serventi and Françoise Sabban, translated by Antony Shugar Slow Food: The Case for Taste, Carlo Petrini, translated by William McCuaig Italian Cuisine: A Cultural History, Alberto Capatti and Massimo Montanari, translated by Áine O’Healy British Food: An Extraordinary Thousand Years of History, Colin Spencer A Revolution in Eating: How the Quest for Food Shaped America, James E. McWilliams Sacred Cow, Mad Cow: A History of Food Fears, Madeleine Ferrières, translated by Jody Gladding Molecular Gastronomy: Exploring the Science of Flavor, Hervé This, translated by M. B. DeBevoise Food Is Culture, Massimo Montanari, translated by Albert Sonnenfel Kitchen Mysteries: Revealing the Science of Cooking, Hervé This, translated by Jody Gladding Hog and Hominy: Soul Food from Africa to America, Frederick Douglass Opie Gastropolis: Food and New York City, edited by Annie Hauck-Lawson and Jonathan Deutsch Building a Meal: From Molecular Gastronomy to Culinary Constructivism, Hervé This, translated by M. B. DeBevoise Eating History: Thirty Turning Points in the Making of American Cuisine, Andrew F. Smith The Science of the Oven, Hervé This, translated by Jody Gladding Pomodoro! A History of the Tomato in Italy, David Gentilcore Cheese, Pears, and History in a Proverb, Massimo Montanari, translated by Beth Archer Brombert Food and Faith in Christian Culture, edited by Ken Albala and Trudy Eden The Kitchen as Laboratory: Reflections on the Science of Food and Cooking, edited by César Vega, Job Ubbink, and Erik van der Linden Creamy and Crunchy: An Informal History of Peanut Butter, the All-American Food, Jon Krampner Let the Meatballs Rest: And Other Stories About Food and Culture, Massimo Montanari, translated by Beth Archer Brombert The Secret Financial Life of Food: From Commodities Markets to Supermarkets, Kara Newman Drinking History: Fifteen Turning Points in the Making of American Beverages, Andrew Smith

I TAL IAN Identity

in the Kitchen , or Fo o d a n d t h e N at i o n M a s s i m o M o n ta n a r i

translated by

Beth Archer Brombert

C o l u m b i a U n i ve r s i t y P r e s s N ew Yo r k

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York  Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2010 Gius. Laterza & Figli. All rights reserved. Published by arrangement with Marco Vigevani Agenzia Letteraria Translation copyright © 2013 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Montanari, Massimo, 1949– [Identità italiana in cucina. English] Italian identity in the kitchen, or Food and the nation / by Massimo Montanari; translated by Beth Archer Brombert pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-231-16084-1 (cloth: alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-231-53508-3 (ebook) 1. Food—Italy. 2. Cooking, Italian—History. 3. Italy­­—Social life and customs. 4. Italians—Ethnic identity. 5. National characteristics, Italian. I. title. II. Title: Food and the nation. TX360.18m6613 2013 394.1’20945—dc23 Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. This book is printed on paper with recycled content. Printed in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Jacket design by Julia Kushnirsky Jacket photograph by Veer References to websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

CO N T E N TS

Translator’s Preface  vii Preface: Italy and Italians  xv

Before There Was an Italy There Was a Europe  1 Italy Is a Network of Cities  5 Models of Cooking Between Unified and Varied  11 Popular Culture and Culture of the Elite  19 People and Products That Travel  27 Preservation and Renewal of Alimentary Identities  33 Macaroni-eaters: How a National Stereotype Arose  41 The Artusian Synthesis  47 The Number of Italians Increases  53 The “Italian Miracle”: Between Modernity and Tradition  59 The Invention of Regional Cooking  65 Epilogue: In Search of Home Cooking  73 Related Readings  85 Index 97

TR A N S LAT O R’S P R E FACE

Massimo Montanari has devoted some thirty years and thirty

books to the study and diffusion of Italian alimentary history and, more broadly, to the role of food as culture. As a medievalist his training provided him with a rich background in the literature, politics, economics, and sociology of medieval Europe and of an Italian cultural entity that lacked a political reality, an Italy that was not to become a nation for another half millennium—not, in fact, until 1861. His prolific writings, erudite but never pedantic, investigating the history of eating, from the hunting and meat-eating of barbarians to the civilization of agriculture and bread, the significance of foods, the origins of customs, markets, locutions, products—all the many factors that entered into the alimentary culture of Europe, and ultimately of the New World as well—have reached a wide audience, from scholars to gastronomes. Thanks to his close readings of medieval and Renaissance literature and to his generous quotations, nonspecialist readers have been granted a rare glimpse into the medical thinking and early cookbook

writing that created an Italian cuisine when much of Europe was still unaware of such refinements. The present volume, on Italian identity in cooking, has a personal resonance for me. Long before I knew what, or even where, Italy was, I had become acquainted with its culinary identity, or to be more precise, the identity that had been exported beyond its borders. As an only child growing up in downtown Manhattan I was frequently taken to restaurants, most often Italian. My familiarity with Italian food was not, however, limited to restaurant dishes. My mother, a great consumer of fresh fruits and vegetables (I don’t remember ever seeing cans of either in our kitchen), was a regular client of the municipal market on 10th Street near Second Avenue, whose stalls were operated exclusively by Italian immigrants. They spoke their local dialects to each other and broken English to their customers. Before the construction of that indoor market, some of these same vendors and many of their earlier fellow Italians had stands, really pushcarts, all along First Avenue and the side streets. Many of those pushcarts were still to be seen when I was child, piled high with fruits, vegetables, dried fish, tripe, olives, all things never sold in non-Italian grocery stores. I remember eating artichokes, prickly pears, fennel, broccoli rabe, beet greens, broad beans, fresh peas that I learned to shell when my schoolmates ate peas out of a can. And when most people were eating iceberg lettuce, if they ate salad at all, we had romaine, escarole, radicchio, dandelion greens VIII |

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(my mother drew the line at garlic). Not even my college roommates had ever seen an artichoke. However, in matters Italian other than food, I was abysmally ignorant. I had no idea of Italian as a language or of Italy as a geographic entity, let alone its literature or history. But I had a very intimate knowledge of the flavors of that world, or at least the southern part of it, since most of the immigrants who provided food in restaurants or markets were from regions south of Naples: the smells and tastes of cooked tomatoes, garlic, spaghetti, ravioli, grated cheese (for a long time grated cheese was a thing in itself for me that came out of glass dish with a hinged stainless steel cover; only much later did I discover its origin in a huge wheel that could be flaked into chunks and eaten, ideally, with a ripe pear). That was Italian. I could not have imagined that one day I would assume an Italian identity myself. When my husband-to-be informed me that he had been granted a Fulbright Fellowship to write his doctoral dissertation and that we would spend our first year of marriage in Rome, I was far from enthusiastic. By that time Italy had acquired for me a cultural identity. As a graduate student in French at Columbia I had taken a course on Dante for nonItalian speakers and had seen Renaissance art at the Metropolitan Museum. But ancient Rome was much more vivid to me than modern Italy, thanks to movies like Ben Hur. As for contemporary Italy, that image was based on the post–World War II neorealist films coming out of Rome’s Cinecittà. The Rome in which I would be spending a whole year of my life

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was like a folding screen, each panel depicting a different image: the Colosseum, St.Peter’s, the dismal quarters of postwar Rome. It was hard to reconcile such disparate views, and even harder to place myself within them. After three weeks of an immersion language course at the University for Foreigners in Perugia I was actually speaking the language spoken throughout the peninsula, even if regional dialects were still used by many. With my newly acquired ability to communicate, friends entered our life and I soon learned that Italian identity was not singular but decidedly plural, unless an Italian was outside the country’s borders. Within Italy what counts is the region or the city of origin: one is Lombard, Tuscan, Emilian, Sicilian; or Roman, Florentine, Milanese, Neapolitan; or, even more precisely, the inhabitant of a village, a paese. Someone from Castellina in Chianti (where we spend our summers) is Italian if, say, he goes to Paris; in Italy he is Tuscan; in Tuscany he is Chiantigiano; and in Chianti he is Castellinese. But there are connecting links among all Italians, a very basic one being pasta. Everywhere along the length and breadth of the peninsula people eat pasta, in different forms and with different sauces, but it is still pasta, and most commonly dried pasta in its innumerable shapes. Pesto, for example, the pasta sauce now eaten everywhere is, or was, an exclusively Ligurian dish. In my early years in Italy you could not buy pesto readymade in a store. It was always made at home by laboriously grinding in a mortar with a pestle many leaves of freshly picked X |

Translator’s Preface

basil, garlic, oil, and pine nuts, to which was added grated pecorino, made from ewe’s milk (never parmesan, made of cow’s milk, and not Ligurian but Emilian, since Liguria has no pastureland, whereas Emilia, in the Po Valley, is rich in dairy herds). The pasta used for pesto was traditionally, and rigorously, a flat spaghetti called trenette. Having spent two summer holidays on the coast of Genoa, I learned that If you did not have trenette in the larder you did not make pesto, nor did you make pesto when basil was out of season, which meant that pesto was largely a summer dish. Today you can buy the sauce year round in jars, the contents of which looks more like olive paste than the bright green of fresh pesto. Pasta all’uovo, fresh pasta, soft and golden with egg yolks, was once a luxury. Most often made by hand at home, it could be found ready-made only in certain stores of big cities and was identified with Emilia or its capital, Bologna. In Florence, as late as the 1970’s, fresh pasta could be bought only in delicatessens (pizziccherie) that bore the sign “PASTA BOLOGNESE.” The sheets were cut on command into strips wide enough for lasagna (lasagna alla bolognese is made with fresh pasta) or thin enough for taglierini, and it was really fresh, since refrigerated cases were still largely a thing of the future. Nonetheless, pasta, fresh or dry, was a national dish, although I later discovered that Italy had three different basic dishes: rice and polenta (made of corn or buckwheat) in Lombardy and more generally in the north; bread in Tuscany; and dried pasta in the south, generically known as maccheroni. So

Translator’s Preface | XI

widespread was the use of maccheroni to mean dried pasta that Italians came to be known abroad as “macaroni-eaters” (in the non-Italian spelling), as we discovered on a trip to Paris during our year in Rome. We were stopped by a police officer in a monstrous traffic jam. My husband obediently slammed on the brakes at the sign of the raised arm and open hand. Despite the multitude of cars around him, the officer strode aggressively over to the driver’s open window and, having evidently noticed the Rome license plate, bellowed, “Eh, macaroni, y ,a pas de passages cloutés à Rome?” (Hey, macaroni, don’t they have pedestrian crossings in Rome?) Montanari tells us how pasta came to Italy. Macaroni, in its generic sense, though long associated with Naples, was in fact brought to Sicily by the Arabs around the twelfth century in the form of dried noodles. The ancient Romans had earlier invented pasta dough that was cut into large flat strips, like lasagna or pappardelle, but the dried variety could keep longer. Once factories were established in the south, it was cheap to produce. The availability of an affordable product coupled with the inefficient distribution of fresh food resulted in pasta supplanting the traditional Neapolitan diet of cabbage and meat. How many Neapolitans know that their fore-forefathers were known as “cabbage-eaters” rather than “macaroni-eaters”? Along with pasta, most of Italy’s culinary trademarks, Montanari reminds us, have exotic origins. Tomatoes, peppers sweet and hot, potatoes, corn (which became the staple dish of peasants in the north, as did potatoes in Ireland, to the detriment of XII |

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their health), all came to Italy, and ultimately to Europe, from the New World in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In the present volume, Montanari returns, as in a number of earlier books, to the enormous divide between peasant and patrician, eminently demonstrated by the differences in diet, which led to sociologically weighted locutions such as “Al contadino non fa sapere quanto è buono il formaggio con le pere” (don’t tell the peasant how good cheese is with pears), to which he devoted the fascinating book Cheese, Pears, and History in a Proverb, and such contemptuous appellations as macaroni-eater, turnip-eater, mouse-eater . . . man being apparently ranked according to what he eats. Montanari also brings to light the role that hunger played in agriculture and in class distinctions (corn and potatoes, being more prolific crops than wheat, could feed many more peasants, so that bread made of wheat became the mark of the upper classes, particularly white bread, in contrast to dark bread, made of coarser grains like rye and associated with the peasantry). It was hunger that also brought vegetables, salad greens, and herbs to the Italian peasant table, and eventually to the rest of Europe, although it took time for them to gain acceptance as “respectable” foodstuffs. Ironically, many of those contemptible peasant dishes and products have now become part of the culinary repertory of the well-to-do. When a restaurant diner today delights in a bowl of polenta taragna (buckwheat polenta) in the region of Valtellina, or panzanella in Tuscany (tomaotes, cucumbers, red onions mixed with soaked stale bread and oil) in Tuscany, he is eating the

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dishes that kept peasants from starving. What emerges from this slender volume is the very weighty notion that “identity . . . is not inscribed in the genes of a people or in the ancient history of their origin, but is constructed historically through the day-to-day dynamic exchanges between individuals, experiences, and different cultures.” After more than a half century of living, eating, and cooking in Italy, I can personally attest to Montanari’s conclusions. Beth Archer Brombert

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P R E FAC E

Italy and Italians “Italy is made, now let us make Italians,” Massimo d’Azeglio1 is

reputed to have said once the country was unified in 1861. This statement could have been reversed: Italians finally made Italy. More than anything it was a question of numbers and proportions. Peasant masses had always lived (and would have continued to live) within locally circumscribed areas. Whereas upper classes of society—aristocrats and bourgeois— had lived for centuries in an “Italian” dimension that went beyond the political and administrative confines of the many states dotting the peninsula and the islands. This is to say that for some, at least, Italy had existed for some time. It was the Massimo d’Azeglio (1778–1866), distinguished writer and statesman, preceded Camillo Cavour as prime minister to Victor Emmanuel, king of Piedmont-Sardinia, T.N.

1

This volume is an amplified reworking of the essay Modelli alimentari e identità italiana, which appeared in La cultura italiana, under the general editorship of L. L. Cavalli Sforza, UTET, Turin 2009, vol. VI, Cibo, gioco, festa, moda, edited by C. Petrini and U. Volli, pp. 73–89.

Italy of a way of life, of daily practices, of mental attitudes: the Italy of culture, which identifies a country more accurately than political unity. Alimentary and gastronomic models—always a decisive element of collective identities—were an integral part of this culture. It is on these that we will focus our attention in order to verify how the presence of a common sensibility, of shared styles and tastes, allow us to speak of a “land called Italy” as far back as the Middle Ages, when Italy was yet to come or to be imagined but when Italians already existed. For that is how they felt and characterized themselves with absolute certainty and without any ambiguity. Jacques Le Goff observed that “the political and mental realities of the Italian Middle Ages are the Italians, far more than Italy.” The same can be said about the modern period up to 1861.

