Why Italians Love to Talk About Food (28 page)

The ecclesiastical calendar was often put into rhyme by poets and versifiers, in order to facilitate its memorization. The Tuscan poet Folgore da San Gimignano (the pseudonym
of Giacomo di Michele, or Jacopo di Michele, c. 1270–c. 1332) in his
Sonetti de la semana
(Sonnets of the week), 1310, left us a list of foods subdivided according to the days of the week (“Wednesday: hare, partridge, pheasant, and peafowl / and cooked beef and roasted capons”); and in the cycle of sonnets
Collana dei mesi
(Sequence of the months), c. 1323, provided recipes for a diet related to the months of the year, specifying that in February you must eat game and in March (during Lent) fish and eels (“trout, eel, lamprey, and salmon, / dentex, dolphin, and sturgeon, / every other fish along the entire coast”).

The
Collana dei mesi
was so familiar to contemporaries that it became the object of a parodylike rehash in the work of a poet-minstrel from Arezzo, Cenne della Chitarra (thirteenth to fourteenth centuries), author of a cycle of sonnets entitled
Collana delle noie e di fastidi di vario genere
(Sequence of irritations and annoyances of various kinds), in which even everyday exasperations are distributed according to the months. The fourteenth-century poet Antonio Pucci (1309–88), who worked as a town crier for the communal administration of Florence, presented his material in a similar vein: he would proclaim edicts and laws in a loud voice and then, in his free time, rewrite them in farcical language for the public's amusement. Pucci is the author of a cycle of sonnets on temperance, deprivations, and diet during the days of Carnival, Lent, and Easter, whose title recalls that of Cenne della Chitarra's cycle:
Le noie
(Annonyances), c. 1350. In a little poem entitled
Le proprietà di Mercato Vecchio
(The goods of the Mercato Vecchio), Pucci also dedicates more than a few verses to the foods specifically prescribed for each month by the religious calendar:

 

For Lent there are garlic and onions,
and parsnips, and no more meat,
since it pleased the Holy Church to so decree.

 

So, then, what was to be eaten on the various days, according to the requirements? On Easter, lamb, adopted for the festive Christian menu as a symbol of the crucified Christ, and borrowed from the gamut of ritual dishes of the Jewish Passover, where it symbolized the liberation of the Jews from the slavery of Egypt and their return to the Promised Land. Also conveyed from Jewish Passover tables to the Catholic Easter dinner were the bitter herbs that, for example, constitute the Ligurian Easter herb bouquets called
preboggion
, the filling for the Easter pie.

The dietary requirements of the Church have remained somewhat unchanged from
the tenth century to our own time. Some aspects of the culinary tradition of the nineteenth century are easily reconstructible based on the sonnets of the Roman poet Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli (1791–1863), a master at representing the plebeian dialect. Food, obviously, occupies a central place in his unconventional and irreverent works. Here is a sonnet dedicated to an Easter banquet, “La Santa Pasqua” (Holy Easter):

 

Here we are at Easter. Already you can see it, Nino:
the table is wholesomely bedecked
with Our Lady's herb, Roman mint,
sage, sweet marjoram, violets, and rosemary.

 

Already prepared since last week are
ten flasks and a good barrel of wine,
already by God's grace the fireplace is smoking
to celebrate the feast in the Christian way.

 

Christ is risen: joyously!
On His day no one worries about the expense
or gives a damn about their troubles.

 

Soup, eggs, salami, English trifle,
artichokes, grains, and the rest,
all for the glory of Holy Church.

 

