The Italians (16 page)

This is partly because of the identification between cuisine and family. Recipes are passed on from mother to daughter and become part of a family’s sense of identity. Food also plays a crucial role in strengthening family bonds. Whatever their other commitments, children are expected to be at table for dinner. It is where the affairs of the day are discussed, problems addressed and complaints aired. When they grow up, those same children will be expected to be at their mother’s lunch table on Sunday. In the cities, you can set your watch by the traffic jams that build on Sundays before lunch, as families return to the home of the previous generation, usually stopping along the way to buy a cake or tart for the last course.

The role of the table in Italian life is relentlessly emphasized in advertising of all kinds and even reflected in the grammar of the language.
Il tavolo
is the word for the physical object, whereas
la tavola
—the same word but in the feminine—is untranslatable into English. Its connotations encompass the meal and its preparation, quality, consumption and—most important—enjoyment.
Il tavolo
is a piece of furniture on which to rest plates and cutlery.
La tavola
signifies an experience in which china and glass, knives and forks play only a very small and functional part. When, for example, Italians want to describe the joys of good eating and drinking, they talk of
i piaceri della tavola
.

It was not until quite recently, however, that Italian cooking came to be recognized as something other than a poor second to French, even by the Italians themselves. Giuseppe Prezzolini, the writer who first divided his compatriots into
furbi
and
fessi,
was well ahead of his time—at least as far as international opinion was concerned—when in 1954 he asked, “What is the glory of Dante compared to spaghetti?” For at least fifteen years afterward, the more accepted view was that Italian gastronomy meant no more than cheap, rough wine in straw-covered flasks and mounds of pasta, all plonked down on checkered tablecloths.

Several factors have played a part in changing perceptions since then. One has been a marked improvement in the quality of Italian wine. Another has been the spread of enthusiasm for the Mediterranean diet. In previous centuries, foreign travelers had noted with regret and disdain the dearth of meat in the Italian diet. Animal fat and protein was what counted as prestige food, and it was thought to be anything but unhealthy. The man who did more than anyone to overturn that view was an American physiologist, Ancel Keys, who highlighted the link between saturated fats and heart disease.
How to Eat Well and Stay Well the Mediterranean Way,
which he and his wife, Margaret, published in 1975, offered an alternative, yet still delicious, diet rich in olive oil, vegetables, pulses and fish.
^*
Perhaps most important of all, Italian food is quite simple to prepare—a factor that has weighed progressively more as people have come to expect good cuisine in the home as well as in restaurants and hotels.

But it is not as easy as it might seem to reproduce in Birmingham or Boston that tasty dish sampled on a memorable evening in Tuscany or overlooking the Bay of Naples. More than any other internationally renowned cuisine, Italy’s depends for its impact not on complex sauces or obscure spices, but on the quality of the ingredients. A perfectly ordinary dish of, say, rigatoni with basil and tomato sauce can be transformed into an exquisite gastronomic experience if the
passata
(the sieved tomato pulp) used to make it is of high quality. Even today, many city-dwelling families in Italy make and bottle their own
passata
from tomatoes grown on land that they or their relatives own.

This intimate link between the quality of the cuisine and the quality of the ingredients is central to the Slow Food movement, which came into being in 1986 in protest at the opening of a McDonald’s near the Spanish Steps in Rome. The aim of Slow Food is to preserve regional cuisines and the use of locally grown vegetables and locally reared livestock. It is not specifically an organic food movement, but many of the restaurants that adhere to its principles use organic ingredients and wines. The movement claims more than a hundred thousand members in some 150 countries. In 2004, its founder, Carlo Petrini, a culinary journalist, founded a University of Gastronomic Sciences in his native town of Bra, near Turin. It is part of a complex that also includes a Michelin-starred restaurant and a hotel. Subjects include nutritional science, the chemistry of taste, and the history, aesthetics and sociology of food.