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ITALIAN Identity

in the Kitchen , or Fo o d a n d t h e N at i o n

B EFORE THERE Was an ITALY THERE Was a EUROPE

The emergence of an “Italian” culinary culture came little by lit-

tle within the broader European koine that had developed during the early Middle Ages, thanks to the encounter of Romans and “barbarians,” as the Romans disdainfully called them. This encounter, preceded by a period of brutal conflict, determined the circulation, and the integration, of various cultural models, creating a new reality that to some degree married the traditions and lifestyles of Mediterranean populations with those of the Continent, thereby moving the center from the western Mediterranean to Europe. The conflict/encounter between Romans and barbarians was echoed by the contrast between their alimentary values: the culture of bread, wine, and oil (symbols of Roman agricultural civilization) became mixed in with the culture of meat and milk, lard and butter (symbols of “barbarian” civilization, associated more with forest life than with ag-

riculture). The prestige of the Roman model, which favored the ability to domesticate and transform nature, had to come to terms with the importance attributed by the barbarian victors to the consumption of meat and animal products. Out of this emerged a new model of production, termed “agro-forest-pastoral” by historians, in which bread and grains were on equal footing with meat and dairy products, a symbiosis simultaneously economic and mental from which the historical wealth of European cuisines derived. This phenomenon was accelerated by the spread of Christianity, which imposed models of common behavior on the peoples of Europe. On the one hand, it conferred singular prestige on the traditional symbols of Mediterranean civilization— bread, wine, oil—that became cult emblems and instruments of the new religion (bread and wine for the celebration of the Eucharist, oil for the administration of the sacraments). On the other, it introduced in every region of the continent the same obligations of alimentary alternation determined by the liturgical calendar that marked the passage of time, differentiating the days and periods of “fat” (when meat could be eaten or was even encouraged to mark holidays) from the days and periods of “lean” (when meat had to be replaced by vegetables or at most dairy products, eggs, fish). In this way the coexistence of all products, all fats, all condiments, on all the tables of Christian Europe was assured. The convergence of these political, economic, and religious factors generated a relatively homogeneous culture that we 2 |

Before There Was an Italy There Was a Europe

define as European. Within this framework diverse identities slowly took shape, bound by the formation and consolidation of common traditions, ways of life, and collective values. In Italy, various peoples (first the Goths, then the Lombards, who invaded the peninsula along with other, smaller groups) superimposed themselves on the preexistent “Roman” population, itself composed of a multitude of origins held together by their shared Roman culture. For a while the historical record made it possible to distinguish with a degree of clarity between the individual ethnic groups; later, only traces remained, primarily linguistic. What stands out clearly are the exchanges—social, cultural, in addition to biological—that give birth to a new reality. Little by little, out of this mixture of peoples, the Italians were born.

Before There Was an Italy There Was a Europe | 3

ITALY

Is a NETWO RK of CITIES

its own cultural (and political) identity by means of what we would call today “networking.” Whereas elsewhere (France, England, later Spain) political entities, relatively homogeneous and sizable in territory, had already taken shape by the mid-centuries of the Middle Ages, for various reasons—starting with the cumbersome presence of the Papacy smack in the middle of the peninsula—this did not happen in Italy, despite attempts made by the Goths and later by others. There was, however, a material and psychological space within which models of life and culture, objects and techniques, humans and habits circulated, including food and even gastronomy. It was in this way that during the Middle Ages an “Italian” alimentary model developed, lasting in certain basic aspects all the way to today.

Italy constructed

A key factor emerges from this mechanism regarding cultural transmission and diffusion: the network of cities, more powerful in Italy than elsewhere, and with very specific characteristics. Pivotal in the Roman administrative system, the cities—even in the Middle Ages, notwithstanding the general decadence of the system—long remained a determining factor in civil life. The countryside and rural centers (abbeys, castles) acquired a previously unknown importance, though this was not the reason for the decline of the centrality of urban nuclei as seats of religious and political power. At the beginning of the eleventh century the municipal phenomenon exploded in the center-north of the peninsula: the cities proposed—at first along with the bishopric, later (in some cases) in opposition to it—to take over as centers of self-government and control of the territory. This is singularly Italian: in the absence of lordly powers capable of coordinating vast regional differences, the city succeeded in expanding (unlike other places) within what came to be called the “county,” which in essence made it a little capital whose fortunes were intimately associated with the surrounding area. Nobles and merchants in the city joined their interests and created a more or less coherent system of domination over the economic and alimentary resources of the countryside. Toward the end of the Middle Ages, from the fourteenth century on, the signorie, the nobility, inherited this municipal phenomenon, modifying the political orientation (to the point of creating family dynasties) but confirming and reinforcing 6 |

Italy Is a Network of Cities

the territorial character of the municipal government. Beyond the considerable differences between various social and political experiences, what they shared was the ability of major centers to impose their dominion over lesser ones, thus creating a hierarchy of the capital cities over the others, which nevertheless continued to administer their own territory. In this way “regional” states arose, increasing the economic and political horizon of municipal power. What remained in an altered situation was the model of the city that governs the territory. What also remained was the model of the network that brought together diverse political entities, making them homogeneous on the cultural level, to various degrees, through the circulation of men, ideas, and merchandise. Men: professional politicians, notaries, officials of the local administration, as well as artists and intellectuals, merchants, cooks for important families, makers of street food. Ideas: acquired knowledge, experiences, mental attitudes. Merchandise: the products made by artisans and the farm products that appeared in the markets and then disappeared again. Medieval cities with limited territory and cities on the threshold of the modern era that asserted themselves as heads of their regional states were simultaneously centripetal and centrifugal. Centripetal because they directed most of the county’s resources to urban markets, with the age-old practice of protectionism, intended to ensure the safety of the inhabitants. Centrifugal because the basic products in urban markets (primarily wheat) that could satisfy local needs also created exchanges with other

Italy Is a Network of Cities | 7

markets, especially in the case of delicacies, which were commercially desirable As of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, various cities in Emilia and Lombardy, for example, tied their names to a particular cheese, known as parmigiano, piacentino, or lodigiano, according to the local variety. These prestigious cheeses, produced in the farms around Parma, Piacenza and Lodi, reached distant places thanks to the markets in those cities. The use of this type of cheese as a condiment for pasta, along with butter and a bit of “sweet spice” (primarily cinnamon), became virtually obligatory on the tables of those who could afford it from one end of the peninsula to the other. In the particular case of the denomination parmigiano, the association with the city is even more explicit than would appear at first. For in the local vernacular still today, parmigiano refers to anything (people or things) related to the city, whereas parmense indicates inhabitants of the county. The mechanism is therefore clear: the countryside produces; the city (which controls the rural economy through the property of the citizenry) directs the produce to the urban market and gives it the denomination of its own identity (parmigiano, piacentino, and so on); the urban market distributes the product in a commercial space. The cultural result is that this movement of products leads to shared alimentary tastes and practices. The ability to intercept commercial circuits, to be the point of departure and the point of arrival of desirable gastronomic products, was a powerful means of assuring a city renown, 8 |

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fame, and reputation during the Middle Ages. This is how Bologna acquired the epithet of grassa, fat, an adjective that in those days had a distinctly positive connotation, signifying abundant, rich. As of the thirteenth century the circulation of this name throughout Europe was associated with the presence in the city of a well-attended university, and with the influx of professors and students to a locality that could accommodate them thanks to a well-provisioned market. However, it is not the fertility of the surrounding countryside, nor the excellence of the local cuisine that can give rise to such fame. These conditions are necessary but not sufficient. Many other cities enjoyed similar conditions but did not manage to achieve the reputation of Bologna. What makes the difference is the policy of interchange and openness, the vocation that Bologna developed precociously—resulting from the presence of a center of university studies—of proposing itself as a place of mediation, of cultural exchanges. The extraordinary gastronomic identity of this city was born not of the unprovable superiority of its municipal importance, but rather of its ability to exploit it, to activate a network of relationships that in this case were particularly extensive.

Italy Is a Network of Cities | 9

M ODEL S of COOKI NG B E TWEEN UNIFIED and VARIED

The cookbooks that appeared in Italy as of the fourteenth cen-

tury are reliable evidence of this circulation of products, tastes, and techniques related to food. During the Middle Ages there were two principal groups or “families” of cookbooks: one southern in origin, the other Tuscan. The progenitor of the first would seem to be a text developed at the Angevine court of Naples, entitled Liber de coquina. Recent studies, however, argue convincingly that alongside this text there is another, from the previous century, drafted in Sicily at the court of Frederick II in Palermo. What interests us is how that “progenitor” of Italian haute cuisine came to be the model for the authors of many cookbooks, compiled not only in the south but also in central and northern Italy. The Tuscan text, created perhaps in Siena, had an analogous circulation. It too was copied, adapted, reworked in various regions of the peninsula, from north to

south. The numerous adaptations to suit local situations (hardly surprising in texts like cooking manuals, which by their nature are malleable and open) do not contradict the fundamental reality of a culture that appears to have been diffused and shared on a level that we can cautiously define as “national,” albeit limited to a restricted public, such as the courts of the nobility (which produced the Liber de coquina) and the palaces of the high bourgeoisie (which produced the Tuscan cookbook)—urban centers, in any case, such as Palermo, Naples, Siena, and later Bologna, Florence, and Venice. Certain original traits can be perceived in this medieval Italian cuisine. To begin with, the role of pasta—not yet entrenched, and in no way comparable to the role (as we will see) that pasta will play in the modern and contemporary era— which was already significant and characteristic. The culture of pasta is not exclusively Italian; in those centuries even French or English cookbooks include it. What appears to be Italian is the variety of types and shapes that multiplied during the Middle Ages because of the superimposition, specifically in Italy, of diverse gastronomic traditions: the ancient Roman one that was already familiar with the large form (lasagna); the medieval Arab one that introduced the lengthened form (vermicelli and fettuccine) and contemporaneously spread the method of drying it to facilitate its conservation and ability to be transported long distances. This led to the industrialization of pasta, first documented in Trabia, in the Arab region of Sicily, where the chronicler Edrisi mentioned the existence of a 12 |

Models of Cooking

factory that exported “all over, to Calabria and other Muslim and Christian countries; and sent out very many cargo ships.” We are barely at the beginning of the twelfth century. In the next century, pasta factories will be built in Genoa, another port and another commercial center, which confirms that the success of alimentary models is based on their ability to travel. In the meanwhile another type of pasta, short and hollow, appeared: macaroni. A “container filled with macaroni” was registered in Genoa in 1279 in the inventory of the estate of miles Ponzio Bastone and is the first time that this term, often used during the Middle Ages and later to indicate gnocchi, designated the product still called by that name. No less important is the category of stuffed pasta: ravioli and tortelli, sweet and salty, fried or boiled, seem to have enjoyed particular success in the Italian peninsula, even though they gained recognition on a European scale. In short, the Middle Ages represent the decisive moment in the evolution of a pasta culture that would remain throughout the centuries a pillar of the Italian culinary model. In the fifteenth-century cookbook by Maestro Martino, and even more clearly in cookbooks of the Renaissance, the phase that might be called “experimental” has by then been passed. Pasta, in its many varieties, no longer appears in occasional individual recipes scattered among unrelated chapters. It has now become a gastronomic type in its own right and deserving of special chapters. Another distinctive dish of medieval cooking is the torte with a baked crust of pasta dough, filled with meat, cheese,

Models of Cooking | 13

fish, vegetables—an ingenious invention that allowed any kind of ingredients to be contained, cooked, and carried. Tortes (or pastelli or pasticci in Italian1) seem to be a characteristic element of the Italian taste and Italian gastronomic model of the Middle Ages, transformed during the Renaissance by a brilliant innovation: the covering over the filling was made friable and edible by adding butter to the dough. The multiple forms of pasta and the unlimited variants of the torte are almost a metaphor of Italian cuisine and its basic character: general recognizability, common elements that define a powerful and specific cultural identity; local differences deeply rooted in the customs of the territories and cities where such identities arise and decline; the dissemination of information and the possibility of comparing the variants; the absolute legitimacy of each variant within the overall context; and the impossibility of (or rather, the indifference to) deducing a uniform model from those variants. A particularly noteworthy example can be found in the cookbook of Bartolomeo Scappi. the most important cook of the Italian Renaissance, author of the seminal Opera (1570), which covers his long experience as a chef in the employ of the lords of Milan, Venice, and Bologna, and ultimately of Pope Pius V in Rome. How did Scappi operate? What was his state of mind? His was undoubtedly an Italian state of mind that “Pasties” in English, from the Old French pastee, which became pâté and discarded the crust.

1

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looked at local factors, both urban and regional, and tried to combine them, without establishing a hierarchy of values. Let us take the case of tortes. Scappi presents a few of the bestknown types, in the styles of Milan, Genoa, Bologna, and Naples. The differences lie in the ingredients (meat and vegetables), the condiments (butter in the Milanese and Bolognese versions, oil in the Genoese), the presence or absence of eggs (present in the Milanese dough, absent in the Bolognese), the form (higher in the Milanese version, lower in the Bolognese, whereas the Neapolitan version is typically open rather than closed, with the dough serving as a base rather than as a cover, and is “called pizza by Neapolitans”). There is no torte all’italiana. In Scappi’s monumental cookbook this attribution appears barely twice. The torte is generically Italian, as is the network of customs, techniques, and tastes that from time to time qualify the common dish concretely or diversely. Bartolomeo Scappi’s methodology—anthological, so to speak, bringing together various experiences, comparing the gastronomic practices of north and south, east and west (on the subject of fish, he repeatedly distinguishes between Adriatic customs and Tyrrhenian ones)—is exemplary and revealing. It is not a matter of setting up judgments or hierarchies, selecting or rejecting, but simply knowing and comparing. Which is why scholars have long argued about Scappi’s biographical identity, some declaring him Lombard (as appears certain by now), others Bolognese, Venetian, or something else again. It is this

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very polyvalence that marks his cultural versatility, his “Italianness,” which resists being circumscribed by local or municipal boundaries, as some would wish. Scappi’s Italy is the Italy of the cities that represent regions, which are sizable by the sixteenth century. Milan is Lombardy, and broadly speaking the whole of the north beyond the Po River; Rome, with the Papal States, comprises the heart of the peninsula; Naples is the south, along with Sicily (significant, moreover, because of its singular and solid regional identity). The urban model we have described was not the same everywhere: it worked perfectly in the Italy that had a municipal tradition, meaning the north and in part the center, where a large network of cities, large, medium, and small ruled over the alimentary and gastronomic heritage. It worked less well in the south, where the existence of a relatively centralized kingdom, going back to the Middle Ages, acted as a hindrance to the autonomy of the cities and concentrated politics, the economy, and culture within the capital. The city-states in central and northern Italy were many. In the south, Naples represented the entire region of the kingdom, leaving more space for rural areas to express their identity. To understand such differences, one need only consider the denominations of agricultural and alimentary products in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts. In the Italy of municipal and regional rulers the point of reference is predominantly the city: Scappi (whom we offer merely as an example) recalls the cabbage of Milan, the veal of Rome, the pigeons of 16 |

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Terni, the frogs and olives of Bologna, the sausages of Lucca and Modena, the pumpkins of Savona, the mushrooms of Genoa, the pears of Florence, in addition to parmigiano, obviously, and so much more. As for the south, when no reference is made to Naples, attributions to rural and coastal areas take the forefront. A text such as Lucerna de corteggiani by Giovan Battista Crisci (1634), a veritable catalogue of the products and specialties of the kingdom, is striking for the primarily nonurban locations of production and of markets, identified as villages, or “countryside” or “coastal.” There is no network of cities to synthesize the gastronomic culture of the kingdom (beginning with the denomination)—the “fresh provole cheeses from the Evoli countryside” or the many fruits “from the Posillipo coast”—there is only the splendid capital, Naples. This describes a situation, simultaneously political, economic, and cultural, similar in certain aspects to France, the model since the Middle Ages for the construction of a single state with a single capital, around which the entire country was a virtual countryside. Nonetheless, the south also participated in the network of exchanges and skills that we have described. Many aspects of Italian gastronomy historically follow a north–south itinerary. One need only recall dry pasta or rice, which appear for the first time in Arab–Norman Sicily, or citrus fruits, or vegetables such as spinach and eggplant, all brought to Sicily by these same Arabs, along with sugar and the art of confections that derived from it. Just as it will be remembered that the medieval

Models of Cooking | 17

Liber de coquina, archetype of Italian gastronomic literature, is Neapolitan (though probably of Sicilian origin).

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POPULAR CULTURE and CULTURE of the EL I TE

We will not understand the specificity of the Italian situation

without introducing a new element for consideration, which no longer involves the centripetal and centrifugal relations (as defined earlier) between cities and territories; instead, what might be called the “vertical” relations between the various social components of individual communities come into play. The contribution of “popular” culture to the Italian alimentary model appears to be particularly relevant. The urban gastronomy of central and northern Italy, and to an even greater degree that of southern Italy, indicates a significant rural throwback, clearly noticeable, even if not immediately provable, in cookbooks and all other documents. This is not a simple opposition/integration between cultures of the country and those of the city, but a more general complicity between lower classes and ruling classes, bourgeois or noble. The phenomenon is crucial and requires careful examination.

