Why Italians Love to Talk About Food (2 page)

It is always awkward to speak about “Italian culture,” just as it is awkward to speak about “the Italian landscape.” If you rent a car and drive across the United
States, you can travel for days and days across endless plains; if you travel in northern Europe you can drive at length across equally vast stretches of rye fields. And let's not forget the steppes of Central Asia, the Sahara and Gobi deserts, and the wide expanse of the Australian outback.

One does not come to Italy to find the dizzying verticality of the Gothic cathedrals, the immensity of the pyramids, the cascades of Niagara Falls. Once you have crossed the Alps (where you might certainly have sublime impressions, but ones you could find in France, Switzerland, Germany, or Austria as well), you begin having a different experience. In Italy, the horizon never expands to titanic dimensions, because it is always limited by a hill on the right, or by the modest relief of a mountain on the left, and the road is continuously interrupted by small villages, at least one every five kilometers. On every stretch of the route (except in a certain section of the Po Valley) there will be a curve, a change of course, so that from region to region, but also within the same region, you will continually discover a different country, with infinite gradations from mountains to sea, passing through endlessly varied hills. There is little similarity between the hills of Piedmont and those of the Marches or Tuscany; at times, all you have to do is cross the Apennines, which traverse the entire boot like a backbone, from east to west or vice versa to get the impression that you are entering another country. Even the seas are different: those on the Tyrrhenian coast offer panoramas, beaches of a sort, and coastlines different from those of the Adriatic seaboard, not to mention the islands.

This variety applies not just to Italy's landscape, but also to its inhabitants. Italian dialects vary from region to region. If a Sicilian hears a Piedmontese from the northwest speaking, he will often not understand a word he is hearing. But few foreigners imagine that the dialects also vary from city to city, within the same region, and at times, though only slightly, from village to village.

This is because living together in the boot are the descendants of the Celtic and Ligurian tribes who inhabited the north before the Roman penetration, as well as the Illyrians of the east, the Etruscans and the various Italic stocks of the central region, the Greeks of the south, and scores of ethnic groups that over the course of centuries invaded the autochthonous populations: the Goths, the Lombards, the Arabs, and the Normans (not to mention the French, the Spanish, and the Austrians). On the country's northwest borders something very similar to French is spoken, while German can be heard in the mountains of the northeast, and Albanian in some places in the south.

This same variety of landscapes, languages, and ethnic groups also characterizes
Italian cuisine. Not the Italian cuisine that one tastes abroad, which, as good as it may be, is like Chinese food sampled outside China, a kind of koine, a generic brand, that draws its inspiration from various regions and inevitably gives in to the expectations of the “typical” customer who is looking for a “typical” image of Italy.

To come to know Italian cuisine in all its variety is to discover the monumental differences, not only of language but of taste, mentality, creativity, sense of humor, attitude toward suffering and death, loquacity or taciturnity, that separate a Sicilian from a Piedmontese or a Venetian from a Sardinian. In Italy, perhaps more than anywhere else (though the rule applies to every country), discovering local cuisine means discovering the spirit of the local inhabitants. Try tasting Piedmontese
bagna cauda
, then the Lombard soup
cassoela
, then
tagliatelle
Bolognese-style, then lamb
alla romana
, and finally Sicilian
cassata
, and you will feel as though you might have moved from China to Peru, and from Peru to Timbuktu.

Do Italians still get to know the many cuisines of their fellow countrymen as a means of fostering national kinship? I don't know. I do know that when a foreigner, moved by a great love for this land yet still able to maintain the detached gaze of an outsider, begins to describe Italy to us through its food, then Italians themselves will discover a country that they had (perhaps) largely forgotten.

And for that we should be grateful to Elena Kostioukovitch.

Of course Italians like to talk about food. Italy
is
food and the food is Italy, literally, emotionally, historically, culturally, and symbolically. In America, when we talk about food, we describe it or the restaurant where we ate it or the recipe we used.