By contrast, fast food has made only limited incursions into Italy. There are only about 450 branches of McDonalds,
¹
compared with more than 1,200 in both France and Britain, which have populations of approximately the same size. As for Starbucks, it has never even ventured into Italy. It has branches in more than sixty countries outside the United States, including Germany, France and Spain, where the local coffee is of high quality. But not a single one in Italy. Asked why, the company’s CEO, Howard Schultz, once attributed the decision not to get involved to “the political issues and the economic issues” in Italy.
²

Some Italian foods and dishes have been around for centuries. Writing in 1570, Bartolomeo Scappi, the chef of Pope Pius V, declared that the best cheeses in Italy were Parmesan and Marzolino, both of which can be found today in any Italian grocery store. He also mentioned
“Casci Cavalli,”
an obvious reference to the cheese now known as
caciocavallo,
which is produced throughout the south.

Naples was also known at the time for a dish that consisted of a layer of dough “no more than an inch thick without a top crust,” which local people referred to as
pizza
. But words can be deceptive, and in Italy they have often been used to denote ingredients and dishes that carry quite different names today. When Boccaccio in
The
Decameron
has the practical joker Maso del Saggio describe a mountain in the Basque country where “all of grated Parmesan cheese [on which] dwell folk that do nought else but make macaroni and raviuoli,” he is not alluding to what you would expect to find in a modern trattoria. His macaroni were most likely dumplings made of dried split beans and the ravioli would have been rissoles. Boccaccio also had his character imagine “a rivulet of Vernaccia,” but whether it would have had much in common with the crisp, light wine served in Tuscany today is impossible to know. Orvieto, for example, is nowadays mostly dry, but for centuries was honey-sweet.

Olive oil, of course, has been around for centuries, and doubtless millennia, in Italy. But until comparatively recently it was a costly luxury food in many regions. Lard was the cooking fat used by most Italians in the Middle Ages. Starting in the fifteenth century, butter became increasingly popular in southern as well as northern Italy.

In much the same way, pasta has long been a part of Italian cuisine, but only quite recently acquired the dominant, pervasive role it plays now. The oldest form is thought to be lasagna, which is known to have been cooked in ancient Rome, though not quite in the way it is today. Dried pasta seems to have been invented quite separately, in North Africa, as expedition food for desert caravans. It was probably brought to Sicily by the island’s Muslim conquerors. In a codex published in 1154, a Moroccan geographer and botanist known as al-Idrisi described a thriving pasta manufacturing industry near Palermo, which exported its products to Muslim and Christian countries alike. Among them was a stringlike pasta then known by the name
itrija
. Dried pasta had the same advantages for seafarers as it did for camel drivers, so it is hardly surprising that it next appears in Genoa. It is mentioned in a document written in 1279, and production of vermicelli, which was to remain a Genoese specialty, had begun by the fourteenth century. The consumption of pasta continued nevertheless to be associated with Sicilians until in the eighteenth century the nickname of
mangiamaccheroni
gradually came to be bestowed on the Neapolitans. By 1785, Naples had 280 pasta shops.

Grated cheese was used for flavoring from an early stage, but sugar and cinnamon were also thought to make tasty accompaniments. Pasta was often prepared in quite different ways, boiled in broth or milk rather than plain water. In their study of the history of Italian cuisine, Alberto Capatti and Massimo Montanari quote an early cookery writer who was adamant that “macaroni must be boiled for a period of two hours.”
³

Nor was tomato sauce added until comparatively recently. The tomato, which almost certainly reached Italy through Spain, had acquired its name—the
pomo d’oro,
or “golden apple”—at least as early as 1568. But it was treated by Italians—as indeed by many other people, including Americans—with immense suspicion, and entered Italian cuisine only very slowly. The first mention of tomatoes in a written recipe comes at the end of the seventeenth century. Over the next one hundred years, tomatoes seem to have won a firm place in Neapolitan cooking. But right up until the end of the nineteenth century, it was more usual in central Italy to use
agresto,
a concoction made of sour grapes, to give “bite” to a dish.

The New World food that caught on most rapidly was maize, which was soon being planted in Veneto and used as the basis for an existing dish, polenta, which had previously been made exclusively with buckwheat.

As not a few foreigners have noted, Italian food is the ultimate comfort food, and that point has not been lost on Italians either. One of the characters in Ettore Scola’s award-winning comedy film
C’eravamo tanti amati
(“We All Loved Each Other So Much”) called spaghetti “the great consoler for all woes, more so than love.” And over the centuries, as explained at the start of this book, Italians have needed plenty of consoling.