Distinctive elements of the alimentary culture of European elites during the Middle Ages and beyond are the emphasis placed on meat—symbolic of privilege and power—and the contempt for plants, such as grains, beans, and above all vegetables, represented in literature as typical of the peasant diet. These humble foods were thus unfit for the table of gentry in an ideological context that made alimentary customs a significant social distinction. Smells such as those of garlic and onions appeared to be enough in themselves to “reveal” a peasant nature, as did vegetables in general and so-called inferior grains, which yielded dark breads (rye and spelt), or polenta and thick soups (barley, oats, millet). This is the general rule. But if one reads the recipes for the cuisine of the upper classes—whether the anonymous cookbooks of the fourteenth century or the one by Maestro Martino of the following century, all the way to the Renaissance texts of Cristoforo Messisbugo or the already mentioned Scappi—one realizes that something is out of kilter. Garlic and onions, and later cabbage and turnips, millet and barley, and all kinds of “peasant” produce have entered the repertory of haute cuisine, in recipes often so extremely simple as to be disconcerting, given the context in which they appear: for example, the fourteenth-century Tuscan recipe for raponcelli (turnip greens) that recommends boiling them in water, then sautéing them in oil with onions, salt . . . and there the recipe ends. Cabbage, turnips, fennel, mushrooms, pumpkin, lettuce, parsley, and every kind of herb, aside from legumes like beans and peas, are the basis of innumerable dishes (soups, pies, frit20 |

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ters) proposed by Maestro Martino, and later by Scappi, who does not hesitate to acknowledge in the plebeian simplicity of certain preparations a superiority not easily exceeded by the refinement of the court cook. He often explicitly refers to lessons learned from peasants and fishermen about certain ways of preparing food. For example, after having provided the recipe for turbot “in pottaggio,”1 he claims to have learned this “at the time I was in Venice and in Ravenna . . . among fisherman from Chiozza and from Venetians, who made the best 'pottaggi' on the entire seacoast.” And it is precisely this recipe that Scappi included in his Opera, remarking in addition: “I believe that they make it better than chefs because they cook it as soon as they have hauled in the fish.” This is not a populist commonplace but merely a “technical” question of timing. The fish prepared by fishermen are better than those prepared by chefs simply because they are fresher. Naturally, “popular” recipes did not enter elite cuisine in their original form. Various strategies of ennoblement were used to make them compatible with the culture of privilege and the ideology of difference. An easy but effective way to reaffirm the higher status of the diners, and to display it publicly, was to add exotic spices to the humble dish, something few could afford: “Once they [the raponcelli] are cooked and on a serving dish,” the fourteenth-century recipe prescribes, “put spices in bowls.” Alternately, or additionally, it should 1

Fish stew, like Tuscan cacciucco or French bouillabaisse.

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be emphasized that this preparation is not a dish in itself, as would be the case on a humble table, but was used to accompany some choice food. The recipe for “delicate cabbage” in the fourteenth-century Liber de coquina can be “served to gentry” because its primary use is to accompany any kind of meat, the text specifies “cum omnibus carnibus.” In any case, the presence of products and recipes that indicate a mixed culture (more likely reinterpreted) is a fact of absolute relevance, in no way self-evident in the society of medieval and Renaissance Europe. The incipit of Liber de coquina is a virtual program: “In our wish to discuss herein the preparation of dishes and various types of food, let us begin with the easiest, that is, the category of vegetables”—and on to ten recipes for cabbage before moving on to spinach, fennel, and “small leaves,” followed by dishes based on legumes, such as chick peas, peas, broad beans, lentils, and beans. Not all cultural areas seem equally suitable for this model of consumption: certainly the southern tradition is more heavily permeated. But this tradition, whether on the level of gastronomy or on that of production, will constitute for centuries a point of common reference. From this viewpoint it is interesting to note how the alimentary identity of certain Italian localities in the north, which we imagine as examples of a Po Valley model contrasted with the “Mediterranean” tradition of the south, was perceived during the Middle Ages and early modern period as an unexpected “Mediterranean” key, regarded perhaps as the predominant characteristic of 22 |

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the culture of the entire country. Take the case of Bologna, historic capital of mortadella and meat-filled tortellini. If we look at documents of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the gastronomic innovations of the city—alongside sausages and salsiciotti—seem to be grapes, figs, peaches, olives, cabbages, and “sweet fennel” (bred from wild varieties), which the agronomist Vincenzo Tanara attributed to “the glory of Bolognese farmers.” Among the “Bolognese” recipes, particularly renowned seems to have been the “vegetable torte” mentioned by Scappi, which may be the same “Swiss chard torte” mentioned by Tanara a century later. Another good example is that of Giacomo Castelvetro of Modena, who sought refuge in England at the beginning of the seventeenth century for religious reasons (a Protestant, he was persecuted during the Inquisition). At some point, feeling nostalgic for his birthplace, he wrote a little essay on the food culture of Italy, centered not on zampone and cotechino,2 as we would expect from an Emilian like him, but on produce. His essay bears the title Brief account of all the roots, herbs and fruits, raw or cooked. eaten in Italy, whose purpose is to explain to the English that there are many foods to enjoy other than meat, that for reasons of climate, environment, and culture, “la Bella Italia,” as he calls it, developed a culinary tradition based on a variety of botanical products that others neglect. The thick sausages of the region, served hot, often with lentils, especially on New Year’s Day. 2

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It is therefore not surprising that the gastronomic prestige acquired by vegetables represents Italy’s principal contribution to the development of a culinary patrimony in Europe. More than enough has been written about Catherine de’ Medici, who became the wife of Henri II, king of France, in 1533, and who is said to have exported the refinements of Italian court cuisine to the other side of the Alps, making it the model for the evolution of French cuisine in the seventeenth century. Its enduring success later on would have been assured and maintained by the political and cultural hegemony imposed on all of Europe by the monarchy of Paris. The “legend of Catherine” arriving in France with her cooks and recipes (including those of Scappi) is based on truth only if we place it in a proper historical perspective. French cuisine, all by itself, developed styles and “philosophies” of taste that had little to do with the Italian tradition, in that, between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they revolutionized the traditional parameters of gastronomic esthetics, preferring the “naturalness” of flavors over the artifices of medieval and Renaissance court cooks. From this perspective it is precisely the Italian model that was rejected as the expression of an obsolete culture. What did come from Italy, perhaps even thanks to Catherine’s initiative, was the uncommon and special attention given by modern French cooking to vegetables. Moreover, interest in Italian culture was hardly a novelty: already in the fourteenth century it had enjoyed great popularity in Europe through the numerous reprints and translations into French and German of the treatise 24 |

Popular Culture and Culture of the Elite

“On virtuous pleasure and good health” (De honesta voluptate et valetudine) by the humanist Platina, based, for the section on food, on the cookbook of Maestro Martino. What interests us above all is to reexamine how this original character of the Italian gastronomic tradition resulted from the integration of a popular culture and an elite culture that took hold in Italy as in no other European country. A clue to understanding this phenomenon is, once again, the singular relationship in Italy between city and country. The ideal locus for economic, cultural, and social exchanges, the city by its nature was a perfect breeding ground for hybridization and contamination. Popular and elite cultures confronted one another there every day, imitating each other and blending together in turn. The cooks who worked at court or for great families, in some cases of noble origin but more often commoners, were perhaps central figures in this mechanism, yet to be explored. The peasant, ideologically despised by the city dweller, was nonetheless often encountered in the day-to-day reality of the market or domestic service. It is evident that Italian cookbooks, and the alimentary models proposed by them, express a broad social culture. For this reason as well, it is possible to speak of a “national” gastronomic heritage, because the written tradition, the expression of an elite cuisine, over the centuries represented and transmitted a culture in which everyone could recognize fragments of his own identity. If the splendors of Renaissance courts have remained still today the source of pride for entire communities, it is not merely as a

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tourist attraction but also because that tradition represents an important part of the collective memory and, however much adapted, contains the cultures of the entire society. The community recognizes itself in that tradition because, over the centuries, it actively contributed to creating it.

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PE O PL E and PRODU CTS THAT TRAVEL

The network of economic and cultural relations that bind local

Italian phenomena can be explained either by the commercial movement of products, and thus their consumption in regions other than those of production, or by the movement of those who are called today consumers, for touristic reasons or more generally to become familiar with the territory. A good example, albeit literary and virtual, can be found in the “gastronomic voyage in Italy” proposed by the Milanese scholar Ortensio Lando in 1548 in his whimsical Commentario delle più notabili e mostruose cose d’Italia e d’altri luoghi (mostruose here meaning “admirable,” from the Latin).1 Through his invented character, an improbable Aramaic touring Italy, Lando emphasizes the Commentary on the most noteworthy and admirable things in Italy and other places.

1

importance—in order to understand the country—of knowing the gastronomic specialties of the various regions that comprise it. What emerges is a kind of guidebook, starting in Sicily, with its marvelous macaroni “cooked with the fat of capons and fresh cheese, oozing butter and milk on all sides,” in which he organizes a series of stops, predominantly urban, along a south–north axis. Here we see unfolding Taranto, with its marvelous fish; Naples, with delectable breads and other specialties; and then north—somewhat hastily to be honest, and on a dubious itinerary—to the central regions between Tuscany and Umbria, touching on Siena, Foligno, Florence, Pisa, and Lucca. In Emilia one must stop in Bologna, where “the best sausages ever tasted” are made; in Ferrara, “unique in the preparation of salami and preserves of herbs, fruits and roots” (note once more the centrality of plants in the gastronomic imagination of Italy, even in northern regions); then Modena, Reggio, Mirandola, Correggio, Piacenza and its prized cheese2 (in this instance Lando ignores Parma), then, having crossed the Po River, on to Lodi, Binasco, and the great marketplace of Milan; followed by Monza and its sausages, Como and its trout, Lugano, Chiavenna and the cheese of the Alpine valleys. Crossing back on his own tracks now in a southwest direction, Lando leads us to Padua, Chioggia, and Venice, with its impressive seafood specialties. And again, moving northward, to Vicenza, The same as parmesan, by which name the cheese is universally known today.

2

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Lake Garda, the river fish of Treviso, the wines of Brescia and Bergamo. With a new unexpected detour the journey ends in Genoa, to taste the famous tortes and the light wines of the Riviera. This is hardly a complete and reliable guide. It is surprising that Rome was overlooked, as well as a few other places. Nonetheless, the framework designed by Ortensio Lando covers a good chunk of Italy and demonstrates a land rich in gastronomy, localized in certain details but at the same time recognizable in basic characteristics. It is not at all strange that in the forefront of this itinerary are cold cuts, cheeses, and preserves. Our hypothetical traveler might have liked to stop at a tavern to taste some local dishes, but it is the food specialties with commercial potential—those that reach the market and that can even travel distances because of their durability—that constitute the fabric of shared skills and tastes. It should also be noted that preserves provided an important and eventual point of contact between popular and elite cultures. For in peasant societies, techniques of preservation represented the principal strategy for combating famine during the year, without having to trust the vagaries of the seasons. The additional benefit of all the labor and skill that went into preserving natural products was soon transferred from the category of need to that of pleasure, promoting preserves, whether of meat or plants, to the rank of delicacies. Like the Italy of travelers, the Italy of markets was the privilege of few. This was well articulated, in fact theorized, by Bartolomeo Stefani, head chef of the Gonzaga court in Mantua,

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when in 1662 he published L’arte di ben cucinare, et istruire i men periti in questa lodevole professione [The art of fine cooking, and how to instruct those less skilled in this laudable profession]. After having recommended to his readers not to limit their attention (those who could) to “the food of their native city” but to go beyond its confines in search of good foodstuffs, Stefani describes a system of exchanges organized in “gastronomic districts” that are distinct but that communicate with one another. Naples and Sicily, he writes, produce vegetables and fruits that supply the “entire kingdom” during the “cold season,” when it is impossible to find any in other places. Analogously, the coast of Gaeta “provides the same produce to Rome.” Genoa, with its seacoast, provisions Milan, Florence, Bologna, Turin, Piacenza, “and cities near them.” Bologna produces beautiful fennel, grapes, and large olives, “and provides these goods to all of Lombardy, Romagna, Florence, and nearby provinces as far as Rome.” Naturally, to acquire these products required “fast horses and fat wallets.” Rapid transportation is the conspicuous benefit of money. This is why eating foods that come from afar represents in itself a sign of social advantage. In Stefani’s time Piedmont occupied first place in Italian gastronomy. If biscottini savoiardi had become fashionable then (we even find them in the still lifes of painters of that period, such as Cristoforo Munari), it is because that region, until then outside the network of the exchanges and skills that we described earlier, had become part of it for obvious political reasons, from the moment that the house of Savoy moved its 30 |

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interests and its capital south of the Alps, from Chambéry to Turin, in 1563. During the Middle Ages these territories constituted a kind of hinge between the “Italian” world and the “French” world. In the sixteenth century Turin was still notably absent from the Italian alimentary system and from its urban network. (That Lando ignored it in his itinerary is perhaps not important, but its absence is extremely significant from the mental horizon of Bartolomeo Scappi, who limited the culture of northern Italy beyond the Po to Lombardy and the Veneto.) After 1563, Italian culture had to reckon with this newcomer as well.

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PRESERVATION and RENEWAL of A LIMENTARY IDENTI TI E S

meanwhile new products entered the Italian culinary heritage. After the basic contributions of the Arabs during the Middle Ages, the fifteenth century marked the introduction of rice as well into the agronomy and eating habits of the north, whereas buckwheat, which came from Asia, spread throughout the Alpine and pre-Alpine regions as the new grain for making polenta. Then it was the turn of products from the Americas, particularly corn, which penetrated the farmlands of the northeast starting in the 1530s, and slowly replaced traditional grains such as millet and sorghum. Corn even took the name of sorghum, melega, in the dialect of the Veneto, designating a grain that comes from the other side of the ocean. This lexical substitution represents with perfect parallelism the insertion of the new product into the traditional gastronomic vocabulary. If the product was new, its use was ancient, forcing it into a

In the

morphology and a “grammatical” system that had existed for centuries. Polenta was a traditional peasant dish on the Italian peninsula. In Roman times it was made with spelt; in the Middle Ages, with millet and all kinds of small grains or with legumes. Corn, prized for its extraordinary productivity, was adapted to this dish normally made of grains unsuited to the making of bread. This is a recurrent phenomenon in the history of food: incorporating novelties into tradition, reinterpreting them from personal experience, from specific cultural choices not determined by environment or production. Polenta made of cornmeal was not indigenous to pre-Columbia America; in Italy it was virtually the only use to which cornmeal was put. It was not, however, in the sixteenth century that corn took its place in Italian culinary practices. Despite early experiments in the Veneto (when corn was cultivated surreptitiously in kitchen gardens hidden from proprietors and from the share levied on all other products), it was only two centuries later that the success of corn rose to the point of overturning the previous balance of agriculture. This occurred because of the conjuncture of two factors. The first was hunger, which in the eighteenth century dramatically afflicted the population of the Italian countryside because the system of production was inadequate to the demographic growth. The sequence of agricultural crises and famines (particularly serious in 1708, 1740, 1764–67, 1775, 1783, 1789) forced the peasants into drastic actions, such as abandoning traditional grains in favor of a plant that had a much higher yield, even if it led to a qualitative drop 34 |

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in nutrition. The almost exclusive consumption of cornmeal polenta, not combined with other foods such as meat or vegetables, provoked an epidemic in the following century of pellagra, an illness caused by vitamin deficiencies that in the worst cases can lead to madness or death. The second factor was the growth of agrarian capitalism. Although Italy was behind other European countries, this gave rise to a surplus market, regional or “national,” of quality products (in first place, wheat), whereas the peasant population subsisted on lesser products, such as, precisely, corn, which was no longer cultivated merely out of the “free choice” of country people but was encouraged and solicited by their landlords. The tenant farmers, burdened by the laws of land ownership and by the demand for wheat, were obliged to plant corn in the plot of farmland allotted for their own needs; hired workers (constantly more numerous in the context of capitalistic economy) were paid directly in corn. Hunger of a new type was thereby disseminated in the countryside of northern Italy—not the traumatic kind resulting from the shortage of food (the last serious famine was in 1815–16), but the more insidious kind of endemic undernourishment. The imbalance of vitamins and proteins became more important than the insufficiency of calories. The potato too (of Peruvian origin and known in Italy ever since the end of the sixteenth century) did not become widespread until the eighteenth century, with a history analogous to that of corn. Yet again, it was because of hunger that this new plant was introduced into the agricultural and alimentary

