Why Italians Love to Talk About Food (53 page)

This creates a blend of difficulty and satisfaction that is almost amorous, almost passionate. The struggle to do one's best in public is neither an art nor a diversion for Italians; it is a proof of civility, a demonstration of national and geographic belonging. At the restaurant, tables are so close to one another that they couldn't be any closer, so the display of virtuosity is offered not only to one's own table companions, but also to those at neighboring tables.

Even when the food description is not directly related to the idea of eros, the most effective stories about the delights of dining elevate the feeling to such a temperature, to such an intensity, that the pleasure can no longer be expressed in words (“Oh, hush, my dear, you'll make me swoon . . .”), but can only pour forth in music or song. The progression from such passion to eroticism is just one short step, as Andrea Camilleri writes in
The Snack Thief
:

 

He was early for his appointment with Valente. He stopped in front of the restaurant where he'd gone the last time he was in Mazara. He gobbled up a sauté of clams in bread-crumbs, a heaping dish of spaghetti with white clam sauce, a roast turbot with oregano and caramelized lemon, and he topped it all off with a bitter chocolate timbale in orange sauce. When it was all over he stood up, went into the kitchen, and shook the chef's hand without saying a word, deeply moved. In the car, on his way to Valente's office, he sang at the top of his lungs.
⁷

 

Eros, and how! To a lover of good food a successful dish is a pleasure superior to erotic bliss, a sublime joy that makes him forget problems at the office, as well as any personal
troubles. A joy that elevates existence to a height beyond which there is nothing more to be desired and the cheerful acceptance of the hour of death appears to be the only dignified way out of the ne plus ultra. Turning again to Camilleri's
The Snack Thief
, we find many descriptions of this kind:

 

Actually, he knew exactly where he would go . . . When he arrived at the trattoria in Mazara, they greeted him like the prodigal son.

“The other day, I believe I understood that you rent rooms.”

“Yes, we've got five upstairs. But it's the off-season now, so only one of 'em's rented.”

They showed him a room, spacious and bright and looking straight onto the sea.

He lay down on the bed, brain emptied of thoughts, chest swelling with a kind of happy melancholy. He was loosing the moorings, ready to sail out to the country of sleep, when he heard a knock on the door.

“Come in, it's unlocked.”

The cook appeared in the doorway. He was a big man of considerable heft, about forty, with dark eyes and skin.

“What are you doing? Aren't you coming down? I heard you were here and so I made something for you that . . .”

What the cook had made, Montalbano couldn't hear, because a sweet, soft melody, a heavenly tune, had started playing in his ears . . .

The pasta with crab was as graceful as a first-rate ballerina, but the stuffed bass in saffron sauce left him breathless, almost frightened.

. . . “If one ate something like this at death's door, he'd be happy even to go to Hell,” he said softly.
⁸

 

When table companions in a public place want to avoid erotic suggestions, the best choice is risotto. And risotto is precisely what many residents of Milan order frequently in restaurants. (To be clear: residents who are not necessarily natives of Milan. The natives, in fact, often prove to have primitive carnivorous instincts and express them by sucking the marrow in osso buco.) But a particular category of Milan's residents, or of Milan's weekday residents, is composed for the most part of people from the towns and villages of the north: people who are reserved, restrained, obsessed with convention, who come to the city at an already mindful age to look for a prestigious job and top wages, and try to suffocate their deep sensuality, burying it in the subconscious and excluding it from their outward, visible behavior. (From the depths of the subconscious, of course, it screams out even louder . . . but we digress.) These people—the people sporting jackets and ties and
careers—frequently order rice in restaurants, or risotto, the characteristic Milanese dish. Planted by the Spanish in regions that later came under Hapsburg rule, rice has remained the traditional dish here and is psychologically associated with spartan severity, organization, and industriousness. With its petite grains, it is perceived on an aesthetic level as something refined, elegant.

Risotto is a traditional element of the formal business lunch and is the dish most frequently eaten around strangers. It is the opposite of pizza. Pizza is the food of friendship, of familiarity. People who already know each other and are connected by mutual fondness eat pizza together. If you don't know each other very well, it is difficult to avoid a sense of awkwardness, since everyone eats pizza sloppily—some with their hands, sticking their tongues out to catch strands of mozzarella. Spaghetti, too, involves scenarios of sucking and slurping that border on the amorous. It can even be seen in Walt Disney cartoons: in
Lady and the Tramp
, Lady and Tramp dine in an Italian restaurant before their wedding, sucking up the same strand of spaghetti from opposite ends. It's the ideal romantic dinner: spaghetti and meatballs! While risotto, from an erotic point of view, is sterile.

