Why Italians Love to Talk About Food (29 page)

 

Ustacchio, on Christmas eve
go stand in front of the doorway
of some monsignor or cardinal
and you will see a procession enter.

 

First comes the crate of
torrone
,
then a big tub of caviar,
now pork, next poultry, then capon,
and now a flask of the owner's wine.

 

Then come the chanterelles, then lamb,
sweet-scented olives, fish from Foiano,
oil, tuna, and eel from Comacchio.

 

Well then, till late at night, little by little,
you will see, Master Ustacchio,
how devout the Roman people are.

 

On December 25 the table will be overflowing with all these foodstuffs, sent by various donors. But in addition to these unexpected dishes, the mandatory ones must be on the table: tortellini in broth, or another pasta with meat filling, and confections of raisin, honey, and walnuts, in particular the same
torrone
(nougat) mentioned in the sonnet.

In other Italian cities far removed from liberal Venetian and Roman customs—especially in the south—there is a tendency to observe fasting on Christmas Eve. In Puglia, for example, in the city of Gioia del Colle, tradition dictates that no one sit down at the table until nighttime on December 24. Family and friends visit one another and exchange gifts, racked by hunger, while awaiting midnight Mass.

Today, the Church has reduced the number of fasts considerably: the faithful limit themselves to eating meatlessly or fasting on the Fridays of Lent and to abstaining from food for one hour before receiving Communion. In the past, when Communion was a weekly obligation and fasting was defined as total abstinence from food from the moment you awakened in the morning (actually from midnight of the day before), the hardest day of the week was Saturday. No one was allowed to put anything edible in the mouth on Saturday until the “Sunday” Mass that evening (Sunday in the religious sense begins Saturday evening, just as the Jewish sabbath begins on Friday evening). Popular poetry abounds with descriptions of the torments of Saturday: the populace bear up, waiting for sunset and the evening Mass, after which they can at last dig into an enormous bowl of tripe in sauce and then indulge in all the other joys of life, spending time with women and smoking tobacco.

Tripe, though of animal rather than vegetable origin, was perceived as a kind of intermediary food, somewhere between eating meat and abstaining from it. The Roman recipe for the well-known Saturday tripe, which is recalled in this “sabbatical” sonnet by Belli (“La sabatina,” Saturday evening vigil), like the Milanese recipe for
busecca de magher
(stewed beef tripe), comprises onion, celery, carrots, and, in Rome, wild mint as well. The tripe is cooked in this sauce for five hours, constantly skimmed.

 

The menu for the New Year's Eve dinner, or the Night of San Silvestro, resembles a propitiatory ritual or a love potion. Everything that is eaten on this night must favor the realization of desires. Thus lentils (similar to coins) are usually cooked as well as
zampone
(stuffed pig's trotter) or
cotechino
(pork sausage). Centuries ago, similar dishes of meat in gelatin saved the Italian population in times of scarcity during war years. Gelatin for abundance and lentils for wealth are the most important symbolic components on the
table on feast days. Fresh fruit must be placed on the table on New Year's Day in order for it to last all year long, magically transporting those at the feast right into summer or fall. In the past, procuring fresh fruit for the table of the big dinner was not so easy. We know that grapes are jealously conserved for the New Year's dinner starting in autumn, when they are hung from the beams of the loft.

In Liguria there is a type of pasta in the shape of a coin intended for New Year's Day; every pasta disk is made by hand with a little wooden mold, though in the past a real Spanish doubloon was used. These edible “coins” are called
corzetti
. In northern countries, similar coins and medals made of chocolate, and wrapped in gold foil, are given as gifts on New Year's Day.

On January 17, the feast of St. Anthony Abbot is celebrated throughout Italy. Anthony, who lived in the third to fourth century, suffered from cancerous ergotism (a form of gangrene caused by the ergot fungus); now the saint's aid is invoked by those who suffer from the disease that takes his name, St. Anthony's fire. Surviving on only bread and salt, St. Anthony lived for 106 years in a hermitage in the desert. He lived as an anchorite, fought against demons, and protected swine. He had contracted ergotism as a result of being poisoned by ergot, a fungus present in the rye flour used to make bread. Suckling pig (
porcellino
) is made on January 17, wherever the tradition is still alive, and St. Anthony is also portrayed with a little pig peeking out from behind the hem of his habit. But—and this is an important detail—the
porcellino
of St. Anthony must not be eaten in solitude; rather, it is to be shared with the poor invited to the meal, or donated entirely, without even having been touched.

 

At the beginning of the grape harvest it is customary to ritually eat goat stew: the Dionysiac animal is thought to influence the good quality of the wine. At the beginning of the olive harvest, an unfailing dish is
stoccafisso accomodato
(stewed stockfish, or
buridda
). This is the typical dinner during the time of the first olive pressing in San Remo and other Ligurian localities where olive groves abound (Savona, Imperia, Riviera di Ponente, and Riviera di Levante). In each case the dish is in fact prepared with the first oil: murky, greenish, and a little bitter to the palate.

