Why Italians Love to Talk About Food (6 page)

As it turns out, in all probability he was the one this declaration prevented from leading the nation. The government of D'Alema lasted less time than expected (from October 27, 1998, to December 18, 1999), and one of the causes of its downfall was the lack of support on the part of the Emilian hard core, made up of former partisans and their supporters: voters from the central “tortellini” regions, who did not have much liking for D'Alema to begin with and who, after hearing speeches like this, definitively turned their backs on him. It would have been difficult to wound these voters more painfully. And in fact the former Communist mayor of Bologna, Guido Fanti, hurled a fierce reply back to D'Alema: “If we hadn't cooked our tortellini, you wouldn't be there.”
³

Indro Montanelli, immediately grasping the gaffe of the leader of the Left, indicated in an article that, by raising his hand against Emilian tortellini, D'Alema had attacked something sacred.
⁴
But the DS leader stubbornly did not give up: “There is a difference between a tortellino of government and a tortellino of the struggle.”
⁵

The Left was defeated a few months after these sacrilegious statements about Emilian tortellini, and Bologna, a red stronghold for forty years, was also swept up in the fall. The new anti-Communist mayor of Bologna (the first of the postwar period), Giorgio Guazzaloca, a butcher, sausage maker, and veal cutlet pounder, was advised by judicious individuals to publicly proclaim his devotion to tortellini.
⁶

Tortellini forever, as long as Italy reigns! When at the end of 2000 the anti-globalists organized pickets in front of McDonald's (see “The Later Gifts from America”) to coincide with the conference of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Bologna, tortellini were distributed gratis in front of the American fast-food outlets.
⁷
It was an expression of class struggle, of revolutionary ardor, of popular pride. The trumpet of battle sounded and the “tortellino of the struggle,” rejected by D'Alema, resumed its rightful place.

Like the many cultural activities that inevitably conclude with refreshments, local
sagre
in honor of a city's patron saints, like Communist rallies, project a clear symbol of social reconciliation. Psychologists, sociologists, philosophers, and writers (such as Elias Canetti) describe how these events dissolve and extinguish conflict, creating a mollified public. The common celebration of religious rites and, on a secondary level, the convivial banquet can have this effect on the population. The crowd rejoices, forming an immense Rabelaisian collective body. It reconciles, eating an enormous communal meal: a roasted wild boar, a colossal fried fish, a gigantic frittata, a gargantuan polenta, a cyclopean mountain of pasta. In many cases the
sagra
represents a collective religious celebration (in honor of the local saint), in others the common exaltation of political ideas (the feasts of
L'Unità
, the anti-globalist tortellini), but in all cases it culminates in the consumption of a ton of good food. As a result,
sagre
are a very strong ennobling and reconciling force.

What's more,
sagre
and political picnics disseminate culinary culture. Thousands of people sample rare dishes, like donkey meat or frogs, only on the occasion of these feasts. In 1991, seventy tons of frog's legs were eaten at the festival of the Communist Party of Bologna.
⁸

Just as Friulians celebrate the ritual of the
tajut
toward four or five in the afternoon (that is, they sit sipping wine, in the company of friends, in some bar or at a small sidewalk table), Venetians practice the particular habit
l'andar per ombre
, or “moving into the shade,” starting at eleven in the morning. This “moving” means slowly ambling from one bar to another, drinking a small glass of chilled Prosecco at each. Legend has it that the expression originated with itinerant wine vendors who moved untiringly with their stands in search of shelter from the blistering sun, following the cool shadow cast over the piazza by the bell tower of San Marco.

Indolence, elegance, and gloom: these legendary traits of Venetian life, celebrated in British, American, and Russian poetry, are reflected in the city's characteristic cuisine. It was here that the hideous
risotto al nero di sepia
, black risotto with cuttlefish ink, was invented, drowned in the very ink with which the cuttlefish, like squid,
¹
tried to intimidate the fishermen who threatened their freedom. When the central bones of the cuttlefish are extracted during cleaning, care must be taken not to damage the ink sacs, which are set aside. The mollusks are then cut into strips, which are marinated in the usual mixture of garlic, olive oil, lemon, and white wine, while the risotto is prepared by pouring the inklike fluid from the sacs into it.