Italians talk constantly about food even when food isn't the subject. Bring up almost anything—painting, trees, literature, landscape, history, people, religion, even taxes or politics—and the vocabulary of food somehow finds its way in. Painting is full of still lifes with fruit and vegetables. Different trees produce the appropriate wood for grilling specific foods. The oil being discussed is likely produced from olives. Since one out of every two or three days used to be a religious holiday or the eve of one, Italians ate a large preponderance of meatless meals. If there was a tax on public ovens, Italians simply knocked them down and rebuilt once the tax inspectors left. As for politics, even Mussolini brought food to the conversation. As part of the Fascist plan to create a new, stronger Italian race, Mussolini tried to convince people to reject pasta, the country's primal dish, by following the example of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the futurist who made his point dramatically by shooting a bullet into a dish of spaghetti carbonara (Mussolini didn't succeed).

Would anyone be surprised that when Italians talk about food, the language of erotic entanglement is not far away? In Naples, soups made only with vegetables are, in Elena Kostioukovitch's words, “penintential, God-fearing, guilt-free.” Add meat
and the virginal soup becomes
maritata
, “married.” Perhaps only a Tuscan, she says, would describe a sandwich as a “panino sinning with a slice of prosciutto.” Even something as normal as the act of eating spaghetti involves a frisson of danger. All those dangling strands must be sucked noisily as they slither toward the mouth. Just think about twirling the thin noodles around a fork when it is already awash in red sauce.

 

In this remarkable book, Elena Kostioukovitch uncovers many of the secrets of Italian life by looking at food and the role it plays in the national conscious and unconscious. Born in Russia, Ms. Kostioukovitch moved to Italy, where she has lived for twenty years, enthralled by the Italian passion for food and fascinated by how deeply it penetrates the country's sense of itself. She is the ideal guide: an outsider who can see what native Italians can't perceive as unusual or remarkable. Not quite an insider and no longer a true foreigner, she has become much more knowledgeable than most Italians.

As an American, I have had a similar experience of being an outsider in Italy, falling fiercely in love with the country and its endless wealth of food. I, too, have been astonished by what Italians don't notice and what they take for granted. A random selection:

Italians can't possibly sit down for a meal if bread isn't on the table. As a result, they often talk about many things in a vocabulary based on bread. A good, bighearted man is
buono, come il pane
. To call a spade a spade is
dire pane al pane, vino al vino
. To meet one's match is
trovar pane per i propri denti
.

Toasted bread crumbs substitute nicely for grated cheese.

People in Bologna and Palermo make breakfast or a midmorning snack of a brioche panino filled with ice cream.

Italians know which wild greens and herbs are edible and seem to have it in their DNA to cook them enticingly. When an American interviewer called such a diet “eating weeds,” I thought of the women who told me they owed their survival during the war to knowing which roots, leaves, and flowers were safe to eat.

Food saturates every aspect of Italian life and imprints the identity of every Italian. It is first and foremost the fragrant taste of home, the plate of pasta shared with family. It is the aroma and flavor and ingredients of the village. Special local dishes are shorthand for differences—from village to village, from region to region, from city to country. Italians may have a penchant for fighting with their neighbors, but they close ranks where allegiance to local ingredients and dishes is concerned.

There is a story, probably apocryphal, of the jeweler Bulgari being kidnapped, blindfolded, and driven a great distance to wherever he was held for ransom. He never saw either his kidnappers or the landscape, but after the ransom was paid and he was safely home, he was able to tell the police where he'd been held. How? He recognized the flavor and shape of the bread and the sauce on the local pasta.