The herbs that “bedeck” the Easter table described by Belli are clear traces of the Jewish Passover ritual, assumed and restyled by Christianity. The Easter soup,
brodetto
, mentioned in passing, which in reality constitutes the the main dish of the festive banquet, also has a more specific name:
stracciatella alla romana
(a type of Roman-style egg-drop soup).
Brodetto
(as usual in Italy, the more substantial the soup is, the more ironic its name, for instance,
brodetto
, light soup, or
acquacotta
, cooked water, are anything but light or watery: both are thick, dense soups) is prepared only for the most solemn occasions, the most festive days of the year, like Easter. It requires beef, lamb, egg yolks, lemon, fresh marjoram leaves, bread, and pecorino cheese. Toasted crostini and fresh marjoram are placed in each bowl; the meat broth, flavored with egg, is poured in and sprinkled with grated hard cheese, nearly always pecorino. The egg yolks are beaten with
lemon juice in a bowl, using a wooden spoon, and the highly concentrated
brodetto
is poured over the emulsion. It should absolutely not be boiling hot, to prevent the egg from setting and thereby turning this exceptional
stracciatella alla romana
—well blended, with a smooth, velvety texture—into an ordinary
stracciatella
: the kind in which filaments of boiled egg white float. This dish should not be confused with other
stracciatelle
, namely, with
stracciatella guarnita
(garnished with eggs),
stracciatella campagnola
(country-style, with tomatoes), or
stracciatella millefanti
(made with semolina). As for the English trifle, it is the well-known Italian sponge cake dessert (
pan di Spagna
) drenched with rum, custard cream, and chocolate.

 

The Catholic Easter is linked to two ancient Roman prototypes. First, the Days of Minerva, which were celebrated on the occasion of the spring equinox. Second, the feast bidding farewell to winter: the Lupercalia, which always fell in February. During the Lupercalia there was a day (called
dies Februus
, that is, day of purification, of propitiation) on which goats were sacrificed and ritualistic races were organized. Young goat or kid is still today an unfailing dish on the Easter table, along with lamb. And on the day after, Easter, the Monday of the Angel, popularly called Pasquetta (Little Easter), it is customary to take a walk, to simulate the race around the Palatine Hill or the race up and down the Via Sacra. This tradition of the Monday of the Angel is also connected to the day of Resurrection, when Jesus appeared to two disciples on the way to Emmaus, a few kilometers from Jerusalem. To commemorate the walk of the two disciples, the day of Pasquetta would therefore be spent taking a walk or going on an outing “outside the walls” or “outside the gates.” On Pasquetta, Italian families usually leave the cities en masse to spend the entire day outdoors, in the mountains, in the hills or countryside, bringing the
cestino pasquale
(Easter basket) with them, for a leisurely picnic, maybe a barbecue, with family and friends.

The Easter cake is the
colomba
(dove), made with a dough similar to that of the Christmas
panettone
, but without raisins and shaped like a bird. Legend has it that the cake was prepared for the first time by cooks at the court of Alboin, founder of the Lombard realm in Italy: the same man who offered his wife, Rosmunda, wine in the skull of her father, Cunimond, king of the Gepidae, for which reason she later poisoned him. Determined to conquer Pavia, Alboin besieged it for three years and managed to capture it only by starvation. He then made the devastated city the capital of his realm and proclaimed that for the Easter feasts of 572, a new paschal delight would be introduced in the shape
of a dove, the symbol of peace. So goes the account of the origin of this cake of northern Italy (an account that clashes considerably with the character of such a ruthless man as Alboin). Of course the representation of the dove, or of any other bird, both as a symbol of spring and as a symbol of the Holy Spirit, is much more ancient, an integral part of springtime celebrations in many cultures, including the Slavic cultures (the Slavs make little
panettoni
shaped like larks).

Eggs, too, are a symbol of Easter, and are often decorated. As in other countries and religions of the world, they symbolize the days of the spring equinox, because they allude to the sun, to resurrection. During the Easter festivities of 2006, 365 million eggs were consumed in Italy (according to data from the National Aviculture Union).

At a time when daily life was still regulated by tradition, on the Sunday after Easter, that is, on the Octave of Easter, or the eighth day after Easter, married women returned to their parental home, without their families, for a moving symbolic dinner. The menu of this traditional meal, if it can be found in its more ancient version, is almost childlike, and replicates a mood of a quotidian simplicity that has been forgotten: broth and tender boiled meat.