Preservation and Renewal of Alimentary Identities | 35

system. If the dates of the major famines are compared with those of the beginnings of potato cultivation in individual territories, the coincidence is remarkable. Any diffidence toward the unknown American plant seems to have been overcome by need, by the necessity to experiment, strongly encouraged from on high—even kings, along with agronomists and scientists—in countries beyond the Alps. In Italy, local authorities turned to the parish priests, recognized by public officials as “one of the most efficient means of insinuating and diffusing among the people practical information and practices most advantageous to society and to the state.” This statement appears in a circular letter sent out in 1816 by the governing office of the province of Friuli to the parish priests and was accompanied by instructions for cultivating potatoes, to be explained and disseminated to the faithful. Elements of coercion, more or less latent, enter into this picture as well: the peasantry is forced to plant the new products, leaving for the landowners, and thus for the markets, choice cultures. Certain agrarian agreements of the nineteenth century contain a clause that obligates the new overseer of an estate to reserve a part of the land for the cultivation of potatoes. The purpose of this is to placate hunger and prevent new famines. Giovanni Battarra, an agronomist from Rimini, recalled in 1778 how at the beginning of the century fromentone, referring to corn, was not yet cultivated, and he pities the poor peasants of an earlier generation who “were dying of hunger” when wheat was lacking. Now, however, “we are beginning to 36 |

Preservation and Renewal of Alimentary Identities

introduce certain foreign roots, similar to white truffles, that are called potatoes,” says an old peasant whom Battarra imagines conversing with his sons. This affirmation sounds like the ultimate hope for a more secure future: “Lucky for us if we can introduce sound plantings, so that we never again experience famine.” For potatoes as well, the same shift from unknown to known, as in the case of corn, took place. Even Battara, like the famous Parmentier in France and other European agronomists of the time, maintained, and had the peasant father say, that potato flour can be used to make bread. Admittedly, a bread “somewhat hard on the digestion” but “indigestion doesn’t bother peasants,” one of the sons remarks with unintended humor; “on the contrary, they feel more sated.” The potato will not be used for bread but for many other things, some of them very old (like gnocchi, made during the Middle Ages only with flour and bread crumbs) and some new. This very attempt to use it in bread making reveals the tendency toward cultural assimilation, which constantly repeats itself throughout the history of eating and cooking. Something similar occurred with the tomato, another American product regarded with circumspection and diffidence for centuries, then “rediscovered”—as in the Spanish example—in the form of a sauce that became the incontrovertible accompaniment of meat and fish, a monumental event in traditional Italian cuisine. It was precisely in this way that the cookbooks of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries recommended tomato sauce. Then came the idea of combining it with pasta, which

Preservation and Renewal of Alimentary Identities | 37

suddenly changed color. For centuries it had been rigorously white, served with butter and cheese, enriched with spices; from that point on it tended decidedly toward the red. Among the American products that successfully entered the Italian alimentary system in the modern era, sweet peppers and chili peppers, of Mexican origin, enjoyed noteworthy acceptance. The sweet pepper appeared all over the peninsula, establishing itself in the south as well as the north (in Piedmont, for example) as an essential ingredient in recipes that later became “typical” of the local cuisine. The chili pepper was adopted in certain regions, such as Calabria, to the point of becoming an indispensable element in a new gastronomic identity. The Calabresi themselves carried it with them across the ocean at the time of the great nineteenth- and twentiethcentury immigration, spreading it in the United States, where Italo-American slang called it calabresella, taking it for a product of Italian origin. The apparent paradox of this story teaches us that identity—alimentary as well as every other kind—is not inscribed in the genes of a people or in the ancient history of their origins, but is constructed historically through the day-to-day dynamic of exchanges between individuals, experiences, and different cultures. The Italianness of pasta, or the tomato, or the chili pepper (or pasta with tomato sauce seasoned with chili peppers) is indisputable. But it is also indisputable that pasta, tomato, and chili peppers belong in origin to other cultures and that it is necessary to dig in space as well as in time to recapture the fragments of the various histories that in the 38 |

Preservation and Renewal of Alimentary Identities

end interlock and give rise to new histories and identities. In essence, the search for our own roots always winds up being the discovery of the other in us—that other who, by means of complicated processes of osmosis and adaptation, has contributed in various ways to making us who we are. It is precisely for this reason that we speak of cultural identities that develop in time, through contact and exchange. This is exactly the kind of identity that we are seeking in the alimentary and gastronomic history of an Italy that defines itself as a space of common values, skills, and familiar flavors (not necessarily appreciated by all)—an Italy of localisms and regionalisms that have become precisely that because of their confrontation and comparison with other localisms and regionalisms, some even very close. The phenomenon of campanalismo,1 typical of Italian history, is the other face of shared experience. Even the denigration of other eating habits (to call this one “turnip-eater,” that one “polenta-eater,” yet another “bean-eater,” and so on, as can be seen in Italian documents from centuries past) would be incomprehensible unless those habits were familiar and even sampled. As Vito Teti has written, “alimentary insults” attest to “culinary varieties” and their shared experience in a network of reciprocal knowledge. Only in this context can we understand such appellations as “potato-eater, tripe-eater, mouse-eater, frog-eater, onion-lover, A regional chauvinism that got its name from the notion of the area in which the village church bell could be heard.

1

Preservation and Renewal of Alimentary Identities | 39

broth strainer, pumpkin-eater, fig-picker, bean-eater, chestnuteater, lard-eater," found in areas of southern Italy that culturally are generally homogeneous.

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Preservation and Renewal of Alimentary Identities

M ACARONI-EATER S: H OW a NATIONAL S T EREOTYPE ARO SE

Among the characteristic epithets related to the food and local

customs of Italy, the one that assumed with time a different and quite singular role because it was tendentiously unifying was “macaroni-eaters,” in other words, pasta-eaters—in the broad connotation that the term maccheroni tends to have in the languages of the south. The importance of pasta, which during the Middle Ages had already established a significant place for itself in the alimentary system of Italy, suddenly increased in the first half of the seventeenth century, as described by Emilio Sereni in 1958. The change was noted in Naples, where, under Spanish rule, problems of production and the inefficiency of the public market caused the progressive decline of resources that had been the principal ingredients of the popular diet—meat and vegetables, primarily cabbage. This provoked a change in the dietary bal-

ance with a heavy shift to the side of carbohydrates. Bread and pasta, like polenta and potatoes elsewhere, became increasingly dominant. Pasta in particular, thanks to a small technological revolution brought about by the greater availability of the muller1 and the invention of the mechanical press, began to be produced at lower costs, encouraging its promotion as a “basic” food. If until then pasta was one among many products, even considered a luxury (so much so that in the sixteenth century its fabrication was prohibited in Naples during periods of famine so as not to encroach on the production of bread), now for the first time it became a food of the people, the main dish in the daily diet of the urban poor. From the seventeenth century on, it was Neapolitans who acquired the nickname of “macaronieaters,” appropriating it from the Sicilians (who in the Middle Ages had first adopted the Arab model of dried noodles). The pairing of pasta and cheese, to which tomato sauce was added in the nineteenth century, took the upper hand over the traditional duality of cabbage and meat: a dietary solution ingenious in its own way because it assured an adequate intake of calories as well as the desired feeling of satiety. Consequently, macaroni became synonymous with Naples. It is interesting that at the time of the unification of Italy, the conquest of Naples was represented as an orgy of pasta and of Sicily as an orgy of oranges. On the 26th of July 1860, with the occupation of the island accomplished and the landing of 1

A grinding device.

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Macaroni-Eaters

Garibaldi’s troops on the continent anticipated, Cavour2 wrote to Piedmont’s ambassador in France, “Oranges are already on our table and we are about to eat them. As for macaroni, we will have to wait, since they are not yet cooked.” The 7th of November Garibaldi entered Naples and Cavour wrote: “The macaroni are cooked and we will eat them.” These expressions could be seen as malicious—the north that “eats” the south—but should more accurately be interpreted as reflecting the desire of the political class of Piedmont to credit its own role as guarantor of the interests and traditions of all regions at that delicate moment in the country’s unification. To this end, in addition to political programs, a psychological program was instigated, the “southernization” of the northern [Piedmontese] identity, and herein alimentary symbols became decisive, as they always do. To eat macaroni suggests sharing a culture, thereby transforming the symbol of Naples (and by extension the entire south) into a symbol of the nation. The “national revolution,” insofar as it signifies “the acquisition of the south by the north,” was also a revolution of the gastronomic image that, in the words of Franco La Cecla, “pulls farther north the Mediterranean blanket of which macaroni [is] an essential part.”3 Camillo Benso, count of Cavour, was a leading figure in the unification of Italy and prime minister to the king of Piedmont-Sardinia, Victor Emmanuel, who became the first king of Italy.

2

3 It must be remembered that until Italy was unified in 1861, Naples and Sicily were ruled by the Bourbons of Spain and that Piedmont was an independent kingdom under the House of Savoy.

Macaroni-Eaters| 43

In the meantime, the Neapolitan “model” spread throughout southern Italy, where initially it had only interested urban and coastal areas, more attuned to the logic and mechanics of the food market. In rural regions of the interior, pasta remained for a long time a food for the rich, eaten by the poor only rarely, so that in the early years of the twentieth century, testimony gathered by parliamentary investigations still defined macaroni as a “regal dish.” Already then, however, the appellation “macaroni-eaters” had acquired a broader meaning, representative not only of Neapolitans but of southern Italians in general, at the very time that the political–cultural project of the House of Savoy sought to confer on them an even moreencompassing meaning of “Italianness.” The development of this image owed a great deal to the dramatic phenomenon of the emigration that, in the last decades of the nineteenth century, scattered millions of Italians in search of work and food throughout Europe and across the Atlantic. More typical of the south, from which the majority of the immigrants came, the consumption of pasta was seen as a distinctive element of the Italian “difference.” The stereotype, as is common, was constructed by others to distinguish and to a degree deprecate the newcomers and their strange customs. Nevertheless, the stereotype also took hold internally. The dream of pasta—as it had remained for many Italians forced to leave their native land—was more easily realized in America. With employment, families had greater resources and could afford the pasta industry that had crossed 44 |

Macaroni-Eaters

the ocean precisely to respond to that custom, or to that unsatisfied desire. America, the land of plenty, where Carnival4 was more than a metaphor, made it possible at last to have pasta, and meat too, on the daily table, and was the true locus of this Italian stereotype. It was in America that many southern peasants became “macaroni-eaters,” and it was they who invented spaghetti and meatballs, that prototypical ItaloAmerican dish. Along with pasta, other Italian food myths (parmesan, oil, wine, integrated with the new myth of steak) took root in Italian communities across the ocean, thanks to the integration that occurred between domestic customs and the business of groceries and restaurants. It was in those communities, through the contact of individuals and families from various parts of Italy, that an Italian style of eating arose, which in many cases preceded similar experiences in the home country. As Paola Corti has remarked, “through the channel of Italian restaurants in foreign countries, the regional traditions of the peninsula came together,” so that it can be said that “alimentary syncretism . . . characterizes the overall experience of the emigration.” It is merely a question of distance: the closer the object, the more the overall design obscures the details; the farther away from the local perspective, the more the traits held in common Carnevale, in Italian, meaning “goodbye to meat,” is the festive period before Lent. 4

Macaroni-Eaters| 45

become visible and new connections are made. Urban identity dissolves in a regional setting, regional identity dissolves in a national setting. But one thing does not exclude another. Identity is always multiple: local/urban, regional, national. As a young woman born in Argentina of Italian parents said: “I feel Italian . . . because my customs . . . my way of eating . . . my tastes are entirely Italian. .  .  . Yes, and Biellese,5 Piemontese.” Dialect is not antagonistic to Italian. It complements it, “inflects” it.

5

An inhabitant of the city of Biella, in Piedmont.

ARTUSIAN SYNTHESIS

T he

Within Italy also, as among the emigrants, the meeting of lo-

cal traditions remained the means of achieving a common cuisine. This was the project lucidly followed by Pellegrino Artusi, Romagnolo by birth, Florentine by adoption, patriotmember of Giovine Italia, who, thirty years after the political unification of Italy, endowed his countrymen—or rather countrywomen—with a genuine “national” cookbook. Published in 1891, the Artusian manual, La scienza in cucina e l’arte di mangiar bene [Skill in the kitchen and the art of eating well], set out to unify the country in its gastronomic practices as Manzoni had tried to do with language. (Haven’t we already seen that cuisine is also a form of language?)1 To this end, Artusi searched among local traditions for recipes that seemed to him acceptable to a wide audience. Ignoring the indifference of 1

Yes, but here Manzoni and food are likened as unifiers.

publishers, he printed the book at his own expense and sold it by mail from his home in Florence. The idea worked and the cookbook grew interactively through the close correspondence between the author and his women readers, who overwhelmed him with suggestions, details, and plans, thus allowing him to augment the recipes in each successive printing, so that by 1909 they had almost doubled in number (from 475 at the outset to 790 in the last edition). The postal system made it possible for distant places like Sicily to enter Artusi’s collection, which ended up as a collective enterprise despite the powerful personality of the author, and explains in part its stunning and enduring success. Another means of acquiring information was the railway, which carried Artusi in his peregrinations. As Alberto Capatti observed, “the railway in 1891 connected all the gastronomic stops cited in Scienza in cucina and delimited the regions known by him.” The Artusian method, which relied on mail and trains, is new in means but not in essence. Basically, it is not very different from the the method practiced three centuries earlier by Bartolomeo Scappi, that of going along with the local and urban customs of Italy without presuming to arrive at a “national” model, except in sharing resources and skills while respecting the differences. This is a far cry from the rigorous codification to which French cuisine was subjected in the nineteenth century in the wake of a centuries-old political, cultural, and consequently gastronomic tradition. The Italian model, similarly old, continues to operate on the principle of a network with 48 |

The Artusian Synthesis

regard to the circulation of local experiences, each of which maintains its individuality. Although not wholly inclusive or homogeneous (the fulcrum of Scienza in cucina is the style of cooking that the author knows best, that of Romagna, Emilia, and Tuscany, whereas other regions are less represented and some are entirely absent), the Artusian cookbook suggests a mutual understanding of practices and products, including diversity as an indivisible element of national identity. Just as Scappi left the reader free to choose among the tortes from Milan, Bologna, Genoa, or Naples, so Artusi expresses his respect for the diversity of alimentary customs that are determined by environment, resources, and traditions. He accepts animal or vegetable fats of any origin, steering clear of setting any boundaries or erecting any fences: “Each regional group uses for frying the fat that is most successfully produced in its area. In Tuscany preference is given to olive oil; in Lombardy, to butter; and in Emilia, to lard, which is excellent there.” In Scappi’s time the public had changed and grown. It was no longer the restricted elite of the courts and the inhabitants of major urban centers. Now it consisted of the lower and middle bourgeoisie. What still remained to be done was the “anthological” perspective—to represent the best of Italian gastronomy—which would include popular customs. If Scappi reinterpreted eating traditions of peasants and fishermen, the bourgeois cuisine of Artusi revisited the holiday dishes of the peasantry, including them in a common heritage. The strategic “meeting place of countryside and city” was the market—

The Artusian Synthesis | 49

which Artusi knew well and frequented personally—where the products and culture of a territory are concentrated. “The use of herbs and in particular the flavorings dear to simple cuisines held no secrets for him” (Capatti). If still today, after more than a century since its first edition, La scienza in cucina continues to be printed, read, and discussed, it is because Artusi knew how to look ahead, to anticipate trends that would become integrated into Italian cuisine in the twentieth century but that in 1891 were only in the making. What is most significant is the space he devotes to pasta, both industrial and homemade. In this, Artusi’s manual is completely original and assists in the birth of the Italian stereotype we examined earlier. There are many recipes for spaghetti, which had officially entered the “national” cuisine. A gastronomic system thus evolved focused on “minestra,”2 which for Artusi consists not only of the types of pasta served in broth but also of those served in a sauce, pastasciutta, dry pasta; in short, a primo, or first course, as it will be called by the bourgeois public, able to allow itself a second course, and yet another. For others pasta might be the only dish or the main dish, which is why Artusi comments ironically, though discreetly, that doctors advise “eating little of it so as not to dilate the stomach too much and to leave in first place the nutrients from meat,” given that “a tasty and abundant minestra will always be appreciated by someone who has a frugal dinner.” With the codification of 2

The term commonly used for soup.

