Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well (5 page)

Stunned by the preposterous quality of the display, we might not even stop to ask what kind of subliminal connection could possibly justify the linkage of such distant realities. Indeed, Artusi’s blasé attitude results in some extraordinary detours: Focusing on peacocks, whose meat, Artusi assures us, is “excellent for young people,” the opportunity to impress his readers with the marvels of this bird’s history engrosses him to such a degree that he ends up retaining the secret of how to prepare them for a meal.
⁴⁶
Southeast Asia is their
native home, he informs us, and Alexander the Great introduced them to Greece. Struck by their loveliness, the great military leader issued an edict protecting peacocks from the appetites of less sensitive souls. In Rome, things were dramatically different. A rival of Cicero in the Forum, Quintus Ortensius, found them rather delicious and dined on them with no pangs of conscience. In the end the peacock lore in Artusi’s pages may whet our curiosity, but hardly our appetite. These days it may be hard to appreciate the bravery it took to disregard Alexander’s decree, as peacock-meat fanciers are likely to find their favorite fowl (plucked, of course) frustratingly elusive in supermarket poultry departments. Thus we might be better off leaving the stuff such culinary dreams (nightmares?) are made of to the estimable Petronius Arbiter or to Federico Fellini’s visual repagination of his
Satyricon
. Artusi alternately teases and flaunts in
Science in the Kitchen
.

Whatever else they may be, his pages read like a humorous collection of practical, naive, and sometimes blasphemous, remarks. They are a meticulous compilation of culinary rules, means, and advice, tickled and bedazzled by a panoply of anecdotes and commentaries drawn from history and myth as well as mildly encyclopedic samples of zoological and botanical information. If not a perfect admixture, they form a decidedly irresistible cocktail.

Failing all else, significant episodes from the author’s life, or the lives of his friends, are conjured up and elevated to the rank of indispensable digressions. In the early 1840s,
⁴⁷
some seventy years before
Scienza in cucina
reached its apotheosis, the gastronome, as he himself recounts, met with a law student from the University of Bologna, whose name would soon become notorious for reasons unrelated to food history. The meeting, actually no more than a casual encounter, took place at the Trattoria Tre Re (The Three Kings), one of the oldest eating and sleeping establishments in town.
⁴⁸

Felice Orsini, whom Artusi describes as a “congenial young man, of middling height, lean build, pale and round face, refined features, the blackest eyes, crinkly locks, who lisped slightly when he spoke,” attempted to assassinate Emperor Napoleon III in Paris in 1858. To no
one’s surprise, the student was subsequently executed. Artusi acknowledges the tragic nature of the event, but goes on to suggest that the assassination attempt may have played a significant role in the French monarch’s decision to aid the Piedmontese in their war with the Austrians. These and other details can be gleaned from the recipe for
maccheroni col pangrattato
(macaroni with bread crumbs).
⁴⁹

Somewhat longer (though some are longer still)
⁵⁰
and a great deal more political than the average Artusian digression, such a rambling introduction to the preparation of a dish is, as we have indicated, not unusual. It is nontheless astonishing to encounter Artusi’s highly inappropriate adoption of an expression commonly used to return to a primary subject after a digression: “Ritorniamo a bomba” (literally, “And now, let’s go back to the bomb”). Given that Orsini’s was the first known act of terrorism to be carried out by means of an explosive, would it not have been advisable, on the part of Artusi, to avoid that expression altogether?

Although Artusi is sometimes inadvertently outrageous in his choice of metaphors and more than slightly irreverent in his similes and historical anecdotes, his syntax and lexicon seem to conform to the widespread notion that the Florentine dialect was ideally suited to become the national linguistic standard. This opinion, which still holds sway in some remote North American colleges and even among a select group of Florentine loafers, fueled many a heated discussion, especially during the post-unification era. In fact, it had received the endorsement of none other than the Milanese Alessandro Manzoni, who made a point of taking up residence in Florence in order to “Tuscanize” his otherwise “Lombardian” novel. Tuscans were generally pleased, though some snobs among them suggested that Count Manzoni’s newly acquired language was as good as his French,
⁵¹
too good, that is, to be in harmony with the content of a seventeenth-century story having as its background Milan and the lesser branch of Lake Como.

Artusi was not a Florentine either, and had moved to that city for reasons that were not at all linguistically motivated. Yet he followed
Manzoni’s example and became himself
plus royaliste que le roi (parfois)
. Yet in his case, the notion of “rinsing one’s linguistic clothes in the waters of the Arno River” (God forbid!) did not become an onomasiological theorem, as it did with Manzoni. Also, let us not forget that, unlike Manzoni, who spent just enough time in Florence to do the rinsing, Artusi lived there from 1851 till the day of his death sixty years later.

From a normative point of view, the so-called
questione della lingua
(that is, the quest for lexical and stylistic standards of expression), which dates back to the
Rinascimento
, has been, by and large, a sterile or marginal affair. (Not infrequently, in their creative practice, authors contradict or disregard their own most cherished linguistic beliefs.) Rekindled, for obvious political reasons, during the
Risorgimento
, it has resurfaced at almost regular intervals, as the manifestation of a misguided, when not decidedly undesired quest for national identity. As a yardstick to measure what should be used, kept, or dismissed by modern Italian speakers, strict Florentine observance has proven to be a rather ridiculous affair. Artusi himself more than once assumed his readers to be familiar with Florentine terms that were in fact far more obscure to them (and maybe even to the Florentines) than the regional variations he was determined to extirpate.

While there can be no doubt of his appreciation of Bologna and its food, as well as the jovial character and the longevity of its inhabitants – so many are the praises he lavishes on them in
Scienza in cucina
⁵²
– the vernacular and, above all, the gastronomic jargon used in that city is clearly not Artusi’s favorite
modus loquendi
. “What a strange language they speak in the learned Bologna!” he writes:

They call carpets rags; wine flasks gourds; sweetbreads milks. They say “zigàre” for “piangere” (to weep), and they call an unsavory, ugly, annoying woman, who would normally be termed a “calia” or a “scamonea” a “sagoma” (Italian for silhouette and, figuratively speaking, a funny person). In their restaurants you find “trefoils” (instead of truffles), Florentine style “chops” (instead of “steaks”),
and other similar expressions that would drive anybody mad … When I first heard the Bolognese mention a crescent, I though they were talking about the moon. Instead they were discussing the schiacciata or focaccia, the ordinary fried dough cake that everybody recognizes and all know how to make. The only difference is that the Bolognese, to make theirs more tender and digestible, add a little lard when mixing the flour with cool water and salt.
⁵³

To fully appreciate Artusi’s idiosyncratic attitude, one should add that while “sagoma” enjoyed, as it does today for that matter, a wide currency in a number of northern Italian regions (including Artusi’s native Romagna), who has ever heard of “calia” and “scamonea” (yes, they can be looked up in a very good dictionary), apart from Artusi, of course, who wants to be more Florentine than his Florentine interlocutors? As a result, in
Scienza in cucina
, many lexical items remain whose origin, carefully tagged by phrases such as “in the language of,” “as they say in,” and so on, have no significant ties to the “language” of Florence.
⁵⁴

Even on the “Western front”, not all things were quiet. Artusi’s relentless campaign to “purify” gastronomic language of unwarranted francophonic infiltrations looks more like the symptomatic displacement of some discomfort than a legitimate linguistic concern: “How strange is the nomenclature associated with cuisine! Why white mountain,” writes Artusi to introduce the recipe for salted codfish Mont Blanc style (no. “8), “and not yellow mountain, as one would think from the color this dish takes when made? And how could the French, demonstrating their usual boldness when it comes to metaphors, have stretched their name for this dish into
Brandade de morue? Brandade
, they say derives from
brandir
, to move, strike, wave a sword, halberd, lance and similar weapons. In fact, what is being brandished except a paltry wooden mixing spoon?”
⁵⁵

At time his insistence verges on the ludicrous. With a verse of dubious literary merit (”What the French call soufflé / And use as an
entremet
/ By your leave I name ‘sgonfiotto’ / And serve as a
‘tramesso’”),
⁵⁶
he tries to teach his fellow citizens (who, I am afraid, turned a deaf ear) to discontinue the use of the terms
soufflé
and
entremets
. Internationally successful as they had been for so long, these terms were not about to make way for homespun equivalents. Ironically, here too the proof is in the pudding: to this day, in Sicily, a chef is referred to as a
Monsu
, from the French
Monsieur
.
⁵⁷

While Artusi’s were certainly not easy times for the
questione della lingua
, graver problems besieged the incipient nation, chief among them poverty and hunger. For an idea of how serious these problems were, we can look at one of the many food-related episodes to be found in Carlo Collodi’s
Pinocchio
,
⁵⁸
first published in book form in 1883, and thus a mere eight years older than
Scienza in cucina
. In the following episode, the wooden puppet is taught a lesson in, let us say, frugality. Extracting from the jumble of words with which Pinocchio greets him upon returning from jail the very simple truth that Pinocchio is dying of hunger, Geppetto, Pinocchio’s “father,” takes three pears, which he had intended for himself, and offers them to his starving son: “’If you want me to eat them, kindly peel them for me.’ ‘Peel them for you?’ cried Geppetto, astonished. ‘I would never have thought, my lad, that you were so refined and fastidious. That’s too bad! We should get used, from childhood, to eating everything, and liking it; for one never knows what might happen in this curious world.’” Not only will Pinocchio end up eating the parings for which he had shown such disdain, but, being still vexed with a problem that the pulp (and the peels) of three little pears can hardly solve, he will proceed to eat the cores as well. Having gobbled down everything, Pinocchio can finally tap on his stomach and announce cheerfully, “Now I feel better.”
⁵⁹

In another famous episode, that of the meal taken by Cat and Fox at the Inn of the Red Lobster, the idea of poverty filters through the voracious appetites of the eaters: “The poor cat had bad indigestion, and could eat no more than thirty-five mullets with tomato sauce and four helpings of tripe with parmesan cheese; and because she thought the tripe was not well seasoned, she asked three times for extra butter and grated cheese. The fox too would gladly have nibbled at something,
but since the doctor had put him on a strict diet, he had to be content with a hare in sweet and sour sauce, garnished with fat spring chickens and young pullets. After the hare, he ordered a special dish of partridges, rabbits, frogs, lizards and other tidbits, but he would not touch anything more.”
⁶⁰

This comic intermezzo hearkens back to a centuries-old literary topos, referred to as poor man’s paradise, the land of plenty, or the land of Cockaigne, according to a thirteenth-century
fabliau
whose anonymous author swore to have visited it on strict orders from the pope for the highly credible purpose of doing penance. In this land “qui plus i dort, plus i gaigne” and “Cil qui dort jusqu’a miedi, / gaigne cinq sols et demi.”
⁶¹
In the
Decameron
, Bocaccio turned the narrative into a comic masterpiece: Calandrino, whose gullibility knows no bounds, is told of a country called Bengodi where “vines are tied up with sausages and a goose can be had for a farthing, with a gosling thrown into the bargain.” Around these parts there is a mountain made entirely of Parmesan cheese; its inhabitants spend their days preparing ravioli and macaroni, which they cook in capon broth. When these doughy delights are thrown down the slopes, the lucky individual who retrieves “the most of them, the most he eats.” Nearby flows a stream of Vernaccia wine, “the best that ever was drunk.”
⁶²
The gallery of characters seeking free food would not be complete without at least a passing mention of such Commedia dell’Arte masks as Harlequin and Pulcinella, whose stage life is dominated by the grumblings of their empty stomachs and the need to secure food by outwitting masters and innkeepers alike.

These examples bespeak a long-standing preoccupation or fear that had marked peasant life since the Renaissance days of Ruzante,
⁶³
and had by Artusi’s time become the daily experience of the urban working classes as well. It was a tragedy of vast proportions that the very limited strength of incipient workers’ movements seemed incapable of taming. Hunger, poverty, and injustice were everywhere in the streets of Italy, as well as in Italian literature, of the end of the nineteenth century: in Pirandello’s
I vecchi e giovani
,
⁶⁴
a novel of epic
dimensions, significantly poised between Roman political corruption and the brutal military crushing of a miners’ rebellion known as the
Fasci siciliani
(1894); in Giovanni Verga’s
Per le vie
, a collection of short stories focusing on the life of the Milanese working class;
⁶⁵
and in books such as Edmondo De Amicis’s
Cuore
(1886), another work whose popular appeal survived various political transformisms, two world wars, and a depression.
⁶⁶