During Carnival, obviously, excess reigns everywhere; still, it does not consist of eating enormous portions, but rather in munching a little of this and a little of that. Therefore, salamis and deep-fried fritters are welcome: actually, the food must be quick to eat but also hypercaloric, in anticipation of the forty-day Lenten fast. In the Veneto and in Friuli,
Carnival treats are called
crostoli
(ribbons), in Venice
galani
(ribbons), in Tuscany
cenci
(knots), in Piedmont and in Liguria
bugie
(lies), in the northern regions
stracci
(scraps), and in those of the south
frappe
(fringes). In the Marches they are made with chestnut flour, while in Sicily the exquisite cannoli are filled with sweet ricotta. In Pesaro
arancini
, filled, fried rice croquettes, are made at Carnival time.

The beauties of Tuscany have always been extolled by those who have done the canonical Grand Tour of Italy (and those who still do it). Though the expression “Grand Tour” was used for the first time in the seventeenth-century travel notes of Richard Lassels,
¹
the idea of it is found in embryonic form in the sixteenth-century travel observations of Michel de Montaigne. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the so-called Grand Tour constituted an obligatory stage of a classical education. In 1738 and 1748, excavations at Herculaneum and Pompeii were begun. In 1764, these ancient Roman cities were described by the art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann in his
History of Ancient Art
. The main objective of the Grand Tour was to visit the excavations in Rome, Sicily, and the area of Naples, and to admire Renaissance art in Florence and Venice. Tuscany represented an intermediate leg of the journey, leading to these fascinating tourist destinations, but travelers passing through the region always remained enchanted with it.

As Dickens put it in the notes of his Italian tour: “Returning to Pisa, and hiring a good-tempered Vetturino and his four horses, to take us on to Rome, we travelled through pleasant Tuscan villages and cheerful scenery all day.”
²

Travelers to Tuscany arrived from Romagna, then a poor and depressed part of the Papal State. The population lived there in abject poverty throughout the year, and individuality was suffocated. Travelers entering Tuscany noticed by contrast how
effective the creative work of free men could be, a creativity that was even embodied in the landscape. Goethe writes:

By Andrei Bourtsev

 

The most striking thing about Tuscany is that all the public works, the roads and the bridges, look beautiful and imposing. They are at one and the same time efficient and neat, combining usefulness with grace, and everywhere one observes the care with which things are looked after, a refreshing contrast to the Papal States, which seem to keep alive only because the earth refuses to swallow them.
³

 

Descending into Tuscany from the Apennines, the traveler notices that even the sky assumes a magical Mediterranean color. Before him lie the landscapes painted by Duccio di Buoninsegna, Pietro Lorenzetti, Bartolo di Fredi, Sano di Pietro, and Giovanni
di Paolo. Gentle hills geometrically divided into arable land and vineyards: nature ennobled by man's effort and intelligence, with fields, wineries, oil presses, mills, and coopers' and potters' shops. Well-to-do, cultured citizens decorated their country estates as if they were works of art.

The earliest articulated considerations on the cultural exchange between the countryside and the city are contained in Vincenzo Tanara's treatise
L'economia del cittadino in villa
(The economy of the city dweller in his country house), 1644, as well as in Marco Lastri's book
Regole per i padroni dei poderi verso i contadini, per proprio vantaggio e di loro
(Rules for estate owners toward farmers, for their own advantage and that of the farmers), 1763. Added to those is a collection of advice to farmers concerning their health. In Italy, especially in the eighteenth century, during the Enlightenment, knowledge of agriculture was rather widespread in aristocratic and upper-middle-class circles. In this regard, Stendhal describes an amusing episode that occurred in October 1816 in Milan:

 

Only two nights ago, the owner of one of these proud mansions, finding himself unable to sleep, was strolling up and down beneath the porticos at five o'clock in the morning, while the dawn lay hidden in a steady fall of warm rain. All at once his eye was caught by a figure emerging from a side entrance on the ground floor, and he recognised one of his acquaintances, who was, as it chanced, an exceedingly handsome young man. Putting two and two together, he quickly concluded that the stranger had passed the night unbidden beneath his roof. Knowing that the young man had a genuine interest in agriculture, and using the rain as a pretext for conversation, the husband, without interrupting his sheltered stroll beneath the portico, kept his rival for two whole hours standing there in the downpour while he plied him with endless questions on farms and farming. Not until eight o'clock had struck, and the rain showing no signs of abating, did the husband most gallantly take leave of his acquaintance and return within the house.
⁴