50 |

The Artusian Synthesis

the primo as an opening dish (which at least theoretically presumes a “second”) an Italian meal model was established that is grammatically different from meals north of the Alps, organized around a single principal dish (the French plat, and English main dish) preceded by a first course of lesser importance.3 Pellegrino Artusi certified the birth of a modern Italian cuisine that established itself not only among the urban middle class, to whom Scienza in cucina was initially dedicated, but with time among the popular classes as well. From this viewpoint his manual constitutes a “veritable watershed,” writes Piero Meldini; “there is no subsequent Italian cookbook, until the 1940’s and beyond, that does not measure itself again the Artusian model,” even when it is contested, as did Ada Boni in 1925, pursuing in her Talismano della felicità [The talisman of happiness] an elitist cuisine deliberately distant from Artusi’s. Even the cookbooks compiled by home cooks, the notes and notebooks kept by families for daily meals, owe a great deal to Scienza in cucina, from which they often copied instructions, which explains why Meldini wittily remarked that “grandma’s cooking,” as we like to call it, in many cases should instead be recognized as “grandpa’s.” At the time of Artusi’s death in 1911, the Italians “to be made” (according to Massimo d’Azeglio’s prediction) were still A primo, consisting of soup or a pasta dish, generically minestre, is preceded by an antipasto (literally, “before the meal”), or appetizer. The main dish, inexplicably called “entrée” in English, is listed on menus as secondo. 3

The Artusian Synthesis | 51

many, very many, but in the meantime the number of those “already made” was growing—and with regard to this we must recognize, with Pietro Camporesi, “that La Scienza in cucina did more for national unification than I Promessi sposi4; that Artusi’s flavors succeeded in creating a code of national identity where Manzoni’s style and phonemes failed.”

The Betrothed,the novel by Alessandro Manzoni (1785–1863) read by generations of Italians well into the twentieth century. 4

NUMBER of ITAL IANS INCREASE S

T he

Artusi’s insistence on the social usefulness of a “first course”

was not gratuitous. At the end of the nineteenth century Italy was a poor country with a poorly balanced diet. Consumption of meat was barely 16 kilos per capita per year, compared with more than 40 in Germany, 55 in the United States, and 58 in Great Britain. The effects of the progressive “simplification” of the diet in terms of carbohydrates, which had became more prevalent in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, continued to be felt. The dramatic result of the situation was the enormous emigration, already discussed. However, already in the first decade of the twentieth century, the period of industrial take-off, the alimentary trend improved on the whole. Attempts to evaluate it in terms of calories (despite the uncertain methodology of calculation and the doubts that arose among scientists

about the validity of such indices) suggest the reassuring level of more than 2500 calories per capita, which was maintained until World War II, when many Italians were plunged into malnutrition. The tragedy of 1915–1918, on the other hand, left no negative traces in this regard. On the contrary, in certain respects “it provided an occasion for millions of peasants at the front to savor, albeit in the dramatic setting of the trenches, meat, pasta, bread made of wheat, wine, coffee.” These foods entered the collective patrimony because they were part of the daily diet. To them were added the traditional foods of home cooking, sent to the soldiers by their families, which were exchanged among them and made available to everyone. By forcing thousands of young men, who had until then lived in an isolated world, to live side by side in trenches or barracks, the war gave many their first exposure to different cultural and alimentary realities. In this way, an “Italian” alimentary model could be shared and spread to new social strata. The confrontation among culinary traditions extended all the way to prisoner-of-war camps. At Celle, in the vicinity of Hanover, between the end of 1917 and the beginning of 1918, almost three thousand soldiers captured during the rout at Caporetto were held prisoner. A Genoese second lieutenant, Giuseppe Chioni, to alleviate the stress and discomfort of his captivity, had the idea of collecting recipes that he and his companions remembered, and of putting them into a manual he entitled Arte culinaria [Culinary art], once he returned home. Like Scienza in cucina, it is a collective work that grew out of 54 |

The Number of Italians Increases

the “reciprocal exchange of memories, regrets, and desires,” Chioni wrote in his introduction, not without reflecting on the “strange psychological phenomenon” that had induced him and so many others to “turn from soldiers into cooks.” In the same camp and during the same months a noncommissioned officer, Giosuè Fiorentino, native of Agrigento, in Sicily, compiled another cookbook, also a collective effort—in different handwritings that alternate throughout the manuscript—that brings together the experiences of the various inmates. An analysis of this text reveals a mixture of traditions from the north, center, and south of Italy, a veritable compendium, more comprehensive than Artusi’s book, which we have seen to be oriented along the Emilia, Romagna, Tuscan axis. “Nothing leads one to assume that Giuseppe Chioni and Giosuè Fiorentino could have known each other,” wrote John Dickie, but it is astounding that “two starving young men from the opposite ends of Italy should have individually invented the identical means of alleviating the excruciating torments of hunger and homesickness,” providing us with a “stunning proof of the role played by food in the national Italian identity.” The military command, to keep up the morale of the troops, put out a newspaper (La Tradotta) in which the meaning of national identity is condensed in gastronomic symbols. A curious map shows the cities and villages between the Piave and the Po rivers, with their respective products, recipes and specialties that the “enemy” would like to gobble up. The map is accompanied by a few stanzas of eight-syllable lines that de-

The Number of Italians Increases | 55

scribe the collapse (after the “battle of the solstice” in June 1918) of the “Austro-Hungarian culinary-eating offensive” prepared on hills and valleys “with the tragic-comic benefit of a great gastronomic strategy.” The strategy would have been to devour the asparagus of Bassano, the cherries of Marostica, the polenta and game birds of Schio, the radicchio of Castelfranco, the polenta of Cittadella, the doughnuts of Vicenza, and the luganega [sausage] of Treviso, the baìcoli of Venice, the hens of Padua, and the bread from Piava, washing it all down with bardolino and grappa, and ending with sturgeon on the banks of the Po. “But as things turned out / they ate for six days / a stew of broom /a salad of bayonets.” The moral: “Whoever makes decisions without the boss / eats a mess of trouble.” The catastrophe of the second conflict did not encourage similar poetic flights. Non sprecate [Don’t waste] is the title of a brochure put out by the Office of the Press and Propagnda of the Fascist regime in 1941. The first warning: “Check everything thrown into the trash . . . everything can be recycled.” It was a real challenge for Petronilla—during the era of Amalia Moretti Foggia, author of the famous gastronomic “pearls” in the Corriere della Sera—to convince her agitated readers that even without basic ingredients they could produce “delicious little dinners.” Mayonnaise without oil, gelatin without meat, cakes without sugar, chocolate without cacao, coffee without coffee—every possible substitute was used in her cookbook “for exceptional times” (1941), “for difficult times” (1942), “for these times” (1943). Daily papers and periodicals all participat56 |

The Number of Italians Increases

ed: the section “Self-sufficient Recipes” in the Gazzetta della domenica taught readers how to make “string beans without string beans” using spinach stems, and “spinach without spinach” by substituting the leaves of carrots and radishes.

The Number of Italians Increases | 57

T he “I TAL IAN

MIRAC L E ”: B E T WEEN MODERNI TY a nd TRADITION

The food crisis in Italy caused by World War II was so great

that its effects were felt for a decade after the end of the war. The “Italian miracle,” as it was called, did not find its “terminal year” until 1958 (Crainz), after which time the country succeeded in recovering its prewar level of consumption. In the 1960’s the depression could be considered ended, and in 1968 the 3000-calorie average per inhabitant seemed to have been reached. This is the level that scientists (with a slight overestimation, and with limits already noted) consider to be the watershed between poverty and well-being. In that period Italy went from a traditional rural society to a modern industrial society. During the mid-1960’s emigration to other European countries and to America ceased. Between 1974 and 1984 the historical alimentary divide between north and south, urban and rural came to an end.

The Italian alimentary model changed in those years. As in all industrial countries, a large role was played by manufactured foodstuffs, canned goods, and all the “modern” conveniences that the monthly magazine La cucina italiana (founded in 1929) suggested to the “modern housewife” as a compensation for the grim life of the recent past. In parallel fashion the process of cultural homogenization was promoted by the mass media: no longer just radio and movies, which were certainly important during the two decades of fascism, but, starting in the 1950’s, also, and above all, television, which some, not incorrectly, regard as the real unifier of Italian culture, including alimentary customs. These, however, long retained an intimate dialectal nature, deeply rooted in local traditions, as shown in the historical documentary Viaggio nella valle del Po [Voyage in the Po Valley], the remarkable series directed by Mario Soldati in 1957 “in search of genuine foods.” The passage to “modernity” in Italy, illustrated by Soldati himself as he stopped in factories that stood near ancient taverns and small artisanal workshops, was uncertain and in no way linear. The crisis of peasant society, about which Pier Paolo Pasolini wrote such memorable pages, was devastating but did not completely erase traces of the past. “Alimentary modernization,” because of its slowness and contradictions, “was not able to assure a steady improvement in the diet, nor could it replace a typology of consumption dominated by localization and seasonality, which expressed limited and irregular relations with the market.” So wrote Stefano Za60 |

The “Italian Miracle”

magni, according to whom the de-seasonalization and de-localization “that unequivocally signal the break with traditional eating habits produced by industrialization” were never fully accomplished in Italy. If at the beginning of the twentieth century they were not yet visible, by the last decades of the century they had decisively advanced, though with continuing second thoughts and back-sliding. This “delay”—as it can be regarded in terms of economic development—could, however, be reevaluated as a cultural resource. Alimentary postmodernism has, in fact, dislodged choices that seemed well rooted, proposing relationships with food that paradoxically combine the maximum of modernity with the recovery (or reinvention) of tradition. Today it is the professional restaurant—which in Italy developed with predominantly “family” characteristics, opting for the model of the trattoria over that of the restaurant—that seems to embody the domestic traditions that had been abandoned by many (if not by all). Tradition and modernity, in the collective imagination, no longer seem yoked to the most banal stereotypes that would have them contrasted and contradictory. Both have much to offer and can meet as equals. New paths can be perceived, new demands are being made. Does market development necessarily mean the negation of regional values? Does the preservation of food in refrigerators necessarily indicate that seasonal rhythms are ignored? Does contact with the world via the Internet necessarily annihilate local cultures?

The “Italian Miracle” | 61

It would seem not. Instruments of modernity can serve in an intelligent way to revitalize the heritage of skills and practices that history has handed down, and the food industry itself is obliged to confront the same values that we are accustomed to find in “tradition”: seasonality and locally produced foods, publicized (not without evident ambiguities) even in the advertisements of multinational businesses, obviously because these are cultural parameters that continue to be appreciated (indeed, they are more appreciated today than they were before, because of the diminution of ancient prejudices, to which we shall return shortly). Similarly, supermarkets, which typify modern business and the globalized food industry, have to measure themselves against the countertendency of rediscovering neighborhood stores, the “small” over the “big.” These phenomena, common to all industrialized countries, appear to be particularly prevalent in Italy, not out of a special national attitude that generates “antibodies” against the process of modernization (this, if at all, might be the case for more advanced countries), but because of Italy’s delayed involvement in that process. The return to territorial and seasonal dimensions is in effect the sign of an anthropological attachment to tradition, which industrialized food may conceal but not eradicate. It is also a fashion, masking interests that are not always innocent. Myths about “typical,” “traditional,” “genuine,” “authentic” are labels used for selling, especially to tourists. But it would be imprudent to eliminate them as fraudulent. Better to see this, as does Vito Teti, “as the anti-chamber of new forms 62 |

The “Italian Miracle”

of awareness,” the sign of a “solid bond with the past” capable of surviving even in the modern world “in spite of external and internal aggressions.”

The “Italian Miracle” | 63

INVENTION of R E G IONAL COOKI NG

T he

What is called today regional cooking is a modern construc-

tion—postmodern, as Vito Teti defines it, in the sense that it brings together “disparate, fragmentary, unhomogenized elements from various localities of the same region and often from other regions.” Traditional dishes, extrapolated from the economic and social context that produced them (a context of daily poverty and often hunger) and placed in a new alimentary framework of security or even prosperity, at one time inaccessible to the point of being inconceivable, take on a “different dietary, symbolic, and ritual meaning.” If it is possible to reconstruct individual recipes, “it is impossible to reconstitute a cuisine, the life style associated with it, the available ingredients from the past. . . . What is the affirmation of tradition in different contexts if not the invention of new traditions?”

Appreciation of regionalism as a specific dimension of gastronomic culture is not part of the past. In the Middle Ages and early modern era, when the cuisine of elite classes aimed at surpassing the local, then regarded as the image of peasant poverty, “region” was simply where products, or in some cases recipes, came from, which blended into other products and recipes to become a kind of “global table” that reflected the ability of the privileged few to differentiate themselves from the many. The ideology of difference, which assigned to alimentary style the role of indicating one’s social rank, was incompatible with the idea of attributing a culturally meaningful value to regionalism for the simple reason that a region is a spatial entity comprising everyone, rich and poor, peasants and townspeople. Therefore, to think of a region as an intrinsic value is to legitimize the idea that decisive differences are not between people but between places. For the image to be overturned, it was necessary to affirm the idea, long held unthinkable, that all men are equal (at least in theory). In this sense, only the liberal-democratic thinking that accompanied the development of the middle class and an industrial economy could attribute to the region a distinctive value of alimentary identities. This motive, among others, is essential to understanding the modernity of the idea that took shape (that could take shape) only between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In Italy, the importance of territorial identities is first seen from an urban point of view, naturally suggested by the cultural tradition of the country (on which we have amply lingered). 66 |

The Invention of Regional Cooking

Until the unification of Italy, aside from a pair of seventeenthcentury cookbooks whose intention is to represent a “regional” dimension as piedmontese, references to cities are to those that appear frequently in cookbooks: Il cuoco maceratese (The cook from Macerata), Antonio Nebbia, 1779; La cuoca cremonese (The female cook from Cremona, 1794); Il nuovo cuoco milanese (The new cook from Milan), Giovanni Felici Luraschi, 1829, Il cuoco bolognese (The cook from Bologna, 1857); La cuciniera genovese (The female cook from Genoa), Giovanni Battista Ratto, 1863, are merely a few examples. The attempt to define regional identities was sequential and went along with the process of unifying the country politically. Contrary to Artusi’s project (given the fact that his objective was to construct an “Italian” network of culinary knowledge), the tendency to regionalization was making headway during the same decades and could be seen as the other face of gastronomic nationalization. The first cookbook to classify dishes according to this criterion was La nuova cucina delle specialità regionali (The new cuisine of regional specialties) by Vittorio Agnetti, publshed in Milan in 1909. Then the national-populist rhetoric of fascism stressed the reasons for ruralism and regionalism—paradoxical at a time when radical nationalism carried the administrative centralization of a unitary state to extreme consequences. Regional subdivision is precisely what was established on the basis of the first plan to inventory the Italian culinary heritage. The idea was launched in 1928 during a meeting of the Ro-

The Invention of Regional Cooking | 67

tary Club of Milan, in the presence of Arturo Marescalchi, Undersecretary of Agriculture. The Italian Touring Club compiled and published La guida gastronomica d’Italia (The gastronomic guide of Italy) in 1931, which subdivided products and recipes according to their regional and provincial origins. An ambiguity arises from this, destined to endure, between “regions” understood to be administrative divisions of the state—which they will moreover become with the republican constitution of 1946 and its complete achievement in 1970—and “regions” as cultural entities of a historic and geographic nature. To classify recipes and products within the conventional and predefined boundaries of administrative regions is obviously constraining, as it corresponds only partially to a historical-cultural reality, creating artificial bonds where they do not exist and breaking them where they do. That same year the painter Umberto Zimelli was commissioned by the Ente Nazionale Italiano per il Turismo (the National Tourist Office) to design a poster intended to promote Italian gastronomic specialties to foreigners, assigning to each region an ornamental lozenge indicating its dishes and products. This map of “gastro-fascist Italy” (in the words of Alberto Capatti)—not without a touch of “gustatory irredentism” in its territorial trespasses of Nice, Istria, and Dalmatia1—is interesting because, unlike contemporary French maps, arranged around the market of the capital, “it lacks a center toward which all products flow.” It does, however, 1

