Why Italians Love to Talk About Food (37 page)
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Authors: Elena Kostioukovitch
Included among the region's typical dishes are many extremely laborious, complex delicacies: stuffed mutton head, stuffed pork rinds, cooked on the grill and then stewed, and
ciarimboli
(entrails seasoned with garlic, salt, pepper, and rosemary, dried by indirect heat from the fire, then cooked on the grill). There is a bizarre dish, Urbino-style snails (young ones) with chicken gizzards, whose invention is attributed to Beatrice d'Este, who lived in the fifteenth century and was the wife of the Duke of Milan, Ludovico il Moro. Beatrice acted as patroness to Bramante and Leonardo da Vinci, and encouraged Leonardo to design unique kitchen devices such as a mechanical roasting spit and a range hood to eliminate smoke from the fireplace.
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As if this were not enough, if we are to believe the legend, Beatrice created many interesting culinary combinations, for example, morels and glazed carrots, hearts of artichoke and spring turnips.
One senses instinctively that the arts of cooking and music share similar creative mechanisms: in both arts, success depends on interpretation. Especially prized is the ingenious reinvention of what is prescribed, a judicious deviation from the norm. As a result, there are many books, many anecdotes real or invented, about the association of music and cooking. It is said that the most glorious son of the Marches, Gioacchino Rossini, was a legendary gourmand who wept only three times in his life: when they booed his first opera, when he heard Paganini play, and when, on a boat, he dropped a turkey with truffles into the lake. It is also said of Rossini that he brought several recipes to a cardinal so that he might bless them. After the premiere of
The Barber of Seville
(1816), he wrote a letter to the soprano Isabella Colbran, telling her not about the famous fiasco of the performance, but about a sauce for truffles. Evidently she was not stupefied; on the contrary, she was so enchanted that she married him.
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Other than idling about, I do not know of a more delicious occupation for me than eating, eating as one should, mind you. Appetite is to the stomach what love is to the heart. The stomach is the orchestra conductor who governs and drives the great orchestra of our passions. An empty stomach is a bassoon or small flute, in which discontent rumbles or envy whines; by contrast, a full stomach is a triangle of pleasure or cymbals of joy.
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The jovial Rossini, author of these lines, is also the author of interesting recipes. In 1842, on the occasion of the Bologna premiere of
Moses in Egypt
, he invented “pheasant in a pyramid of salt,” stuffed with herbs (bay, juniper, rosemary, thyme) and wrapped in gauze rubbed with garlic. The resulting mummy, covered with coarse salt in the form of a pyramid, was baked in salt (as is often done with gilthead and monk-fish) and served on a mountain of couscous, symbolizing golden desert sands.
The Marches is a region where cooking is studied seriously. At Porto Recanati, in the province of Macerata, the Accademia del Brodetto (Fish Soup Academy) flourishes. Poets and musicians of the Marches reach the heights of romantic absurdity in their flights of gastronomic fancy. Tonino Guerra, poet, writer, and friend of Fellini, lives in the Marches, in the
borgo
of Pennabilli; I have been his guest and can attest to his efforts to save several species of vine, planted near Andrey Tarkovsky's gravestone; together we visited his creation, “the garden of forgotten fruits,” where he grows medlars, jujubes, and
biricoccoli
(natural hybrids of an apricot and a plum).
In Mondolfo (Pesaro), the most opulent
sagra
of gluttony is held right in the middle of Lent: the Spaghettata della Quaresima (Lenten Spaghetti Feast). Legend has it that the village-born musician Amedeo Tarini, locked in a fierce battle with the parish priest, managed to have the feast celebrated regularly by promising that the condiment for the many quintals of spaghetti would be made of anchovies, tuna, and olive oil, in full accordance with Lenten restrictions.
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TYPICAL DISHES OF THE MARCHES
Antipasti
Olive ascolane
, stuffed with meat (chicken, veal, pork), prosciutto, mortadella, cheese, eggs, and bread, then dipped in egg and breadcrumbs and fried.
First Courses
Vincisgrassi
, lasagna noodles with a sauce of chicken giblets, chicken livers, veal sweetbreads, veal brains, prosciutto, and marrow to taste.
Second Courses
Urbino-style fillet: a pocket is made in the fillet, which is then filled with frittata and prosciutto. Pesaro-style olives: they are not olives at all, but little veal steaks or roulades wrapped around a filling of prosciutto and basil.
Stuffed rabbit. The stuffing is prepared with veal, mortadella, grated cheese, and breadcrumbs mixed with the rabbit's liver and heart, with an accompaniment of salt pork, garlic, nutmeg, cloves, and other spices, all bound together with a beaten egg. This rabbit is cooked on the hearth.