Tell that story in Italy and everyone knows the punch line without even hearing it. The distinctive foods of each village confer a sense of identity to its citizens, who would never confuse them with something from another town. Like Elena Kostioukovitch, I have often eaten specialties made in a single town and remember the two together. I've had a salame made of sun-dried white figs,
sapa
, grape juices reduced to a syrup, and Mistrà, an anise-flavored liqueur, in a small town in Le Marche; sampled a tangy spread based on very aged Parmigiano-Reggiano and a mystery ingredient in a village in Emilia Romagna notable also for the bakery that makes twenty-eight kinds of bread just to go with savory salamis of the region; and snacked on the creamy zucchini tart called
scarpaccia
that is made in the Tuscan coastal town of Camaiore. Go to Viareggio, a few kilometers away, and
scarpaccia
unaccountably becomes a
dolce
sweetened with sugar.

When I first read this book, I was electrified. Finally someone had put together food and Italy and all the pieces that make the conversation whole. Ms. Kostioukovitch doesn't just look at regional or local specialties, or connect the food and practices of ancient Rome with today, or know the history of all the conquerors who have left their culinary imprint. Other books have done that. She looks at Italy's people and history, its institutions and attitudes about food and life, and the curious ways in which those attitudes are expressed.

What may be my favorite parts of the book are the interstitial chapters that deal with subjects as diverse as pilgrims, the liturgical and popular calendar, democracy, slow food, Jews, primary materials, eros, and restaurants. In one of my favorites, an illuminating collection of cooking instructions, Ms. Kostioukovitch quite rightly observes that women learned to cook not from books (most people own perhaps one, or a notebook from a bygone relative written in a spidery hand) but from mothers, grandmothers, and aunts. She intuits that outsiders might need some help knowing how to proceed once the ingredients are enumerated. Her list is illuminating, illustrative of the inventiveness of Italian cooks, and, incidentally, very useful. It includes: “Wall up a bass in a sarcophagus of salt; cut soft cheese with a wire; drown fish in a small amount of strongly flavored liquid; and put mineral water in a meatball mixture to make them softer.”

As I read those essays, I felt I was reading about the Italy I know, the culinarily rich and fascinating country that sees food as a primary part of the enjoyment of daily life. They celebrate the tastes of home and express the author's fascination with their differences. They explain the generosity of Italians, for whom cooking is really an act of love.

In the face of change, Ms. Kostioukovitch sought out old practices. She found bakers in the south of Italy who still form breads shaped like body parts to be blessed and, hopefully, healed. Like her, I went to community celebrations of San Giuseppe in Sicily, held in the middle of Lent, in which symbolic altars were filled with magnificent symbolic breads and massive amounts of ritual food cooked by local families were served to an entire neighborhood. In the midst of this plenty, I found myself in one house with a small, cavelike kitchen in the basement with a single bare lightbulb where women were making exquisite
cassateddi
, ambrosial sweet ricotta-filled turnovers.

In this book you'll find the descriptions of religious feasts and their ritual dishes and
sagre
, country fairs exalting local food specialties. Both are celebrations tied to the calendar that take place in the communally shared moments of time out of time. They bring people together in a kind of actual or symbolic communion to eat food cooked in cauldrons as high as a man's shoulder, stirred with oarlike paddles and then dished out in vast quantities to feed a whole community.

In Elena Kostioukovitch's memorable descriptions, there are two final unforgettable rituals connecting food and culture. The first is at the festa of
L'Unità
, the Communist newspaper, where I remembered being surprised at how many people were eating beautiful steaks. From her I learned that a schism occurred in the Communist party in the 1990s: Massimo D'Alema, a Roman politician, disparaged the tortellini of Emilia Romagna, the homeland of the Left, where they were a symbol of democracy and revolutionary struggle. Further polemics followed, all using the tortellino as a symbol. D'Alema's government lasted less than a year and a half, and all the politicians who followed learned to praise the tortellino if they wanted to stay in office.

And finally: Cassata, the archetypal dessert of Palermo, carries the entire history of Sicily within its chocolate and sponge layers with ricotta and whipped vanilla mousse, decorated by candied fruit soaked in sugar syrup for exactly forty days. First made in monasteries centuries ago, it is the denouement of a Sicilian meal, and for the Mafia the dessert par excellence when served to a group of friends gathered around the unsuspecting victim who is choked with a noose as he swallows his last bite.