Italy lost Dalmatia after World War I. 68 |

The Invention of Regional Cooking

confirm the decentralization of the Italian cultural patrimony. This same Guida gastronomica of the Touring Club is the result of a “survey so detailed as to make any kind of synthesis impossible” (Alberto Capatti). Italian gastronomic culture appears in this as topographically pulverized, irreducible to “politically” determined spaces such as provinces or regions. “Regional” cooking is an invention that fulfills political, commercial, and tourist requirements. Not cultural. From a specifically cultural viewpoint it would be more appropriate to speak of “local,” “territorial,” or “city” cuisines, along with “national,” which integrates them, in accordance with the model of the network, already discussed here. The intermediate dimension of the region encloses historical reality within artificial boundaries, creating ambiguities and misunderstandings. This was nonetheless the winning view, since it is simpler to manage and easier to communicate. The superimposition of politics on culture has transformed the image of Italian cuisine, conferring arbitrary regional identities on the extraordinary wealth of contents that distinguished them historically. The mosaic of local (rural and urban) cuisines had been incorporated into regional unities that function perfectly on the commercial level, but far less so if we look at history and geography, and what they have imprinted on the territory in terms of culture. Except that, after decades of administrative activity, the very existence of regional government has ended up promoting or producing realities that are new in part and delineate a different geography and a different perception of culi-

The Invention of Regional Cooking | 69

nary cultures. If today one uses a search engine to find “Italian regional cooking” one is faced with a million sites that treat the subject of gastronomy from this perspective. The regional image of Italian cooking has also been exported, and with the help of the food industry has been reinvigorated and reinforced abroad. The shelves devoted to Italian cuisine in the supermarkets of north America demonstrate a systematically regional model: types of pasta and recipes or sauces for making them are defined (with considerable fantasy) as Lombard, Venetian, Emilian, Tuscan, Abbruzzese, Pugliese, Sicilian, which is enough to indicate the gastronomic wealth, the “diversity of local traditions,” that has always been associated with the idea of Italy. The red, white, and green flag in a corner or conspicuously placed on an article reassures the buyer that the product conforms to what one expects of Italy: natural and tasty flavors, direct contact with a locality, regionalism, in short. The enormous ambiguity of such images—transmitted by small companies, multinational industries, colossi of food distribution—does not even need to be pointed out. It pains me to see how the “screen” of regions runs the risk of concealing the truly identifying characteristics of Italian cuisine, its absolutely “local” nature that is at the same time profoundly “national.” The dialectal character of this culture never disappeared. If, in the history of the language, one dialect at some point imposed itself on the others, acquiring for itself the sole qualification of “Italian” thanks to the incomparable prestige of Dante, 70 |

The Invention of Regional Cooking

Boccaccio, and Petrarch, and to the authority of the Accademia della Crusca,2 Italian culinary history has had no Dante or national academies. It has only had Bartolomeo Scappi or Pellegrino Artusi, who, like all other “codifiers,” limited themselves to examining local traditions and placing them within a network. In this age of globalization, these traditions seem to be enjoying unexpected attention and growing prestige. Italy, with its myriad local identities, its forms of municipal pride, at times bizarre, at times frankly unacceptable, may well find itself in the right position to affirm the efficacy of its alimentary and gastronomic model, particularly suited to withstand the global challenge that seems to await us in the near future.

2

Similar to the French Academy.

The Invention of Regional Cooking | 71

EPIL OGUE In Search of Home Cooking

A style of cooking with myriad variations and declensions—

city cooking and country cooking, that for centuries have been in contact and have exchanged products, recipes, techniques to the point of creating a national heritage founded on the sharing of local differences—Italian cooking has a basic trait in its genetic make-up, the essentially domestic nature of this cultural tradition, which warrants a few final remarks. Italian cooking developed over the centuries primarily as home cooking, even when it appeared to have attained the highest form of professionalism. For the great cooks of the Renaissance were, in their own way, also “home” cooks, in very particular homes, agreed, but nonetheless domestic realities. Italian restaurants, for as long as they have existed, which is some two centuries, often followed this same path of home cooking as well. This holds true even for the most innovative chefs of today, who make

it a point of honor to seek inspiration in the flavors and techniques learned at home, albeit transformed and reinterpreted. This is what confirms the characteristic that has determined and continues to determine the style of Italian cuisine, making it different from other models (in particular the French), which developed with a “professional” standard deliberately distanced from the nature of home cooking. Let us take the example of Pellegrino Artusi, protector of the Italian gastronomic tradition, of whom we have amply spoken in these pages. Artusi was not a professional cook; he wasn’t a cook at all. The one who cooked was his servant, the young peasant Marietta, who patiently worked with him on every recipe destined to appear in his celebrated cookbook. With her help (which Artusi generously acknowledged, bequeathing to her in his will the royalties from the book), Artusi assembled local Italian traditions, thereby making a significant contribution to the construction of a nation that was still in its infancy on the political level (though ancient on the cultural level). I have already emphasized this point, but what is important here is to stress the domestic aspect of such traditions. Artusi talks about dishes that come from a home kitchen, and it is on the basis of these that he attempts to construct a national standard. He had few cookbooks in his library (he went so far as to write with a touch of coquetry, “Beware of books that treat this subject”). He worked above all with people, “in the field.” This relationship of collaboration with his readers was the primary mechanism of his book, amplifying it, enriching it, and keep74 |

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ing it up to date from one edition to another between 1891 and 1911 (which account for its great success). There is a problem, however. Home cooking suggests an oral tradition. To codify an oral tradition and turn it into writing inevitably betrays it, because in daily practice rules are more related to experience, observation, imitation, than to theory. That is why Artusi, while writing his cookbook, was mentally operating outside of it. As of the opening words, “As common folk know, to make a good broth you have to put meat into cold water and let it simmer very slowly, never letting it boil over.” As common folk know … this is how the first recipe in the Artusian manual begins, and we are immediately projected outside of the text, a text barely begun and already superseded. Artusi wants to bear witness to unwritten knowledge, to practices taught and transmitted orally in houses where people cook. The voluminous correspondence he has with his readers forces him continually to leave his written text in order to test an approach to oral culture that cannot be other than problematic and structurally contradictory since any experience, once set in black and white, undergoes a process of reduction that threatens to deny its fundamental freedom—the possibility of varying, which is its typical, its most characteristic element. To write the oral is thus a mission beyond logic, and yet ineluctable if one wishes to set down and transmit the knowledge that lies outside the narrow sphere of the practitioner. This variability is theoretically averse to codification, but if it is declared, taken as a model, proposed as a method, the

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written text can, at best, represent not only the contents but the spirit, the “philosophy” of daily practice. This was Artusi’s choice: to accept (better yet, to propose, advise, recommend) variations as a constituent and ineradicable attitude toward the practice of cooking. Aside from certain basic rules and procedures, which are indispensable, it is up to each cook to orient the execution of the recipe in one way or another. Let us look at some examples taken at random from the book. “Instead of the tomato sauce [to accompany quenelles], you can substitute a meat sauce, or even dress them with a sauce of giblets and sweetbreads. They [quenelles] can also be made with breast of chicken or filets of fish . . . “ (recipe 317). “Taste the mixture [the stuffing for cappelletti] so as to correct it, since ingredients are not always uniform” (recipe 7). “After three trials, always improving it, this is how I would make [a minestrone] to suit my taste. You are entirely free to modify it as you choose, according to the taste of every locality and to the vegetables you can find” (recipe 47). “Do not reproach me if in these dishes I often add nutmeg. I think it goes well with them, but if you do not agree, you know what to do” (recipe 96). “Here are the quantities for a pasticcio alla romagna for twelve, which you can modify as you like, since in any case a pasticcio always comes out right” (recipe 349). And when Artusi provides a recipe for a classic dish, risotto alla milanese, he gives three of them: “Risotto alla milanese I,” “Risotto alla milanese II,” “Risotto alla milanese III” (recipes 78, 79, 80); the third opens with a marvelous “You can choose!”—just like that, with an exclamation mark. 76 |

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The idea of variation as the very essence of cooking is inherent in Artusi’s method because his preferred frame of reference is home cooking. And that is why he expresses to the highest degree what typifies Italian cuisine as it has developed over time. Home cooking is at the same time democratic and authoritarian. Democratic, because it does not aim at the “perfect” recipe but at multiple variations, all legitimate, all equally deserving of respect. Authoritarian, because each recipe will, by definition, be “the best,” jealously guarded as a secret, a part of the family’s identity. All this is fated to disappear as soon as the recipe leaves the domestic space to be published—in the etymological sense of res publica, a thing of the public domain—and in some way codified. But there is more than one way of proceeding. If the codification is proposed with humility, respectful of the differences and variants, then the basic principle of home cooking is preserved. If one presumes to have found “the right” recipe, then home cooking is finished and embalmed. One can specify the elements shared by the various recipes, a kind of minimal common denominator that expresses the rules and basic concepts, but there can never be a definitive recipe. Invention and freedom will always remain the requisite seasonings, for home cooking. Any research into home cooking—and there is no doubt that still today any discussion of Italian cuisine, its presentation, the retrieval of its historical legacy, must begin there—is a complex and delicate operation to be performed with extreme

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care, as one does with an archeological find that is liable to disintegrate when exposed to air and light. The objective might be to identify and describe the salient points, not of individual recipes but of “families” of recipes, listing for each the possible variants of ingredients and procedures along with their eventual denomination. A discussion of method nonetheless has to be confronted, with full awareness that in the case of home cooking, one is faced with a reality that is structurally different from professional, or haute cuisine, cooking, which by definition requires, or better yet grows out of, rigorous codification and is resistant to questions or comparisons. The cuisine of a “school” can be imitated and copied precisely because it is built around preordained procedures. Let there be no misunderstanding, even home cooking has precise rules. Experience, ingenuity, practice, inventiveness do not in any way exclude the existence of a body of knowledge that is open to question with each trial, but not its basic tenets. The very opening of Artusi’s book—”As common folk know”— implies this sharing of experience and knowledge. For home cooking, I can therefore imagine a project that does not limit itself to collecting recipes but focuses above all on the system, the fundamental procedures, analogous to professional cookbooks, which draw attention to basic preparations before entering into the details of a particular recipe. It is eminently obvious, but always worth repeating, that no research into home cooking can dispense with an initial inquiry into the social class involved. Peasant cooking, middle-class 78 |

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cooking, aristocratic cooking—all contributors in varying degrees to the heritage of Italian gastronomy—no longer have the distinctive qualities that differentiated them for centuries. But if we are talking about domestic traditions, our discussion is largely turned to the past and to the hope of safeguarding a capital that we would regret losing. The social type of the gastronomic models will thus have to serve as a guide for every study also because, as we have pointed out in the present volume, a complex mechanism of cultural hybridization during the twentieth, but already in the early nineteenth century, gave rise to the idea of a historically ambiguous “alimentary tradition” constructed by the ruling classes, which incorporated fragments of peasant culture (recipes and preparations related to particular holidays) that placed territorial identity in a new context of significance, even ideological. This is why “alimentary tradition” can turn into a snare and why it is important to tread cautiously in this kind of investigation and carefully weigh the quality of information collected along the way. “Home” cooking situates itself in a social sense as well, which does not deny the fact that there were reciprocal exchanges among peasant, middle-class, and aristocratic cultures. Middle-class Artusi and peasant Marietta, who together produced the essential handbook for Italian families, are emblematic of this shared and fruitful collaboration. Moreover, “home” cooking should signify not only that food is prepared in a domestic setting (by the housewife, as was traditional in peasant families, with the help of domestics, as was long com-

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mon in middle- and upper-class families). “Home” cooking should also imply that one knows where the products originated (whether from the vegetable garden or from the market is of no importance), that one knows their quality and price, that one knows how to appreciate them and use them in season . . . in short, that one possesses a wide range of abilities that enable one to oversee the process of preparing meals, more or less from beginning to end. This is why it is not possible to define as “home cooking” what today is bought as a frozen dish, or precooked and warmed in a microwave oven. That this takes place in the home rather than in a café or any other public place does not alter the nature of the action, which I would consider lacking in a “domestic” dimension insofar as it precludes any knowledge of the product or what we call today its supply line. “Home cooking” is first of all a comprehensive knowledge of what we eat: seasonal food, of course, associated whenever possible with a particular region, without however becoming mythic. The techniques of preservation (which throughout history endowed us with salted and dried meats and fish, cheeses, jams, and other delicious products) are doubly rooted in “home cooking,” having originated in a domestic economy that was intended to provide a reassuring and durable larder for the needs of the family during hard times. We should also know how to appreciate the qualities and advantages of the food industry, on condition, however, of knowing the route taken by those foods before they go into our kitchen or onto our table. “Home cooking” is also defined by its convivial dimension re80 |

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lated to feelings (not necessarily positive) within the more or less extended family with whom we are expected to share food. Foods of the domestic tradition have a taste, and an aftertaste, that can revive scents and dissents associated with personal relations, private occasions, collective holidays, and common rituals. Without this we can have home recipes, but not “home cooking.” From a practical viewpoint, I believe that this interweaving of feelings and relationships should not rule out certain forms of sharing in serving and consuming food. A communal serving dish from which diners take food (even more than once if they like: a second helping is characteristic of domesticity) is not just a convenient expression but the symbol of a real community around the table. In the past, this occurred not only on peasant tables but on patrician ones as well. Home cooking, therefore, does not end in the preparation of food, nor in the kitchen. It begins long before, following the ingredients (even those that come from far away, but with precise knowledge of their itinerary) from their point of origin to the stove and pots, and ends long after, when they are brought to the table. All of this put together constitutes “home cooking.” And it will be all the more “home” if the various operations are conducted jointly, in the intellectual and affective sharing of the entire process—preparation in the kitchen, consumption at the table. In conclusion I would like to pose a question that may seem silly. Where today can we find home cooking? Where

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can we find out how to preserve it and esteem it? To answer “in the home” would be frivolous and completely erroneous because, if we think about it, home today has become the preeminent site of industrial cooking, of the trend toward cultural homogeneity and disregard for local differences. “Home” is assailed by advertising and a work schedule that leaves ever less time for the traditional practices of domestic cooking, so that paradoxically, it is the restaurant that has taken on the role of surrogate for “home cooking,” reviving certain traditions in a very different context but, objectively, serving to preserve a legacy that is dear to all but forgotten by many. This legacy must be recovered by looking around without bias, in many directions, collecting testimony wherever traces are to be found, inside the home, obviously, but outside as well. It should be noted that there was another crucial moment in recent history when domestic traditions left the home. I am thinking of the first decades of the nineteenth century, the ones that witnessed the birth of restaurants similar to those of today, first in France, later in other countries. All this began with the great revolution that swept away many aristocratic families as well as those of the upper middle class, or forced them to change their way of life. The numerous personnel that had worked in the kitchens of those great houses suddenly found themselves unemployed and free to place their talents and experience at the service of the new middle classes that emerged victorious from the social and political upheaval. It was in this climate that restaurants were born, 82 |

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offering to a much broader public the gastronomic heritage that had grown out of service to princes and duchesses. The comparison is perhaps incongruous, but we find ourselves today in a situation that in a way demands—not out of a need to employ someone from the labor market, but for the common good of not losing our heritage of acquired knowledge—the banishment of domestic cooking from the home, by now at risk of disappearing in every one of its possible social variants, aristocratic, bourgeois, peasant, because it is not proletarian or white collar (if ever such cuisines existed). To retrieve and cherish the memory of these cuisines by patiently cataloguing and collecting written and oral documents is our primary obligation. To assure a future to this kind of cooking may mean, not paradoxically, its reinstatement in a public, not a domestic, context that will assume the responsibility of reviving principles and methods, techniques and tastes.

