Why Italians Love to Talk About Food (63 page)

But since Fascist authorities had declared war on pasta, no one at the state level was concerned about it. Nor were they troubled about the fact that the state's reconversion of food production was leading to tragic consequences: there was not enough food to go around. At that point the Ministry of Propaganda went into action, with the publication of this poster: a man with a napkin knotted around his neck, eating pasta, with a roast chicken, fruit, and a bottle of wine next to him, and a soldier in a khaki uniform, who approaches the glutton from behind and strangles him, saying: “The man who eats too much robs the nation.”

 

Affluent families, many of whom secretly opposed the regime both idealistically and aesthetically, responded to the violation of the food code with provocative acts. Thanks to their money, they could buy products abroad, so dinners consisted of French Champagne, foie gras, caviar, Scotch salmon, and English whiskey. It was especially chic for these
frondeurs
(the term refers to La Fronde, a seventeenth-century French rebellion against royal authority, and has come to mean any malcontent or rebel) to invite some Fascist party leader into their ardent aristocratic society as a guest of honor. The secret agent and gastronome Federico Umberto D'Amato, in his book
Menu e dossier
(
Menu and Dossier
), describes a dinner of this kind, and records the words that the Fascist official later pronounced to justify his attendance, when the matter was discussed at a party meeting: “I accepted the invitation only to ascertain to what extent So-and-so's anti-national activity goes.”
⁷

After the war, the powers of the First Republic demonstrated much more psychological subtlety, accessibility of language, and mastery of the Italian food code (see “
Democracy
”) in communicating with the masses. There were still a few notable times when communication broke off and the authorities erred by sending the wrong signal to the population. This happened in 1959, and almost led Italy to a revolution—the one that Italian Communists had unsuccessfully invoked for so long. In that year the country found itself on the brink of a popular revolt because of Health Minister Camillo Giardin. In 1959 one of the first instances of the adulteration of food products was debated in Parliament. During the debate, Minister Giardin ardently praised the progress of science and the food
industry and used his eloquence and ardor to describe the bright prospects for the conquest of space: “On future space flights,” he proclaimed in the hall of the Senate, man “will be scientifically nourished by his own excrement, transformed into scientifically pure foods.”
⁸
It was not a good idea. Not at all. And the opposition took ample advantage of the minister's gaffe. The vivid line “We are a nation of fifty million aspiring space explorers”
⁹
was sarcastically and lengthily declined in all its inflections by the opposition's press.

Many tourists only visit the part of the Sardinian coast that has been paved over in the last forty years, and so they don't get much of a feel for the aroma of Sardinian cuisine. Real Sardinian food is found precisely where there are no tourists: among the local shepherds who, in the summer season, go up to the mountains to live without their family, without kitchen utensils, without shops, without a freezer, roasting the meat of suckling pigs, goats, and sheep over a fire with herbs and myrtle leaves.

The holiday roast
carraxiu
-style, a specialty invented in Villagrande in the province of Nuoro, eclipses the inventions of François Rabelais. According to the ethnographic descriptions, you take a young bull and stuff it with a kid; the kid is stuffed with a piglet, the piglet with a hare, the hare with a partridge, the partridge with a little bird. After sticking one animal inside the other, the town cobbler is called to sew up the tough hide of the young bull using thick waxed twine. In some locations in Sardinia this dish is called
malloru de su sabatteri
(cobbler's bull). Only Sardinian experts skilled at cooking meat over the fire are capable of roasting such a “nesting doll” uniformly.

Compared to this, other dishes, such as
pastu mistu
, which consists of stuffing a turkey with a chicken or a hare with a rabbit, are child's play. All these foods are reminiscent of ritual sacrifices, of hecatombs. The local folklore has it that ritual incantations had to be pronounced when preparing them. In Lula, in the vicinity of the Franciscan monastery, the residents move to a “sacred clearing” during the feast of St. Francis in October, and in the village of Paulilatino they move to a “sacred well” for the feast of St. Christina at the end of July, spending nine days there in prayer (the novena). The buildings around a sanctuary, meant to serve as lodging during those novena periods, are called
combersia
(possibly from the Sardinian
combessa
, a lean-to shelter with a sloping roof). During those nine days, the entire village attends the solemn slaughter of animals and the preparation of traditional food. “A real hecatomb outdoors, or maybe near or within nuragic monuments, almost as if to stress the continuity with a past that is chronologically distant but very much alive in the consciousness of the islanders.”
¹

By Andrei Bourtsev

 

Cut off from the rest of Italy for fifteen hundred years (from 1800
B.C.
to 300
B.C.
), the island was home to a distinct warrior civilization, which fought and traded with the Phoenicians, Etruscans, and Greeks, and left behind on Sardinian soil the stone structures known as
nuraghi
: enigmatic conical bastions. Only in the third century
B.C.
, when Sardinia was conquered by the Romans, did it create the original culture that survives today.

