Why Italians Love to Talk About Food (43 page)

Every evening fishing lamps appear out at sea. The anchovy swims toward the light, drawn by the plankton that become more visible in the illuminated water. Once caught, the fish are immediately sprinkled with salt. Raw sardines, salted right on the boat, are the basis of a famous Venetian dish: sardines
in saòr
(in a sauce of onion, vinegar, raisins, and pine nuts).

 

Italian seafood cuisine is full of interesting products. Romagna boasts specialties such as clams, or
poveracce
(
Venus gallina
). Throughout Italy, and primarily in Naples and Sicily,
arselle
clams (
Tapes decussatus
, the checkered carpet shell) are eaten. A very common
homemade dish is the delicious calamari, also called squid. Also popular are razor clams (
Solen vagina
) and scallops, or “sea combs” of St. James. In restaurants and on the market they are known by the French term “Saint-Jacques,” but it would be more accurate to call them “Santiago,” since these beautiful shells (well cleaned after the mollusk was eaten) were affixed to caps worn by medieval pilgrims on their way to the shrine of Santiago de Compostela. The second name for the sea combs of St. James,
capesante
(referring to the holy sign on the hat), goes back to that very tradition. Upon closer observation, this same flat shell with its broad wavy edge can be recognized in ornamental motifs that are found over the portals of both Catholic cathedrals and Orthodox churches, as a symbol of Christianity.

Very often mussels, giant squid, octopus, and
moscardini
(little octopuses) are present in Italian menus. Cuttlefish are often prepared, bought from the fish vendor or in the frozen food section of the supermarket, as well as sea truffles and tellins (both shellfish). Mantis shrimp (
canocchie
) or sea cicadas (
cicale di mare
) are not a rarity, nor are the magnificent crustaceans: shrimp, prawns,
mazzancolle
shrimp, scampi, crayfish, lobsters, crabs, spider crabs, and
moene
(sea cicadas during the shedding period).

The artistry of the Italian chefs who specialize in seafood is so renowned that the authoritative cooking expert Davide Paolini states that even the famous tempura of Japanese restaurants was introduced in Japan by the Italians.
⁸
According to his theory, the word “tempura” derives from
tempora
, seasons. Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese missionaries, finding themselves in Japan, observed the fasts “of the four seasons” (
tempora
), the quarterly three-day periods of prayer and fasting known as Ember Days, and during those times ate only fish. According to this expert, even the famous Japanese platter called the boat dish (so called in all Japanese restaurants in Europe and America, it is a small wooden boat, on the deck of which sashimi and sushi are displayed) recalls Italian and Portuguese ships. The Europeans also supposedly taught the Japanese to marinate mackerel with seaweed in special wooden molds, reminiscent of Portuguese sailing vessels.

Besides the huge consumption of fish, there is another almost universal feature of Italian food that is evident to both locals and foreigners: the love for raw, unprocessed vegetables.

This trend existed as far back as ancient Rome. In a comedy of Plautus, a chef explains why nobody has hired him: he charged handsomely, because his skill set him apart from other cooks who “slap barely seasoned grasses on the plate, almost as though the diners were ruminants.” There follows a description of these “grasses”: cabbages, beets, borage, spinach, garlic, coriander, fennel, black lovage (
Smyrnium olusatrum
), and mustard
(Plautus,
Pseudolus
, III). “The breath of our grandparents and great-grandparents reeked of garlic and onion,” Marcus Terentius Varro wrote in his
Saturarum Menippearum
(fragment XIX), “but their spirit was one of courage and strength.”

In the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance, foreign travelers were amazed at the excessive quantities of vegetables eaten by Italians. In 1581 Montaigne noted with astonishment in his travel diary: “We had artichokes, beans, and peas here, in the middle of March.”
⁹
Costanzo Felici, in his treatise on botany (1569), advised against consuming raw tomatoes:

 

The golden apple, so called in common parlance because of its intense color, or the apple of Peru, which is either bold yellow or vivid red—this one is either equally round or divided into sections like a melon—is also similarly sought after by gourmands eager for new things and also fried in a pan like the other, accompanied by verjuice, but to my taste it is more fine-looking than flavorsome.