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R ELAT E D R EA D IN G S

Preface: Italy and Italians

Paese Italia. Venti secoli di identità [Italy the country. Twenty centuries of identity] is the title of a book by R. Romano (Rome: Donzelli, 1994). That it is possible to speak of “Italians” ever since the Middle Ages, even before there was a political Italy, has been maintained by J. LeGoff, L’Italia fuori d’Italia. L’Italia nello specchio del Medioevo, in Storia d’Italia, v. II, t. 2, Dalla caduta dell’Impero romano al secolo XVIII [Italy outside of Italy. Italy in the mirror of the Middle Ages in The history of Italy: From the fall of the Roman Empire to the eighteenth century] (Turin: Einaudi, 1974), pp. 1933–2088.

Before There Was an Italy There Was a Europe

On the conflict-contact between Roman culture and “barbarian” culture (also between culinary models) see M. Montanari, La fame e l’abbondanza. Storia dell’alimentazione in Europa [Famine and abundance. The history of eating in Europe] (Rome-Bari: Laterza,1993), pp. 12–49. The expression “agro-forest-pastoral” comes from G. Duby, Le

origini dell’economia europea. Guerrieri e contadini nel Medioevo [The origins of the European economy. Warriors and peasants in the Middle Ages] (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1973), pp. 22–32. On the cultural nature, not biological, of ethnic identities—in other words, the need to consider them as a product of history or “ethnogenesis”—see Typen der Ethnogenese unter besonder Berücksichtigung der Bayern [Types of ethnogenesis with particular attention to Bavarians], eds. H. Wolfram and W. Pohl (Vienna: Östreichische Akademie des Wissnschaften, 1990).

Italy Is a Network of Cities

On the importance of the city in defining the alimentary and gastronomic model of Italy, see A. Capatti and M. Montanari, La cucina italiana. Storia di una cultura [Italian cooking. The history of a culture] (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1999,) pp. x–xi ff. (The idea was taken up again by J. Dickie, Con gusto. Storia degli italiani a tavola [Delizia: A history of Italians and their food] [Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2007].) On the “territorial” nature of municipal power and on the ability of urban centers in Italy to dominate the “county” by exercising a complex relationship of hegemony and integration, I will limit myself to citing (out of a vast bibliography) the recent La costruzione del dominio cittadfino sulle campagne. Italia centrosettentrionale, secoli XII–XIV [The development of urban domination of the countryside], eds. R. Mucciarelli, G. Piccinni, and G. Pinto (Siena: Protagon, 2009). On the development, beginning with communal cities, of seigniorial states of regional extent, see G. Chittolini, La formazione dello stato regionale e le istituzioni del contado. Secoli XIV–XVI [The Formation of the regional state and the institutions of the county] (Turin: Einaudi, 1979). 86 |

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On the implications and meaning of the stereotype “Bologna grassa” I refer the reader to Bologna grassa. La costruzione di un mito, in Il mondo in cucina. Storia, identità, scambi [Fat Bologna. The construction of a myth in The world in the kitchen. History, identity and exchanges], ed. M. Montanari (RomeBari: Laterza, 2002), pp. 177–196.

Models of Cooking Between Uniform and Varied

For Liber de coquina see the edition, copiously introduced and annotated by L. Sada and V. Valenti, Liber de coquina. Libro della cucina del XIII secolo. Il capostipite meridionale della cucina italiana [The cookbook of the thirteenth century. The southern progenitor of Italian cuisine] (Bari: Puglia Grafica Sud,1995). The probable Norman-Swabian origins of the Angevine cookbook have been upheld on the grounds of linguistic considerations and content by A. Martellotti, I ricettari di Federico II. Dal “Meridionale” al “Liber di coquina” [The cookbooks of Frederick II. From “Meridionale” to “Liber di coquina”] (Florence: Olschki, 2005). On medieval Italian cookbooks and their wide circulation within the peninsula: B. Laurioux, Le règne de Taillevent. Livres et pratiques culinaires à la fin du Moyen Age [The reign of Taillevent. Culinary books and practices at the end of the Middle Ages] (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1997), pp. 210–216. On the history of pasta: F. Sabban and S. Serventi, La pasta. Storia e cultura di un cibo universale [Pasta. History and culture of a universal food] (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2000). With particular attention to Italy: Capatti and Montanari, La cucina italiana [Italian cooking], pp. 49–67 (on p. 60 the text by Edrisi on the pasta factory of Trabìa). Also, on pp. 67–72, the importance of “tortes” or “pasties” in medieval cooking (F. Sabban and S. Ser-

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venti, A tavola nel Rinascimento [Dining in the Renaissance] (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1996), p. 167 on the Renaissance evolution of the type. On the “Italian” dimension of Bartolomeo Scappi’s cooking, see again Capatti and Montanari, La cucina italiana, pp. 15–22. Ibid, pp. 26–27, nonurban Italy is emphasized in texts from southern areas, as in Lucerna by Crisci.

Popular Culture and Culture of the Elite

On the relationship between the cooking of the poor (oral) and that of the rich (written) see M. Montanari, La cucina scritta come fonte per lo studio della cucina orale [Written cooking as a source for the study of oral cooking], in “Food and History,” v. I, 2003, no. 1, pp.251–259. Bartolomeo Scappi’s views on the fishermen of Chioggia are in Opera (Venice: Tramezzino, 1570), p. 120. On the “Mediterranean” image of medieval Bologna and the early modern era, see Montanari, Bologna grassa, p.186. On Castelvetro, idem, La fame e l’abbondanza, pp. 144–145. The “case” of Catherine de’Medici is examined in Capatti and Montanari, La cucina italiana, pp.127–131. On the “revolution of taste” in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France, see the recent synthesis of S. Pinkard, A Revolution in Taste. The Rise of French Cuisine, 1650–1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), with timely references to the earlier bibliography, among which the seminal works of Jean-Louis Flandrin are to be noted).

People and Products That Travel

Ortensio Landi’s Commentario delle più nobili e mostruose cose d’Italia e altri luoghi di lingua aramea in italiana tradotto. Con un breve catalogo de gli inventori delle cose che si mangiano e 88 |

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beveno, novamente ritrovato [Commentary on the most noble and the most atrocious things about Italy and other places translated into Italian from Aramaic. With a brief catalog of the inventors of the things eaten and drunk, recently rediscovered] (Bologna: Pendragon, 1994) is reproduced in M. Montanari, Nuovo Convivio. Storia e cultura dei piaceri della tavola nell’Età moderna [The new banquet (reference to Dante’s Nuovo Convivio). History and culture of the pleasures of the table in the Modern Era] (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1991), pp. 42–47. Ibid, pp. 223–225, the passage by B. Stefani, L’arte di ben cucinare et istruire i men periti in questa lodevole professione [The art of cooking well and instructing those less skilled in this admirable profession] (Mantua: Osanna, 1662), pp. 142–133, to which I refer in my text. On the seventeenth-century vogue of Savoy biscuits: Capatti and Montanari, La cucina italiana [Italian cooking] p. 29. For examples of “still lifes” with Savoy biscuits mentioned in the text: Cristoforo Munari 1667–1720. Un maestro della natura morta [A master of the still life], eds. F. Baldassari and D. Benati (Milan: Motta, 1999).

Preservation and Renewal of Alimentary Identities

On the subject of the introduction of corn into Italy, the fundamental work remains that of L. Messedaglia, Il mais e la vita rurale italiana [Corn and Italian rural life] (Piacenza: Federazione italiana dei consorzi agrari, 1927). See also Montanari, La fame e l’abbondanza, pp. 166–170. On the “linguistic” significance of alimentary substitutions: Montanari, Il cibo come cultura (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2004), pp. 143–152 (English translation, Food Is Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).

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On scarcities in the eighteenth century: A. Capatti, A. De Bernardi, A. Varni, Introduzione, Storia d’Italia, “Annali” 13, L’alimentazione [Introduction. History of Italy, “Annals” 13, Alimentation] (Turin: Einaudi,1998), pp. XVII–LVIV, XXXIX. On the progressive social differentiation of diet and the new modalities of peasant malnutrition, more qualitative than quantitative, ibid, pp. XLIV–XLV; see also Montanari, La fame e l’abbondanza, pp. 166–170. On the development of agrarian capitalism in Italy: E. Sereni, Il capitalismo nelle campagne 1860–1890 [Capitalism in the countryside] (Turin: Einaudi, 1947). On the introduction of the potato into Italy: Montanari, La fame e l’abbondanza, pp. 170–175. On recommendations to parish priests in the Friuli region: G. Panjek, In margine alla storia dell’alimentazione: un dibattito settecentesca sull’introduzione della patata nel Veneto, in Raccolta di scritti per il cinquantesimo anniversario della Facoltà di Economia e Commercio dell’Università degli Studi di Trieste [Marginal to the history of food: a sixteenth-century debate on the intruduction of the potato into the Veneto, in Collection of essays for the fiftieth anniversary of the Faculty of Economics and Business of the University of Trieste] (Udine, 1976), pp. 573–587, 580–581. For a general historical view: R. N. Salaman, Storia sociale della patata. Alimentazione e carestie dall’America degli Incas all’ Europa del Novecento [Social history of the potato. Food and famine from the America of the Incas to nineteenth-century Europe] (Milan: Garzanti,1989). The text by G. Battari appears in Pratica agraria distribuita in vari dialoghi [Agrarian practice disributed among various dialogues], Cesena: Biasini, 1782), pp.104–105, 131,134 (reproduced

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in Montanari, Nuovo Convivio, pp.341–345). On the history of the tomato: D. Gentilcore, La purpurea meraviglia. Storia del pomodoro in Italia [The scarlet marvel. History of the tomato in Italy] (Milan: Garzanti, 2010). On the economic and cultural aspects of the chili pepper, and its effects on the identity of the Calabrian tradition: V. Teti, Storia del peperoncino [History of the chili pepper] Rome: Donzelli, 2007). On the importance of distinguishing between identity (us) and roots (the other in us) see Montanari, Il cibo come cultura, pp. 259–260; idem, Il riposo della polpetta e altre storie intorno al cibo (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2009), pp. 195–197 [English translation, Let the Meatballs Rest (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013)]. On food-related insults: V. Teti, Le culture alimentare nel Mezzogiorno continentale in età contemporanea, [The alimentary cultures in present-day southern Italy] in Storia d’Italia, “Annali” 13, pp. 63–165, on p. 67. On precedents in the Middle Ages and Renaissance: L. Messedaglia, Vita e costume della Rinascenza in Merlin Cocai [Life and customs in the Renaissance of Merlin Cocai], eds. E. and M. Bilanovich (Padua: Antenore, 1974), pp.140–141 (with a reference to Baldus by Teofilo Folegno, v. II, p. 104 ff., a kind of catalog of the attributes, gastronomic among them, of a number of Italian cities).

Macaroni-eaters: How a National Stereotype Arose

On the “mutation” of the alimentary role of pasta in sixteenthcentury Naples see E. Sereni’s fundamental and methodologlcally exemplary Note di storie dell’alimentazione nel Mezzogiorno: i Napolitani da “mangiafoglia” a “mangiamaccheroni” [Notes on the history of food in southern Italy: Neapolitans

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from “leaf-eaters” to “macaroni-eaters”] in “Cronache meridionale,” IV–VI, 1958, and in idem, Terra nuova e buoi rossi (Turin: Einaudi, 1981), pp. 292–371 (from which I quote). F. La Cecla, La Pasta e la pizza [Pasta and pizza] (Bologna: Il Mulino,1998), p. 17, quotes the letter by Cavour of July 16, 1860, written in French1: “With regard to the continent we will give our support, since the macaroni are not yet cooked, but as to the oranges, which are already on our table, we are quite determined to eat hem.” Ibid, pp. 27–28, the image of the “Mediterranean blanket” being “pulled farther north.” The letter of September 7, addressed, like the previous one, to the ambassador from Piedmont to Paris, Constantino Nigra, is quoted in G. Mantovano, L’avventura del cibo. Origini, misteri, storie e simboli del nostro mangiare quotidiano [The adventure of food. Origins, mysteries, stories and symbols of our daily meals] (Rome: Gremese, 1989), p.83. Teti’s observations on the social status of pasta, long regarded a luxury food, appear in Le culture alimentari nel Mezzogiorno [The alimentary culture of the Italian south], p. 97. Ibid, pp. 98, 137–139, the importance of the emigration to America for the fulfillment of an old alimentary dream and the consolidation of the related stereotype. For spaghetti with meatballs, see Dickie, Con gusto, pp. 280–281. On the importance of migrations in the construction of alimentary stereotypes: P. Corti, Emigrazione e consuetudini alimentari. L’esperienza di une catena migratoria [Emigration and alimentary customs. The experience of a migratory chain], in Storia d’Italia, “Annali” 13, pp. 681–719, on pp. 708, 719. Ibid, p. 714, the evidence of Argentinian emigration.

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The Artusian Synthesis

The importance of Pellegrino Artusi in the cultural unification of Italy was first brought to light by P. Camporesi, Introduzione to P. Artusi, La scienza in cucina e l’arte di mangiar bene [Skill in the kitchen and the art of eating well] (Turin: Einaudi, 1970); on p. XVI the parallel between Manzonian phonemes and Artusian “tastemes.” A. Capatti, Lingua, regioni e gastronomia dall’Unità alla seconda guerra mondiale [Language, regions, and gastronomy from Unification to the Second World War] in Storia d’Italia, “Annali” 13, pp. 753–801, stressed the importance of the railroad (p.774) and the postal service (p. 775) in the construction of the Artusian paradigm. Ibid, p. 776, the “popular” dimension in Artusi’s culture as well (personal familiarity with products, market, etc). Alberto Capatti has now edited a new edition of Scienza in cucina (Milan: Rizzoli [Classici BUR], 2010). An examination of the correspondence between Artusi and his women readers, and the “interactive” mechanism in the way the cookbook grew progressively from edition to edition can be found in M. Fabretti, Pellegrino Artusi e la cucina di casa [Pellegrino Artusi and home cooking] (Forlimpopoli: Casa Artusi [Quaderni di Casa Artusi, 3], 2008). Quotations from Artusi are in the introduction to the chapter on minestre [first courses, such as soup and pasta], a polite polemic with doctors who recommend limiting the consumption of pasta, and in recipe 209, freedom of choice in the use of fats. Observations by P. Meldini can be found in A tavola e in cucina, in La famiglia italiana dall’Ottocento a oggi [The Italian family from the nineteenth century to today], ed. P. Melograni (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1998), pp. 416–463, on pp. 441, 443.

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The Number of Italians Increases

On the consumption of meat in Italy at the end of the nineteenth century: Introduzione to Storia d’Italia, “Annali” 13, p. li. Ibid, table 1 on p. xxxv, the evolution of the average per capita caloric intake, deduced from ISTAT statistics. Ibid, pp. lvi–lviii, the role of World War I as an “opportunity” for the “national” integration of models of alimentary consumption. The two wartime cookbooks: G. Chioni, G. Fiorentino, La fame e la memoria. Ricettari della Grande Guerra. Cellelager 1917–1918 [Hunger and memory. Recipes from the Great War], eds. Q. Antonelli and G. Bettega (Feltre: Agorà, 2008) Ricettari della gente comune [Recipes of common people], 3. Ibid, pp. xiii– xvii and xix–xxvi, essays by F. Caffarena, Prigionieri nel paese di Cuccagna [Prisoners in the land of Cocaigne], and A. Caputo. La memoria del cibo di casa tra i prigionieri italiani di Cellelager [The memory of home-cooked dishes among Italian prisoners], on the “collective” nature both of writing and its function as an affirmation of identity. The quotation by Dickie comes from Con gusto, pp. 297–299. About the brochure La tradotta, initiated by the Office of Propaganda of the Third Army, twenty-five numbers appeared between 1918 and 1919 (a facsimile copy was published by Mondadori in 1933 and in a second edition in 1965). The text cited, by Antonio Rubino, appears in number 13, July 23, 1918. For this information I am grateful to Danilo Gasparini. On Petronilla’s “cooking without” and the “self-sufficient” suggestions of government magazines and leaflets: M. Montanari, Leggere il cibo: un viaggio nella letteratura gastronomica [Reading food: travels in gastronomic literature], in La cucina bricco-

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ncella, 1891/1991. Pellegrino Artusi e l’arte di mangiar bene cento anni dopo [Pellegrino Artusi and the art of eating well a century later], ed. A Pollarini (Casalecchi di Reno: Grafis, 1991), pp. 23–40, on pp. 37–38.