The traditions in Sardinia are archaic. If you look at the natural environment—emerald sea, the streams and mountains—you think you are in a terrestrial paradise. This is Sardinia's problem. Everyone covets such a paradise, and the Sardinians have had to defend themselves against some invader or another through the ages. In addition to the more notorious groups who attacked Italy (the Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Greeks, Spaniards, Normans, and Arabs), the island was targeted by Pisa, Genoa, the Papal State, the Aragonese, the Austrians, and the Savoys as well. Add to this raids by pirates, and a scourge that marked the history of the island for centuries: kidnappings. Banditry, to a lesser extent, still survives today; to realize its importance, you need only visit the Santuario del Bandito (Shrine of the Bandit), a place of religious pilgrimage, which stands in the heart of the Sopramonte Massif, in Lula. The old Russian Brockhaus and Efron encyclopedia reads:

 

The culture of the conquerors was never able to subjugate the wild, indomitable savages who lived in inaccessible gorges and caves. Even the Romans, who conquered the island in 238 [
B.C.
], failed to definitively break the mountaineers' resistance; in the slave market, Sardinian prisoners were the least prized because of their hardened nature, their ineptitude at forced labor, and their lack of dependability.

 

The Sardinians' peculiar language owes much to their surly nature, brusque and taciturn, which other Italians are unable to understand. Many of their word roots were borrowed directly from Latin, but transformed by a phonetic evolution so unusual that it is definitely impossible to grasp their meaning.

The Sardinians are stubbornly attached to their remote caves, the forests, the steep mountains in the central part of the island, the Barbagia, where, according to a
curious statement by William Black, “mean-eyed, gun-toting sheep wait on every corner.”
²
The attacks and enemies, in any period of time, came from the sea: it is not surprising that the Sardinians, even in times of peace, avoid the sea. The dishes most typical of Sardinia (except for lobster) do not belong to the category of seaside cuisine, but to that of the mainland. Essential to local life is
carasau
bread, also known as
carta da musica
, or music paper, which is excellent for travelers but involves a rather laborious preparation. Flour is mixed with yeast and salt; the dough rises slowly, then the sheets, inflated by warmth, are baked in the oven. Once removed from the oven and allowed to cool, the sheets are cut horizontally into two layers. One side of each disk is naturally smooth, while the other is rough and porous where it was cut. This is necessary so that the liquid condiments, olive oil and sauces, can be soaked into the bread. After cutting, the sheets are returned to the oven to bake a second time; the second baking, the
carasatura
phase, makes it crisp.

These paper-thin breads are sold in packages of twenty. Like all breads of nomadic peoples (for example, the lavash of the people of the Caucasus), they serve as both dish and napkin. They are topped with anything you want and, if sprinkled with water, the dough becomes pliable again and can be rolled up to make a stuffed roulade.
Fratau
bread is made from
carasau
bread. First it is soaked in unsalted water (or broth) for thirty seconds. Then it is placed on a hot dish, so that the sheet softens. It is covered with tomato sauce, sprinkled with grated pecorino cheese, and topped with a fresh raw egg.

Even the pasta here is unusual and terribly laborious to prepare: the wives of shepherds and sailors, left at home, once busied themselves for entire days making dry pasta. Some pasta shapes show a supreme indifference to the expenditure of working hours, such as the
filindeu
(God's threads), very fine spaghetti braided or knotted manually, one by one, to form bows. Similarly laborious is the production of another shape, the
malloreddus
, also made by hand with saffron dough, ribbed on the surface, and with an interesting curvature on the inside. The
malloreddus
easily soaks up the sauce and retains the grated cheese well. The saffron, naturally borrowed from the Arabs, was at one time prized for its antiseptic qualities and as a vitamin source.