Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well (9 page)

Escoffier was a professional cook who, in 1859, as a mere thirteen-year-old boy, began to apprentice in his uncle’s Restaurant Français, in Nice on the French Riviera. From such humble beginnings, he moved on to supervise the kitchens of the most famous eating establishments of his time, ranging from the Petit Moulin Rouge restaurant in Paris to the Grand Hotel in Monte Carlo, the Savoy and the Carlton in London, and, of course, the Ritz in Paris. He blossomed into a larger-than-life personality – “le roi des cuisiniers … le cuisinier des rois,” as he was called. He was a celebrity who often overshadowed the celebrities he served and after whom he occasionally named his dishes: Kaiser Wilhelm II, Marcel Proust, Frederic VIII of Denmark, Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria, actress Sarah Bernhardt, singers Adelina Patti and Nellie Melba,
¹¹⁸
and dozens of Sagans, Vanderbilts, and Radziwills -in a word, anybody who, before, during, and after la Belle Epoque, was a bona fide regular of the
beau monde
or resembled one.

As Chef Gualtiero Marchesi, one of the earliest and most gifted exponents of
nouvelle cuisine
, has recently remarked: “Artusi’s recipes should be read in the context of the era in which they were written and the audience to whom they were addressed. “We are at the end of the ninteenth century, when there was no codified Italian cuisine. We are not in France, where at the end of the 1920s August Escoffier published his
Guide culinaire
, which delved not only into the ambit of French cuisine but international cuisine as well. In his rigorous exposition, he leaves nothing to chance. Artusi, instead
00gives complete freedom to the cook in his recipe book, and by doing so he foresaw the current tendency of the present era which runs against the orthodoxy of classic cuisine
.”’
¹¹⁹

But that’s just it: Is the time not yet ripe to hail freedom and even individual whims as signs of a much needed and long-awaited culinary emancipation? In other words, does this newly conceived latitude, of which many “Artusian” recipes are a testimony, not encourage the very assumption and display of responsibilities that strict obedience to blueprints (no matter how perfect) would in fact discourage? In the recipe for
pasticcio di maccheroni
(meat and macaroni pie; recipe 349) the ultimate implications of Artusi’s softer, less obsessive, and, in this case, mirthful approach cannot go underestimated: playing on the the word
pasticcio
, which of course means
pie
, but also,
pastiche, hotchpotch, jumble, mess
, and so on, he concludes his invitation to “modify the recipe as you please” with the remark that “a pasticcio always comes out well no matter how it is prepared.”
¹²⁰

Progress does not stand in the way: quite the contrary. The more precisely cooks can control their equipment, the freer they will be to improvise, to add personal touches, and to rely on established and codified experience merely as an inspiring point of departure. When basic procedures can be repeated with a minimal margin of error, even culinary “transgressions” are welcomed as the sign of a need to explore the realm of the possible, that kingdom of temerity and risk, situated just opposite the land of the plausible. In this inspirational territory ideologies and manifestos do not qualify as devices to shore
up knowledge: observance of premises are profoundly shaken by an alternative and deliriously provocative logic. The implication in
Scienza in cucina
is that, while a rather mediocre kind of pleasure can be derived by confining oneself to the laws of calculability, real fulfillment implies a ravaging of the certainties that have enabled the process in the first place. Sapience and savoring are once again connected in Artusi’s book.

Much has been written about a title that would seem to imply that the cognitive advantages of
scienza
belong with the making of food, while those of
arte
refer to its appreciation and consumption. In reality their coming together is a marriage of convenience. While Artusi may not have the confident air of superiority of a true man of science or the divine inspiration of the artistic genius, he shares with the first the dominant ideology that reason and science can provide certain and lasting answers to any problem, physical or metaphysical, and with the second the reliance on techniques and the training of the imagination.

Citizen of a century filled with books singing the praises of “physiology” (dozens by Mantegazza alone), dating back to Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s trail-blazing
Physiologie du goût
(1825), Artusi was in no position to ignore the temptation to secure his culinary edifice on a clearly marked positivist foundation. The debt
Scienza in cucina
owes to this philosophical school, however, does not extend much beyond lip service, except perhaps in the area of social problems, where a modicum of rationality has never done any harm anyway.

The Artusian notion of
art
, on the other hand, while not antagonistic to that of
science
, is akin to that of
technè
– of ability, or skill obtained (and surpassed) by observing masters at work. It conjures up the atmosphere of a Renaissance
bottega
¹²¹
or any other ergonomic environment in which the original semantics of
Ars
have not been altered or betrayed. They can be encapsulated as follows: “any productive activity of man (as opposed to nature), disciplined by a group of specific, technical knowledge (by means of norms and rules) and founded as much on experience as on ability and the personal geniality of the person who is executing it.”
¹²²

While seemingly swarming with “mothers, sisters and servant girls”
¹²³
whose “culinary wisdom” the author neither shuns nor ridicules, Artusi’s kitchen is in fact the ideal training ground of those sorcerer’s apprentices who, having studied statistics, prefer to be guided by the empirical wisdom of their palates, and by the notion that while taste is doubtless one of the senses nature bestows upon all her children, a taste for food is a “knowledge” one develops through a strategy of instinctual perceptions. It is safe to assume that, in Artusi’s title,
science
and
art
are to be entered as chiastic members of same basic linguistic register. In our times,
Art in the Kitchen and the Science of Eating Well
would be equally satisfactory; in nineteenth-century rhetoric, this would not have been the case.

Beyond these semasiological explorations, two major achievements have remained unchallenged from Artusi’s times to our own: the reaffirmation of a direct link between health and a sensible diet
¹²⁴
and the definitive defeat of those “medically proven theories” that assigned different digestive and assimilative powers to stomachs belonging to people of different social origin. Clearly these theories did not hold taste to be a matter of culture, and anchored metabolism to a set on non-physiological observations. While gentlemen and ladies
¹²⁵
would be harmed by the ingestion of popular and rustic food, feeding “delicate food” to bean-eating peasants would result in sickness and death.
¹²⁶
Variously manipulated, this rather convenient assumption became a powerful political tool in the hands of the privileged classes and an occasion for self-defeating vainglorious declarations on the part of their subjects.
¹²⁷

Now that gastronomic democracy seems to be solidly entrenched in certain regions of the West (not necessarily those that glitter most: just look at the millions of Americans who poison themselves daily with fast-food products and turn their bodies into walking garbage bins), poor parents may renounce their cruel tease of promising to reward the good behavior of their ice cream-craving children by showing them other more fortunate children
actually
eating ice cream in the main piazza of an Italian or French city. The repercussions of
this type of “grey” humor may still be traced in the darker psychic recesses and ostensible lifestyle of many a Rolex-flaunting adult.

A caveat to conclude: The Artusian predilection for excessive quantities of butter and lard is a myth. As is the idea that the recipes liberally deploy spices: neither Tuscan nor Romagnan cuisine is particularly spicy; and Artusi recommends using modest amounts of salt and pepper. Exaggeration, even if judged by our standards, is not really Artusi’s game. Indeed, a revealing
excusatio
concludes the brief preface to the book: “I should not like my interest in gastronomy to give me the reputation of a gourmand or glutton. I object to any such dishonorable imputation, for I am neither. I love the good and the beautiful wherever I find them, and hate to see anyone squander, as they say, God’s bounty. Amen.”
¹²⁸

In their
Artusi 2000
,
¹²⁹
Giuseppe Sangiorgi and Annamaria Tosi have rearranged 775 Artusian recipes in order to construct a rational model of food consumption, on a day-to-day basis. They show beyond any doubt that consulting
Scienza in cucina
does not automatically mean preparing for a royal banquet. On the other hand, Claudio Moras, president of the Associazione Cuochi Romagnoli (the Romagna Chefs’ Association) and editor of
L’Artusi cent’anni dopo, 1891 — 1991
¹³⁰
argues, with good reason, that the classification of
pagnottelle ripiene
(stuffed rolls; recipe 239) under the heading “entremets” – that is, minor dishes to be served between main courses – may contradict eating habits on any rung of the social ladder. The caloric content of the stuffing itself, which consists in Artusi’s words, “of chickpea-size chunks … [of] chicken livers, white chicken meat, sweetbreads and the like … cooked in brown stock and bound with a pinch of flour … [and], to make the mixture tastier, … truffles,”
¹³¹
is enough to discourage the modern chef from treating
pagnottelle
as a dependent clause in an already rich edible sentence. But, if that is the case, why not trim it and treat it as a main course?

To balance these two assessments, we may wish to turn to the endorsement of Artusi’s recommendations that Emanuela Djalma Vitali proffers in her review of the celebrated Einaudi 2001 edition of
Scienza in cucina
, whose author she notes, “prematurely died at the age of 91” due to an overdose of good food. “There is no great cuisine (or health) wherever there is room for margarine, seed, palm, or coconut oil, processed fats and ‘light’ cheeses, or other disgusting abominations. This is sensorial squalor … It occurs when butter (a great deity among foods), lard, rendered pig cheek, and rendered lard (why not?) are ostracized. You cannot live to be almost one hundred if you allow yourself to be ground up by nutritional whims, by fears of lipids and cholesterol. These are diseases of the soul.”
¹³²

Whatever you yourself choose to do, I sincerely hope you will not pronounce the same malevolent (but largely justified) verdict that Artusi reached with regard to his competitors: “Beware of books that deal with this art: most of them are inaccurate or incomprehensible, especially the Italian ones. The French are a little better. But from either, the very most you will glean are a few notions, useful only if you already know the art”.
¹³³

Of course, much more can be said about the “gastronomic father of us all” and his epochal book, and we would gladly oblige anyone kind (or hungry) enough to advance a request for further information, had we not been taught by schoolteachers and parents, at a time and in a country where many children did not have enough to eat, to chew each morsel thirty-three times, regardless of its consistency, and to leave the dinner table with a little bit of appetite.

1
The number of recipes had also grown prodigiously: from 475 to 790. The second edition (1895) brought the number to 575, the third (1899) added 19 new recipes, the fifth (1900) 35, the sixth (1902) 25, the eighth (1905) 15, the tenth (1906) 15, the eleventh (1907) 8, the twelfth (1908) 88, the thirteenth (1909) 10. Artusi’s death, which occurred on 30 March 1910, ensured that this figure would not increase further.

2
This section was added to the sixth edition and reprinted in all subsequent editions.

3
”Story (of the Success) of a Book” appears in
La cucina bricconcella
(Cooking is a troublesome sprite), a precious collection of essays edited by Andrea Pollarini and published in 1991 by the Region Emilia Romagna (Grafis Edizioni) to celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of
Scienza in cucina
.

4
Landi and/or his heirs reissued
Scienza in cucina
thirty-one times, until 1928.

5
Or, rather, international distribution: in 1901, an unidentified American customer placed an order for 100 copies. In the beginning books were sold directly by the author. As late as 1932 they were sold by R. Bemporad e Figlio as well as by the estate of Pellegrino Artusi.

6
See p. 5.

7
Bemporad began its own printing in 1924, creating a four-year overlap with Landi.

8
Displaying on the front cover the number of copies sold in the hope of enhancing sales was a widespread practice, not merely a promotional device introduced by Bemporad. In fact, the same kind of information was avialable on the front cover of the editions issued by Landi. It would also seem to bear the “imprint” of the author’s churlish style.

9
Not too many Italians (literati or otherwise) can claim to have achieved a similar station in their lifetime or after. The few exceptions include Machiavelli, whose name stands, quite mistakenly, for political cunning and even treachery; and Casanova, of course, whose name now has a mildly obscene connotation. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from the Italian are mine.