Basilicata is a solitary, silent place, a mountainous region, once covered with forests and populated by shepherds, that received its name during the time of the Byzantine rule. The name is derived in fact from the Greek
basilikos
, the term used to identify the region's Byzantine rulers. But in the Roman era the historical name of the region was Lucania, from the Latin
lucus
, woods. Wooded areas, then, were at one time common in this territory, before indiscriminate deforestation opened the way for rivers, which each spring descend from the mountains, eroding and scoring the landscape with gullies. This same disaster—the disappearance of trees due to uncontrolled, senseless exploitation of forests—has also destroyed neighboring Calabria.

Landslides multiplied, while roads, until recently, were virtually nonexistent. These places are so out of the way that they have always been an ideal hideout. Criminals and fugitives as well as honest men hid in Basilicata. In the seventh century, Christian monks came here from the Middle East and Africa to escape the Arabs and Persians. Religious dissidents, the iconophiles, fled from Constantinople, under the iconoclast emperor Leo III the Isaurian (in power from 717 to 741). Christians from nearby Sicily fled when the island found itself dominated by the Arabs. In Matera, all the land is riddled with caves where the Christians once hid from their persecutors and built underground churches. Today the region houses an archaeological wonder, protected by UNESCO: 137 churches with frescoes painted between the eighth and thirteenth centuries.

By Alexey Pivovarov

It is a land of veritable poverty. It was in these very places that Carlo Levi, sent into confinement during Fascism, wrote
Cristo si è fermato a Eboli
(
Christ Stopped at Eboli
), a dark tale of poverty, superstition, and disease. From Levi's book it appears that the majority of Lucanian farmers survived, from autumn to spring, by eating nothing but bread that was made in November and kept in the pantry: hard, heavy round loaves, very different from today's fresh, crunchy Italian bread, bought in the morning at the local bakery. Rarely did the inhabitants of Basilicata eat lamb (only if someone in the family fell ill, or if the village celebrated a wedding, the birth of a child, or the feast of the patron saint) or mutton (one in twenty, at Christmastime).

There are few tourists in Basilicata. They have not yet discovered the region. All in all, one does not come across many recipes from this region, even in cookbooks. Yet
Cicero, Martial, and Horace once praised the spicy sausage from the area, back when it was called Lucania. The Roman epicure Apicius, in particular, was enthusiastic about the choice Lucanian sausages and gives us the ancient recipe: “Fill the casing with well-pounded pork, and add ground pepper, cumin, savory, rue, parsley, bay leaves, and lard, then hang it close to the fire.” Every family raised pigs, the poor man's livestock. Even today there is at least one pig on every farm. From that meat come the excellent Lucanian sausages
pezzenta
and
cotechinata
, the same that were celebrated by seventeenth-century poets such as Giovan Battista Lalli in his
Franceide
(1629):

 

The people of Basilicata sent
the fattest animals of the grubby herd,
that large and small, when added up,
numbered one thousand five hundred,
in addition to plentiful cured meat
aged a long time and slowly smoked.
¹

 

In Basilicata pepper and spicy peppers reign: hot pepper, or
peperoncino
(in turn divided into two varieties: the small
diavolicchi
, little devils, and the long “cigarettes”), red pepper, Indian pepper, paprika, chilies, and Tabasco. Almost all these crops were introduced into Italy from the New World, and today the cuisine of Basilicata would be unimaginable without them. It is no wonder that dishes created here include
penne all'arrabbiata
(with tomato, pancetta, onion, garlic, hot red pepper, and pecorino cheese), Potentina-style pepper chicken, peppered potatoes, and the not-very-nutritious vegetable soup with soft bread ironically called
pancotto
(cooked bread) and
acquasale
(saltwater).

 

One of the typical products of Basilicata is honey. Bees create honey from lavender in Liguria, from acacia flowers in Lombardy, and from rhododendron and heather in Calabria. Prevalent in Basilicata instead is the famous
millefiori
honey, which the bees distill from a thousand plants and flowers: citrus, chestnut, eucalyptus, sunflower, and thyme.