War and civil strife, often resulting in deprivation, have made a huge contribution to the richness of Italy’s gastronomic repertoire. The use of arugula (
Eruca sativa
) in salads, a culinary fashion that spread to the Anglo-Saxon world only in the 1990s, originated in the grubbing for edible weeds by Italians during and after the Second World War. “The techniques devised in times of famine to render edible even the smallest, most basic resource of the land—the ability to make bread out of wild berries and grape seed recounted in so many ancient and modern chronicles, or to concoct a soup with roots from the underbrush and herbs from the ditches—all clearly testify to the difficulties of people whose daily lives were constantly threatened by the outbreak of catastrophe,” wrote Capatti and Montanari.

In view of the unceasing evolution of Italian cuisine, it is ironic that today’s Italians should be so deeply suspicious of any kind of culinary innovation. Chefs in the luxury restaurants and five-star hotels of the bigger cities may improvise and experiment, but at home, in the corner bar and the neighborhood trattoria or osteria, what wins approval is doing things in exactly the same way as last week and the month before and the year before that.

I always find it striking that if you go into a sandwich bar run by Italian immigrants or their descendants in London or New York, you will often encounter a dazzling array of inventive fillings. Yet back in Italy, with the exception of a few self-consciously trendy establishments, the ingredients are wholly predictable: ham and mozzarella, mozzarella and tomato, tomato and tuna, tuna and artichoke, etc. They are all delicious. But they are always exactly the same.

Ethnic cuisines are still viewed by many Italians with deep mistrust, and to the extent that they exist ethnic restaurants cater largely to immigrants. Chinese food is thought acceptable in the sort of “Where can we go that is cheap and informal?” way that many Britons still think of Indian food. But then Chinese cuisine bears some resemblance to the Italians’ own: dumplings are very much like ravioli, just as noodles resemble fettuccine or linguine. Surprisingly perhaps, the one kind of imported food that has become fashionable in Italy is the altogether more exotic sushi. Even so, a calculation using TripAdvisor.com numbers available at the time of writing shows that, in Rome, Japanese restaurants accounted for 1.25 percent of the total and all ethnic restaurants for less than 6 percent. In cosmopolitan Milan, the overall figure was 17 percent, and in Naples 7 percent.

In the same way, the majority of shoppers remain deeply suspicious of imported foods, and their sensibilities are recognized by manufacturers who, whenever possible, stress that a product has been prepared or grown in Italy. The daughter of an Anglo-Italian marriage once told me how, when she was a girl, she was sent to spend the summer with her grandmother in Italy. Shortly after she arrived, her
nonna
discovered that she had brought with her a jar of peanut butter. Holding it up, she turned to her granddaughter with an expression of bottomless pity.

“Figliola mia,”
she said.
“Ma come ti sei ridotta?”
Impossible to translate, but it’s roughly:
“My darling girl, have you been reduced to this?”

Decades after the introduction of the EU’s single market, Italian supermarkets remain virtually bereft of foreign produce. You will find some German beer, no doubt, and the odd packet of mass-produced French or Dutch cheese. But what else there is will have been confined to a tiny exotic foods section where foreigners can satisfy their outlandish tastes for things like bamboo shoots and corned beef.

The lack of good foreign cheeses is particularly striking because this is one of the very few areas where Italy’s contribution to gastronomy is modest. There is mozzarella and Parmesan, of course, but they are mainly for cooking rather than eating on their own. Apart from Gorgonzola and a few others like Marzolino, Italian cheeses are pretty uninspiring. The same is true of Spain, even though the Spanish cheese industry has advanced by leaps and bounds in recent years. Both countries have a border with France, whose offering in this area is surely unrivaled. But whereas if you go into a Spanish supermarket nowadays you will find a counter laden with cheeses from France and indeed many other European countries, in most Italian supermarkets you will be lucky to find a chunk of Edam and some packs of Brie and Camembert. Once, at the cheese and cold meats counter of a Tuscan supermarket, I asked for feta, which until then I had always thought of as being quintessentially Greek.