Another typical dish of the Marches are eels cooked in wine. Dante portrays the torments of Pope Martin IV (pontiff from 1281 to 1285), who gorged himself on the eels from Lake Bolsena (a typical product of another region, Lazio), cooked however in Vernaccia, according to a recipe of the Marches:
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. . .
the one beyond him, even more
emaciated than the rest, had clasped
the Holy Church; he was from Tours; his fast
purges Bolsena's eels, Vernaccia's wine.
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Rabbit in
porchetta
. The boned rabbit is stuffed with
prosciutto cotto
, pancetta, and salami, garnished with wild fennel sauce, and cooked in the oven.
Crocette
(sea snails) in
porchetta
. Cuttlefish stuffed with cheese, breadcrumbs,
and egg. Mussels are also stuffed in the same way, but the filling includes
porchetta
with garlic, rosemary, wild fennel, peeled tomatoes, and parsley; arranged in a baking dish, the mussels are sprinkled with the soft center of bread and cooked on the grill or in the oven.
Desserts
Caciuni
, in the form of a crescent, filled with pecorino cheese, egg yolks, breadcrumbs, sugar, and grated lemon rind. Before being baked in the oven, the
caciuni
are scored on top so that a little bit of melted cheese will ooze out of the
raviolo
. Also popular is
bostrengo
, a rice pudding with chocolate and pine nuts.
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TYPICAL PRODUCTS OF THE MARCHES
Fossa (pit) cheese. We have already encountered a similar cheese in Romagna, where it is produced on the banks of the Rubicon, in Sogliano, near Forlì. The processing method for the Fossa cheese of the Marches is identical. As in Romagna, it is placed in a cloth sack, covered with wheat and straw, then closed in a “coffin” and lowered into a “grave” of tufa. Each tomb is unique in terms of its temperature and humidity, and the cheese remains buried there from August 15 (Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin) to the beginning of November. Since the climate here is more southerly than in Romagna, the cheese ripens faster, and the pits are opened earlier: not on St. Catherine's Day (November 25), but at the beginning of the month, on All Saints' Day. Tonino Guerra invented the apt name of “Ambra di Talamello” for pit cheese (Talamello being the village in the Marches where it is produced), since it takes on a golden hue underground. The writer, a refined aesthete known for his advertising testimonials, here played a role similar to that of Gabriele d'Annunzio, the controversial Italian poet, journalist, and novelist, who was asked to invent a name for the large department stores in Milan and Rome known as La Rinascente. Today Ambra di Talamello, now a registered trademark, is considered the official commercial name of Fossa cheese.
Cagiolo cheese, similar to ricotta.
Ciauscolo
, a soft salami that can be spread on bread, whose recipe includes orange rind.
Truffles. A third of the national truffle harvest is sold at the famous truffle fair in Acqualagna each year. These are truffles of secondary quality, inferior to those found in Piedmont, in the area of Alba. Sly brokers often buy truffles in Acqualagna, leave them next to those of Alba for a while to let them soak up their divine aroma, then resell them at a high price.
Prosciutto of Fabriano. Horsemeat from Catria. Apricots of Sassoferrato and Macerata, Angelica pears of Serrungarina. Peaches of the Valle dell'Aso. Pink apples of Amandola.
Cucuccetta
pears of Sant'Emidio. Broccoli (from any province of the Marches). Ascoli artichokes. Early artichokes of Jesi.
Honey (from any province of the Marches).
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TYPICAL BEVERAGE
Anise liqueur.
Products of colonized America were introduced in Europe in the sixteenth century (see “The Early Gifts from the Americas”). Toward the middle of the twentieth century, America again brought its products to Europe. Half of the Old World viewed this as an indispensable, timely aid, the other half as intolerable expansionism. Italy, custodian of ancient alimentary traditions, was particularly offended by this “culinary colonization.” Leo Longanesi (1905â57), a distinguished publisher, journalist, and master of wit, made a droll remark that many adopted as their own: “I will eat American canned meat, but I'll leave the ideologies that go with it on my plate.”
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It should be noted that without this American canned meat, Italians would have been finished. In December 1944, in Rome, people were able to buy two hundred grams of bread and one hundred grams of pasta a day, plus a liter of olive oil per person each month, with food ration cards. According to sociologists' calculations, that means that an average citizen in Italy received only 900 of the 2,500 daily calories required to live. The rest had to be bought on the black market.
This black market is the backdrop and main theme of many popular books and films, among them Roberto Rossellini's
Rome, Open City
, 1945; Eduardo and Peppino De Filippo's
Naples Millionaire
(aka
Side Street Story
), 1945; and Curzio Malaparte's
The Skin
, 1949. From these books and films, we're able to know what took place during the months of the war in the markets of Rome and Naples. What happened in aristocratic circles is recounted, only in part, in Malaparte's novel.
