Why Italians Love to Talk About Food (37 page)

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.
¹
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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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 (1905–57), 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.”
¹

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.