 

He goes on: “The eating of salads is almost characteristic of gluttonous Italians (say those across the mountains), who have commandeered the food of animals who eat raw grasses.”
¹⁰

Fruits and vegetable foods were so important for the nourishment of the peninsula's population that scholars could not help but take serious note of it. At the end of the eighteenth century, that period of encylopedias and scientific classifications, Giorgio Gallesio (1772–1839) completed a journey of exploration lasting twenty-five years, from north to south, through all the countrysides and villages of Italy. With the ardor of an enlightened thinker and the fanaticism of a collector, he aimed to observe, record, describe, and classify the principal varieties of existing fruits. His work, the
Pomona italiana
, which was published in installments between 1817 and 1839, has been reintroduced online and may be freely consulted in electronic and hypertext format.
¹¹

 

The largely vegetarian diet, coupled with Italy's generally charming customs and gentle climate, sent the romantic writers into raptures. Typical is Goethe's thrilled description of both lettuce leaves and the city of Naples and Sicily as the quintessence of
italianità
(the Italian spirit). In Goethe's imagination, southern Italy, with its light food, was the pearl of creation. “I won't say another word about the beauties of the city [Naples] and its situation, which have been described and praised so often.”
¹²
Goethe is not even able to
coherently describe this magnificent city: the only thing that he can say is “
kein Wort
” (“there are no words”).

 

Italy boasts an ancient tradition of nutrition and dietetics inherited from the Arabs, primarily from the
Book of Agriculture
by Ibn Al-'Awwam (twelfth to thirteenth century). During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, dietetics was associated with the principles of complementary humors (according to Galen), vegetarianism (according to Pythagoras), and the theories of the late-Roman cooking theoretician Apicius, who recommended the Mediterranean diet (that is, the normal dietary allotment of southern Italy, based on grains, wine, and olive oil).

Galen, a second-century Greek physician, remained topical until the eighteenth century. His theory is founded on the idea of balance among the four basic qualities: hot and cold, dry and wet (to which the poetic elements of fire, air, earth, and water correspond). Illness can be explained by the prevalence of one of these qualities with respect to the norm for any given age group (older people are cold and dry, younger people hot and wet). From ancient times through the Renaissance, an individual's state of health was thought to depend on a balance of humors in his body. An excess or a deficiency of one of the four humors—blood, yellow bile, black bile (melancholy), and phlegm—determined the appearance of an illness's symptoms. In an ideal world order, an ideal body, and an ideal dish, all elements should be present, in harmony with one another. All cuisines, then, are based on one's skill in combining ingredients. Only a few rare foods, foremost among them bread, are perfect in and of themselves. In most cases, the cook must correct the nature of the product based on a complex classification of foods according to the intensity of their quality. A number of classic dishes that are part of the Italian menu were formed in the light of such nutritional concepts, such as pears with seasoned hard cheese or slices of
prosciutto crudo
(cured prosciutto) with melon. Galen's remedies and the cooking treatises of the Renaissance advised against eating melon and pears in their natural state, since they were considered excessively wet and cold. Cheese and prosciutto, on the other hand, contain hot and dry humors: they must be combined with wet and cold humors, and then they may be eaten with gusto.

The final and fundamental Italian food principle is moderation.

The Venetian writer Alvise (Luigi) Cornaro (c. 1484–1566), following a period of illness and suffering, regained his health at forty years of age, thanks in part to his practices as a health fanatic. He had a tendency to overstate his age, and toward the end of
his life declared that he was almost a hundred years old; nevertheless, only the date of his death, May 8, 1566, is certain. Cornaro noted in his
Discorsi intorno alla vita sobria
(
The Art of Living Long
):

 

Oh, how profitable it is to the old to eat but little! . . . I, accordingly, who am filled with the knowledge of this truth, eat only what is enough to sustain my life; and my food is as follows: First, bread; then, bread soup or light broth with an egg, or some other nice little dish of this kind; of meats, I eat veal, kid, and mutton; I eat fowls of all kinds, as well as partridges and birds like the thrush. I also partake of such salt-water fish as the goldney and the like; and, among the various fresh-water kinds, the pike and others.
¹³

 

Twelve ounces of solid matter and fourteen ounces of wine a day was, in Cornaro's opinion, the secret of longevity. “For I feel, when I leave the table, that I must sing, and, after singing, that I must write. This writing immediately after eating does not cause me any discomfort; nor is my mind less clear then than at other times. And I do not feel like sleeping; for the small amount of food I take cannot make me drowsy, as it is insufficient to send fumes from the stomach to the head.”
¹⁴

Naturally, Cornaro's self-satisfaction more than once inspired attacks of sadistic irony in those who came after him. Thus, a certain “Academic,” in 1662, published a transposition of Cornaro's treatise in tercets, in macaronic Latin, signing himself “the walking corpse.”

 

Medical research has confirmed that the Mediterranean diet does, in fact, prevent diseases prevalent in so-called affluent societies: atherosclerosis, stroke, obesity, and hypertension. There are countless contemporary manuals on the Mediterranean diet that bear titles such as “Eat Well to Live Better.”

The majority of Italians are only halfheartedly interested in dietetics and alimentary chemistry: they keep one or two manuals on the subject at home pro forma; they remember their cholesterol periodically and are aware of its danger, but not so much that they go to the doctor to have it regularly monitored (as Americans do). Italy's two greatest certainties concerning nutrition are well established; they do not depend on short-lived trends and may be boiled down to the following creed:

 

1. Avoid junk food, represented by potato chips, Coca-Cola, snacks, and munchies that are bad for your health and above all, fattening.
   
2. Show no pity for pasta that's cooked even one minute too long. Overcooked pasta should only be thrown away. Pasta al dente is never fattening.
   

 

Today everyone aspires to be lean and slender and struggles against excessive weight. One cannot fail to observe that in social relationships in contemporary Italy, a trim, fit appearance, outward style, and above all a well-proportioned figure are key to a successful social identity. Gone are the days of Matteo Bandello, with the cult of full figures and excessive eating (in one of his stories, Bandello praised Milan for its “corpulence”; in another he applied the same epithet to Bologna). Gone are the days when the humanist and culinary theoretician Platina advised his academic friends Scaurio and Celio on how to eat in order to get fat. Distant, by now, are the follies of those dinners that the Church condemns, comparing them to the banquets of the rich Dives (from the Gospel story of the prosperous Dives and the poor Lazarus).

Italians today aspire not only to keep fit, but also to remain agile and active, free from postprandial stupor. This can be noticed at family meals as well as at official receptions. During the international summit attended by Tony Blair and Bill Clinton in November 1999, the Italian government, led at the time by Massimo D'Alema, organized a reception in Florence, in the Sala dei Gigli of Villa La Pietra and, as always, the then prime minister was aided in no small way by his friend and personal chef, Gianfranco Vissani. The menu created by Vissani was privately described as “characterized by lightness.” It included creamed potatoes with lobster,
pappardelle
noodles with rabbit sauce and truffles, weever fish with fennel ravioli in orange sauce, and Florentine-style pumpkin for dessert. By contrast, at the Cologne summit, not long before, the same world leaders dined at the Museum of Roman Art, sitting at a transparent table, beneath which an ancient mosaic was visible. The Germans had orchestrated such a heavy dinner that soon afterward, at the concert of the city's Philharmonic, Clinton slept, Blair dozed, and D'Alema pinched himself to keep his head from lolling on his chest, while his wife, Linda, nudged him with her elbow from time to time.

The menu for the reception given by President of the Republic Carlo Azeglio Ciampi in honor of U.S. president George Bush (2003) appears utterly light, even imponderable: consommé in a cup, boiled rice, veal cutlet, and light pineapple cream. The wines were Montecarlo, Refosco, and Spumante Ferrari. After such a lunch, it is doubtful that anyone would fall asleep at a concert.