The “Italian Miracle”: Between Modernity and Tradition

The expression anno di confine [terminal year] regarding 1958 is from G. Crainz, Storia del miracolo italiano [History of the Italian miracle] (Rome: Donzelli, 1996). Cf. Introduzione to Storia d’Italia, “Annali” 13, p. LX. Ibid, pp. XXXV–XXXVI, the “historic” surpassing of 3,000 calories per capita. V. Zamagni, L’evoluzione dei consumi fra tradizione e innovazione [The evolution of consumption between tradition and innovation], in Storia d’Italia, “Annali” 13, pp. 169–204; p. 13, for the end of the division city–country and north–south in the 1980’s. Ibid, p. 197, on the resistance of Italian society to the modernization of food; see also the cited Introduzione to the volume, p. LV. Ibid, p. 202, for the diffusion in Italy during the 1980s and 1990s of new forms of “modern businesses,” meaning supermarkets. Teti’s opinion of the typical/authentic/genuine/traditional fashion is in Le culture alimentari [Alimentary cultures], p. 161.

The Invention of Regional Cooking

The definition of regional cooking as “post-modern” and related quotations can be found in Teti, Le culture alimentari, pp. 159–160. On the newness and modernity of the notion of “local” as a criterion of gastronomic quality: Montanari, Il cibo come cultura, pp. 109–116. On the urban cookbooks of the eighteenth and nineteenth centu-

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ries: Capatti and Montanari, La cucina italiana [Italian cooking], pp.29–32. On regionalization (including gastronomic) as a secondary outcome of the process of constructing a national state: P. Meldini, L’emergere delle cucine regionali: l’Italia, in Storia dell’alimentazione [The emergence of regional cuisines: Italy, in The history of food], eds. J.-L. Flandrin and M. Montanari (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1997), pp. 658–664. Capatti, Lingua, regioni e gastronomia [Language, regions and gastronomy], pp. 789–790, regarding Zimelli’s map (1931). Ibid, p. 756, on the evaluations of the Touring Club’s Guida gastronomica.

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IN D E X

Accademia della Crusca, 71 Adriatic influence, 15 Agnetti, Vittorio, 67 agriculture, 1–2, 15, 23, 33–37 Americas, 33–34, 37–38, 70 Angevine court, 11 Arabs, 12, 17, 33, 42 Arte culinaria (Culinary art; Chioni), 54–55 L’arte di ben cucinare, et istruire i men periti in questa lodevole professione (The art of fine cooking, and how to instruct those less skilled in this laudable profession; Stefani), 30 Artusi, Pellegrino, 47–51, 67, 71, 79; and home cooking, 74–77 asparagus, 56 assimilation, 37 Azeglio, Massimo d’, xv, 51 baìcoli, 56 bardolino, 56 barley, 20 Bassano, 56 Bastone, Ponzio, 13 Battarra, Giovanni, 36 beans, 20, 22, 57 Benso, Camillo (count of Cavour), xv(n), 43 Bergamo, 29 Binasco, 28

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biscottini savoiardi, 30 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 70–71 Bologna, 9, 12, 14–15, 17, 23, 28, 30 Boni, Ada, 51 Bourbons, 43n3 bourgeoisie, xv, 12, 19, 49–50, 83 bread, 1–2, 20, 28, 42, 54, 56; and potato flour, 37 Brescia, 29 Brief account of all the roots, herbs and fruits, raw or cooked, eaten in Italy (Castelvetro), 23 buckwheat, 33 butter, 1, 8, 15, 28, 38, 49 cabbage, 16, 20, 22–23, 41–42 Calabria, 38 calories, 35, 42, 53–54, 59 campanalismo (regional chauvinism), 39–40 Camporesi, Pietro, 52 Capatti, Alberto, 48, 68, 69 Caporetto, 54 carbohydrates, 42, 53 Carnival (Carnevale), 45 Castelfranco, 56 Castelvetro, Giacomo, 23 Cavour (Camillo Benso), xv(n), 43 Celle, 54 cheeses, 28–29, 38, 80; parmesan, 8, 17, 28, 45; and pasta, 42 cherries, 56 Chiavenna, 28 chick peas, 22 Chioggia, 28 Chioni, Giuseppe, 54–55 Chiozza, 21 chocolate, 56 Christianity, 2–3 cities: and identity, 66–67; markets in, 7–9; network of, 5–9, 16, 25, 31 Cittadella, 56 codification, 48, 71, 75–78 coffee, 54, 56

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Commentario delle più notabili e mostruose cose d’Italia e d’altri luoghi (Com mentary on the most noteworthy and admirable things in Italy and other places; Lando), 27 Como, 28 confections, 17 cookbooks, 11–19, 25, 47–51, 67; collaborative, 47–48, 54–55, 74–75. See also particular cookbooks cooking. See home cooking; Italian cuisine corn, 33–36. See also polenta Correggio, 28 Corriere della Sera, 56 Corti, Paola, 45 Crisci, Giovan Battista, 17 cucina italiana, La (magazine), 60 culture, Italian, xv–xvi, 6–9, 22–23, 60, 61; elite, 25–26; and exchange, 8–9, 25, 38–39, 54; and identity, 38–39; and politics, xvi, 69; popular, 19, 25–26, 49; and regionalism, 7, 68–69. See also Italian cuisine; tradition dairy products, 2. See also cheeses; milk Dalmatia, 68 Dante Alighieri, 70–71 Dickie, John, 55 doughnuts, 56 economic factors, 2–3, 6–8, 16–17, 25, 27, 30, 80; and hunger, 34–37, 55, 59, 65; and industrialization, 11–12, 42, 53, 59–62, 66; and poverty, 36, 53, 59, 65–66. See also social classes Edrisi, 12–13 eggplant, 17 eggs, 2, 15 elite, 1, 19–26, 29, 49, 66, 78–79 emigration, Italian, 44, 53; and Italian cuisine, 45–46 Emilia, 8, 23, 28, 49 England, 5, 23 Europe, 1–3, 13, 20, 22, 24–25, 35, 37; emigration to, 44, 59 exchange: commercial, 7–9, 27–31; cultural, 8–9, 25, 38–39, 54; gastronomic, 11, 12, 21, 47–48, 54–55, 74–75; and network model, 17, 27, 30, 39; regional, 30, 48–49, 71

Index | 99

famines, 29, 34–37, 42; and WWII, 59 fascism, 56, 67 fennel, 20, 22, 23, 30 Ferrara, 28 figs, 23 Fiorentino, Giosuè, 55 first course (primo), 50–51, 53 fish, 2, 15, 21, 28–29, 37, 56, 80 fishermen, 21, 49 Florence, 12, 17, 28, 30 Foggia, Amalia Moretti, 56 Foligno, 28 food industry, 62, 70, 80 France, 5, 17, 24, 37, 82 Frederick II, 11 French cuisine, 12, 24, 48, 51, 74 fritters, 20–21 frogs, 17 fruits, 28, 30; citrus, 17. See also particular fruits Gaeta, 30 game, 56. See also meat Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 43 garlic, 20 Gazzetta della domenica, 57 gelatin, 56 Genoa, 13, 15, 17, 29, 30 globalization, 62, 71 gnocchi, 13, 37 Gonzaga court, 29 Goths, 3, 5 grains, 2, 20, 33. See also particular grains grapes, 23, 30 grappa, 56 guida gastronomica d’Italia, La (The gastronomic guide of Italy; Italian Touring Club), 68–69 Hanover, 54 haute cuisine, 11, 20, 78

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Index

Henri II (king of France), 24 herbs, 20, 28 home cooking, 54, 73–83; and Artusi, 74–77; and codification, 77–78; and restaurants, 82–83; and social classes, 78–79 hunger, 55, 59, 65; and famines, 29, 34–37, 42 identity, Italian, xv–xvi, 3, 5–6, 45–46; alimentary, 38, 55; cultural, 38–39; national, 46, 47, 49, 51; regional, 46, 67–68; urban, 66–67 industrialization, 11–12, 42, 53, 59–62, 66 I Promessi Sposi (Manzoni), 52 Istria, 68 Italian cuisine, 1, 5, 8, 11–14, 23–24, 28–29; and Artusi, 47–51; and emigration, 45–46; heritage of, 16, 25, 33, 49, 67–68, 73, 78–79; and home cooking, 74, 77; and modernity, 60–62; national, 25, 45, 47, 51; regional, 14–15, 22–23, 48–49, 59, 69–70, 73; and social classes, 19, 20, 25, 51, 59 Italian Touring Club, 68–69 jams, 80 La Cecla, Franco, 43 Lando, Ortensio, 27–29, 31 language, 33–34, 47, 70–71 lard, 1, 49 La Tradotta (newspaper), 55 LeGoff, Jacques, xvi legumes, 20, 22, 34, 57. See also particular legumes lentils, 22, 23n lettuce, 20 Liber de coquina (cookbook), 11–12, 17–18, 22 local foods, 60–62, 65, 70, 76 Lodi, 8, 28 lodigiano (cheese), 8 Lombardy, 3, 8, 15–16, 30, 49 Lucca, 17, 28 Lucerna de corteggiani (Crisci), 17 Lugano, 28 Mantua, 29 Manzoni, Alessandro, 47, 51

Index | 101

Marescalchi, Arturo, 68 Marietta (servant of Artusi), 74, 79 markets, 17, 25, 29–30, 36, 41, 80; and Artusi, 49–50; urban, 7–9 Marostica, 56 Martino, Maestro, 13, 20–21, 25 mayonnaise, 56 meat, 1–2, 15, 23, 37, 41–42, 53–54, 56; and class, 20, 22; and Lent, 2, 45; preserved, 28, 29, 80. See also sausages Medici, Catherine de’, 24 Mediterranean influence, 1–2, 22–23, 43 Meldini, Piero, 51 Messisbugo, Cristoforo, 20 Mexico, 38 Middle Ages, 1, 8–9, 12–14, 20–22, 31, 33–34, 37, 41–42; and Italian identity, xvi, 5–6; and regionalism, 66 Milan, 14–16, 28, 30 milk, 1, 28 millet, 20, 33–34 minestra (pasta dish), 50 Mirandola, 28 Modena, 17, 28 modernity, 59–63, 66; and tradition, 61–63 Monza, 28 mortadella, 23 Munari, Cristoforo, 30 mushrooms, 17, 20 Naples, 11–12, 15–18, 28, 30, 41–43; as representative of southern region, 16–17 network model, 69; and exchange, 17, 27, 30, 39; regional, 48–49, 71; vs. singlestate model, 17; urban, 5–9, 16, 25, 31 Nice, 68 nobility (signorie), 6–7, 12, 19 nuova cucina delle specialità regionali, La (The new cuisine of regional specialties; Agnetti), 67 nutrition, 34–35, 42, 53–54, 59 oats, 20 oil, 1–2, 15, 45, 56; olive, 49 olives, 17, 23, 30

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Index

“On virtuous pleasure and good health” (De honesta voluptate et valetudine; Platina), 24–25 Opera (Scappi), 14, 21 oral tradition, 75, 83 Padua, 28, 56 Palermo, 11, 12 Parma, 8 Parmentier, Antoine, 37 parmigiano (parmesan), 8, 17, 28, 45 parsley, 20 Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 60 pasta, 8, 12–14, 17, 41–46, 54; and Italian emigrants, 44–45; macaroni, 13, 28, 41–45; as primo, 50; spaghetti, 45, 50; and tomato sauce, 37–38, 42 pastelli (tortes), 13–15, 23, 29, 49 peaches, 23 pears, 17 peas, 20, 22 peasants, xv, 19–26, 29, 36, 60 pellagra, 35 peppers, 38 Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca), 70–71 Petronilla, 56 piacentino (cheese), 8 Piacenza, 8, 28, 30 Piava, 56 Piedmont, 30, 43 pies, 20 pigeons, 16–17 Pisa, 28 plants, 20, 28. See also particular plants Platina, 25 polenta, 20, 33–35, 56 political factors, 2–3, 7, 30–31; and culture, xvi, 69 Pope Pius V, 14 potatoes, 35–37 pottaggio (fish stew), 21 poverty, 36, 53, 59, 65–66. See also social classes preservation, food, 12, 29, 61, 80

Index | 103

primo (first course), 50–51, 53 pumpkins, 17, 20 radicchio, 56 raponcelli (turnip greens), 20, 21 Ravenna, 21 recipes, modification of, 21–22, 75–77. See also cookbooks Reggio, 28 regionalism, 7, 16, 27–31, 39–40, 46, 65–71; and exchange, 30, 48–49, 71; and Italian cuisine, 14–15, 22–23, 48–49, 59, 69–70, 73; and modernity, 61, 66 Renaissance, 13–14, 20, 25 restaurants, Italian, 45, 61, 73–74, 82–83 rice, 17, 33 Riviera, the, 29 Romagna, 30, 49 Romans, 1–2, 6, 12, 34 Rome, 16, 30 rye, 20 salami, 28 salsiciotti, 23 sauces, 37–38, 42, 50, 70, 76 sausages, 17, 23, 28, 56 Savona, 17 Savoy, House of, 30–31, 43n3, 44 Scappi, Bartolomeo, 14–16, 20–21, 24, 31, 48–49, 71 Schio, 56 Scienza in cucina e l’arte di mangiar bene (Skill in the kitchen and the art of eating well; Artusi), 47–52 seasonality, 29, 30, 60–62, 80 Sereni, Emilio, 41 Sicily, 11, 12, 16–18, 28, 30, 42, 43n3 Siena, 11, 12, 28 social classes, xv–xvi, 19–26, 51, 54, 59, 66, 82; bourgeoisie, xv, 12, 19, 49–50, 83; collaboration of, 19, 25, 29, 79; elite, 1, 29, 49, 78–79; nobility (signorie), 6–7, 12, 19; peasants, xv, 29, 36, 60; urban poor, 42 Soldati, Mario, 60 soldiers, 54–55 sorghum, 33

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Index

soups, 20 Spain, 5, 43n3 spelt, 20, 34 spices, 8, 21, 38 spinach, 17, 22, 57 Stefani, Bartolomeo, 29–30 stores, neighborhood, 62. See also markets sturgeon, 56 substitutions, food, 56–57 sugar, 17, 56 supermarkets, 62, 70 symbolism, gastronomic, 1–2, 20, 43, 55–56, 65 Talismano della felicità (The talisman of happiness; Boni), 51 Tanara, Vincenzo, 23 Taranto, 28 Terni, 16–17 Teti, Vito, 39, 62–63, 65 tomatoes, 37 tomato sauce, 37–38, 42, 76 tortellini, 23 tortes (pastelli; pasticci), 13–15, 23, 29, 49 tourism, 27, 62, 68–69 Trabia, 12 tradition, 25–26, 34, 59–63, 65; and home cooking, 73–83; local, 47–49, 60, 70–71, 74; and modernity, 61–63; oral, 75, 83 transportation, 30 Treviso, 29, 56 trout, 28 turbot, 21 Turin, 30, 31 turnips, 20 Tuscany, 11–12, 20, 28, 49 Tyrrhenian influence, 15 Umbria, 28 unification, Italian, xv, 42–43, 67 veal, 16

Index | 105

vegetables, 2, 13–15, 17, 22, 30, 35, 41; and Italian cuisine, 24; and social classes, 20. See also particular vegetables Veneto, 33–34 Venice, 12, 14, 21, 28, 56 Viaggio nella valle del Po (Voyage in the Po Valley; Soldati), 60 Vicenza, 28, 56 Victor Emmanuel II, xv(n), 43n2 wheat, 7, 35–36, 54 wine, 1–2, 29, 45, 54, 56 World War I, 54, 56 World War II, 54, 59 Zamagni, Stefano, 60–61 Zimelli, Umberto, 68

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Index