 

On St. Mark's Day (April 25),
risi e bisi
, rice and tender new peas, are eaten ceremoniously in Venice: the peas symbolize nature's early bounty. On St. Peter's Day (June 29), fish is eaten in all regions of Italy in honor of Peter the fisherman. For the Venetian feast of the Redeemer, celebrated on the third Saturday of July, sea slugs and fish
in saòr
, salted, fried, and marinated, are eaten. With the feast of the Madonna della Salute (Our Lady of Good Health), on November 21, a joyous historical event is commemorated in Venice: during the plague of 1630, when half the population of Europe died, the epidemic did not touch the lagoon city. On that day mutton from young sheep (
la castradina
), dried in the sun and smoked, is eaten in memory of the time when the Venetians ate this meat, preserved in storehouses for who knows how long, in order to avoid contact with the outside world and thus ward off contagion of the plague.

On November 1, All Saints' Day is celebrated throughout Italy, and on November 2, All Souls' Day. In the last decade of the twentieth century, Halloween was also added to these feasts, automatically imported from America and assimilated in an exclusively commercial way. On the days of All Saints and All Souls, it is obligatory to eat fava beans, symbolically associated with the world of the hereafter. Fava beans, in the mythologies of many people, are perceived as something supernatural: from the sprout of the fava grows
a stalk that reaches the sky, and in the fable the magical beans fulfill the heroes' desires. Pythagoras was so fearful of fava beans that he sacrificed his life for them: he could have saved himself from death, but he refused to walk through fava bean fields. Horace recalls the episode:

 

When will they set before me beans,
Pythagoras' kin,
And those little cabbages
oiled with thick bacon-grease?
⁵

 

It is probable that the Pythagoreans venerated the fava bean as a refuge for the souls of the dead. Pliny affirmed the same thing.
⁶
European popular mythology attributes to fava beans the significance of immortality or disdain for death: favas acquire their vitality from the soil, growing so vigorously that the second mythological significance of the fava is phallic potency, virility. At ceremonial times, Italians eat fava beans both mashed and in the form of cakes.

As far as Halloween pumpkins go, the windows of stationers and toy stores are filled with decorations that recall them (as fashion dictates!). From a gastronomic viewpoint, however, the pumpkin will probably never earn a place at the holiday table, just as Halloween will never become deeply rooted in Italian culture.

In any case, Halloween was born to celebrate the dead in the same period in which they are commemorated in Italy (the end of October and beginning of November). During these days people make or buy
panpepati
, spicy cakes that are called
pan dei morti
, bread of the dead (chocolate, pine nuts, raisins, jam, cream). Originally
pan de mei
or
pane di miglio
was also a ceremonial food for the dead: a sweet biscuit made from millet (today replaced with corn). Millet, like the fava bean, has a special role in magical beliefs. But unlike fava beans, symbolically associated with images of death and the underworld, millet is a symbol of reawakening, of hope in a joyful future. Millet bread must be eaten for the feast of St. George (April 24), to favor a rich harvest and prosperity.

Throughout Italy, especially in the countrysides, it was customary to organize banquets on November 11, St. Martin's Day, the day on which contracts with farmworkers and tenants were dissolved and annulled (in fact the farmers were evicted from their houses, so that
fare sanmartino
, observing St. Martin's Day, in the popular language of some regions, actually means to relocate), and the agreed-upon share of the harvest passed from one tenant to another. In Umbria, the Fossa cheese was unearthed from its pit on that day, and ancient peasant rituals were relived.

______

In accordance with tradition, the planning of the Christmas feast calls for dishes that recollect poverty and ancient times: dishes that re-create the spirit of the manger of Bethlehem in all its evangelical simplicity. Broths and soups of every kind and
bollito
are usually prepared for Christmas.

Christmas Eve is generally marked by going out to midnight Mass (in the more religious families), or by sitting down at the table and waiting for midnight (in all other families, which by now form the majority in Italy). The emotional gathering of all the generations, of family and relations, from near and far, in anticipation of the event is the most heartfelt moment of the feast. The menu of this supper varies depending on the city. In Rome and Venice it is on the eve that one eats the most. You eat what God sends you, and God, on Christmas, sends every Italian household just what that family deserves. Christmas is in fact the prescribed occasion for sending edible gifts to friends, or to those who have done you a favor, and especially to those whom you want to or must ingratiate. Reading Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli's sonnet “La vigija de Natale” (Christmas Eve), we see what spectacles were offered to the observer who stood musing in front of certain extravagant entrances: