Thought for Food

In the highly readable and entertaining Delizia, John Dickie explodes the myth of good solid Italian country cuisine: the slow simmered sauce, the rustic bread sopping up extra extra virgin oil etc etc etc. All the clichés of Italian peasant cooking are paraded out and deflated.

And he also destroys the myth of the Italian momma slaving over a hot stove 24/7 - though he admits it still happens, more and more Italians turn to ready made or quick to prepare pre-packaged foods. Gone are the days when the lady of the household would spend an hour laboriously stirring stock into the rice spoonful by spoonful to turn out a creamy risotto. Perhaps for a special dinner yes but why would you spend that time when there are perfectly good prepackaged versions available for every day meals.

As an example the nice people at Gallo (since 1856) make several types of quick risotto that only take about 12 minutes to cook and they guarantee have less than 2% fat. One of those variaties - the Milanese, Shrimp or Asparagas are big favorites - appears on our dinner table at least once a week and is so good I've even served it - jazzed up - to company.

However, and you knew there had to be a however, even the prepackaged people take for granted that you must have watched your Nonni,Zie and Mama while they worked in the kitchen. The cooking instruction, though colourful, often lack the precision that we expect in North America. This is a direct translation from the box at the left:

Pour two glasses of cold water into a pan for every glass of rice.
Stir and bring to a boil.
When water has come to a boil cook for 12 minutes, stirring occasionally.
When the liquid has been completely absorbed, take off heat and stir in a string of olive oil or a nut of butter.
Add grated parmigiana to taste.

To the North American eye this is totally unacceptable. How much is a glass? What size glass? We have five or six types in the cupboard. A wine glass? A juice glass? What heat? High, low, medium? How much oil is a string? Are we talking rope? Yarn? Thread? And what type of nut? Peanut? Walnut? Hazelnut?

I've been assured that these are foolish and frivolous questions. A glass is a glass and a nut is a nut. Use your judgement - do it the way your Nonna did and if she didn't do it then make a few mistakes, clean a few pots with rice glued firmly to the bottom, waift the smell of burnt rice out of the kitchen with a towel, you'll catch on.

Oh and they give you suggestions on how to personalize it a bit too:

To finish it off just add:
Mixed mushrooms sauted in a pan with sliced onions
Strips of red pepper sauted in a pan
Pitted black olives and minced rosemary

In what quantities? Don't ask! Just do what your Nonna did!

29 luglio - Santa Marta di Betania

"Quote... Unquote"

My friend Larry over at Amoroma suggested that John Dickie's Delizia! was a good read - and as always with Larry he was right.

These pictures are from a wonderful lunch at a little restaurant in Pesaro. Being by the Adriatic the menu was big on seafood. To start an incredible antipasti of frutti di mare - shrimp, marinated salmon, fresh sardines, crayfish, squid and a type of smoked trout.

Dickie's Cosa Nostra, a history of the Italian Mafia, is a best seller and I can see this one, subtitled The Epic History of Italians and Their Food, going the same way. His premise, and in my mind rightly so, is that Italian food is not good old fashioned country cooking that tourists - and many Italians - believe it to be. It is a urban cuisine based on the taste buds and pocketbooks of the city dweller.

These clams had been cooked in a tomato-zucchini-garlic broth and tossed with penne - pasta con le vongole is a favorite all over Italy.

History tells us that people in the countryside ate poorly - poverty does that.

The poverty of the peasant diet still echoes in a number of proverbs that have been handed down.

When the peasant eats a chicken, either the peasant is ill or the chicken is. Among the poor of the countryside, chicken was a costly rarity reserved for the sick. Peasants were often only able to eat animals that had died of disease.

Garlic is the peasant's spice cupboard. Spices were essential to sophisticated cuisine from the middle ages until at least the seventeenth century. But the rural masses couldn't afford them. Garlic, leek and onion, by contrast, stank of poverty. Which is not to imply the well-to-do refused to eat these pungent vegetables - just that they looked down on anyone who had no alternative when it came to giving food flavour.

St. Bernard's sauce makes food seem good. St. Bernard's sauce was the most important ingredient in the peasant diet for most of the last millennium. But happily the recipe* has now faded from memory. It means "hunger".

A history of Italian food written as the story of what peasants actually ate would make for a stodgy read. Many pages would be devoted to vegetable soup. There would be a substantial section on porridge. Bread made from inferior grains, and even from things like acorns in times of hardship ...

Delizia! - John Dickie
Hodder & Stoughton
http://www.hodder.co.uk/

The frito misto was piled high with octopus, shrimp, calmari and other seafood goodies. Lightly battered it only needed a few squirts of lemon to bring out all the flavours.

Dickie looks at Italian cooking in various urban centres over six different periods right up to the new prosperity of the past few decades. I'm particularly intrigued by the chapter entitled Faulty Basil - how great a wordplay is that?

The primi (pasta dishes) were so big that there was no considering a secondi (meat-fish dish)but there was room for a creamy coffee sorbetto. The whole had been accompanied by a nice wine from the Marche, aqua frizante and finished with a coffee and local amaro. And it cost half of what we would have paid for the same meal in Roma.

*Despite Dickie's comment I was able to find a recipe for St. Bernard's sauce but how faithful it is to the original I can't say.

04 ottobre - San Francesco d'Assisi