The Venetians often cook dried cod, which in this city is called
baccalà
. They call
it that as a matter of principle, out of love for its melodious sound, consciously committing a terminological error. In all of Italy, apart from Venice, salted soaked cod (properly called
baccalà
) is distinguished from salted dried cod, called
stoccafisso
(stock-fish). Consequently, the dried cod preferred by Venetian cuisine should be called
stoccafisso
. But the Venetians are obstinate: if they've decided on
baccalà
,
baccalà
it is.

By Andrei Bourtsev

The name for dried cod is one of those apparently trifling questions that is linked by an invisible thread to the Italian consciousness, linguistic and ethnographic-culinary. It was first in language, and later in cuisine, that the complicated process of constructing a national identity was determined at the time of the unification of Italy. One of the principal architects of this important effort was Pellegrino Artusi (1820–1911), a banker, amateur man of letters, and lover of fine food. Born in Forlimpopoli,
Romagna, but an ardent champion of Italian unity, in 1891 he assembled a book of 790 recipes from the most diverse regions of the northern part of the country. At a time when the dialect of Tuscany had been affirmed as the literary language of the recently unified nation, the
romagnolo
Artusi wrote his collection in authentic Tuscan. Indeed, he had moved to Tuscany in 1851 in order to learn the language better, just as the Lombard Alessandro Manzoni had done in 1827, setting out for Florence to spend some time there to “rinse his clothes in the Arno” before publishing the revised edition of
I promessi sposi
(1840). The unitary language of the country was evolving; consequently, a survey of the common national cuisine was called for. Piero Camporesi writes in the introduction to Pellegrino Artusi's collection:

 

Science in the Kitchen
, besides being that delicious recipe book that everyone knows, at least by name—a fixed reference point for the Italian culinary tradition, the perfect handbook for a flavorful and, at the same time, balanced, diet—also performed, in a discreet, covert, intangible way, the exceedingly civil task of joining and fusing—first in the kitchen and then at the level of the collective unconscious, in the unplumbed recesses of popular consciousness—that heterogenous, motley group of people that only formally declared themselves Italians.
*
²

 

Thus, in his scholarly disquisition on dried cod, the great Artusi insists on the distinction between
baccalà
(soaked cod) and
stoccafisso
(dried fish): “The genus
Gadus morrhua
is the cod from the Arctic and Antarctic regions which, depending upon how it is prepared, is called either ‘baccalà' (salt cod) or ‘stoccafisso' (stockfish).” Among the
baccalari
, the erudite Artusi indicates two varieties of cod, Gaspé and Labrador: “The former comes from the Gaspé Peninsula, that is, the Banks of Newfoundland,” namely from America.
³
Naturally this species of cod was unknown in Europe before the discovery of the New World, whereas the Labrador variety is exported by Europe, from Iceland, where it is found in the Labrador Sea. The taste of this fish is more familiar to Italians. It was this specific product that authors of ancient recipe books were alluding to when they wrote of ways to cook
baccalà
. And it is this cod, caught along the coasts of Labrador, that the specialized, periodic publications of the Ligurian Accademia dello Stoccafisso e del Baccalà (Academy of Stockfish and Baccalà) refer to.
⁴

Whatever it's called, cod is in any case imported to Venice already sun-dried. It
then undergoes complex processing. Before being cooked, it must be properly pounded (“
El bacalà xe come la dona, più la se bastona più la diventa bona
”—
baccalà
is like a woman, the more you beat her, the better she gets), and then soaked in water for two or three days, during which the entire surrounding area becomes saturated by a powerful odor. According to laws in medieval cities, you were not allowed to change the water of the soaking cod and throw it out more than once a day, since otherwise an uninterrupted deluge and stench would come from all the houses. City authorities in the Middle Ages allowed this water to be thrown into the drainage canal only at nighttime, in order to avoid traumatic consequences to the sense of smell and psyche of the more sensitive passersby.

 

Venice is quite different from the rest of the Veneto. In the lagoon city the eye is enchanted by the flaking walls of houses dating from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, by the aristocratic air of decadence, by princely salons whose Palladian floors are warped by time. In the Veneto, on the other hand, neat, tidy towns are set amid green hills, and the green of the countryside is dotted by the white of regal neoclassical villas, built by Palladio in the sixteenth century. It's an idyllic landscape that Goethe exalted: