Italy’s culinary texts are written in at least three languages: Latin at the outset, French from the end of the seventeenth century onward, and Tuscan Italian, which is omnipresent, subject to change, and marked with inflections from regional dialects. In recipes, cookbooks, and menus, which provide most of the terminology, we can discern some indications of a linguistic chronology, reflecting for the most part the system of social and cultural exchange. Some of the didactic texts on culinary matters were written in Latin up to the middle of the fifteenth century, while the first book explicitly translated from French was La Varenne’s Il cuoco francese, printed in Bologna in 1682. From then on the number of books that referred to a culinary experience in Paris increased significantly. So too did the importance of loan words used in the vocabulary of professional cooking, which developed into a thick web of Gallicisms. The power of the French language over culinary Italian did not begin to shift until after the end of World War II, when the influence between French and Italian cuisine became intensely reciprocal.
The writers of culinary texts adopted the Tuscan vernacular, along with regional variants, from the middle of the fifteenth century onward. This was a language common to the aristocratic courts of Italy, although it was also open to local and demotic influence, ultimately embracing terms of every provenance—including French and German—that designated ingredients, preparations, or culinary procedures. Even when servants and other personnel were unable to write, they spoke some Italian in addition to their local or native dialect. This Italian was easily conditioned by the whims and fashions of the nobility and was liable to change in response to stimuli from above or below. In the nineteenth century numerous recipe collections were titled or partially written in dialect, or they included individual recipes written in dialect. A similar pattern can be observed in a lively body of bacchic convivial texts, which undertook to revitalize the language of the hearth.
In sketching this broad outline we are not attempting to illustrate the development of a professional idiom that absorbed influences from far and near as it assimilated or adapted itself to different schools and culinary models (which were French throughout all the nineteenth and part of the twentieth centuries). Rather we wish to emphasize the open, malleable character of this language, characterized by a resistance to rules and spelling, that developed in the various sectors of hospitality, service, and dining customs, often in an irregular fashion. Precisely because of its changeable nature, despised by the literary class, the vocabulary of cooking seems indebted to the culture of servants, a tradition that is not always adequately represented in manuscripts and printed documents. The culinary idiom also reflects distinct roles, since the chef and the female domestic cook did not prepare the same dishes or describe their work in the same way. The chef used different registers of speech, similar to the language of those whose meals he provided, while the maid expressed herself in dialect, and the woman of the house functioned as her spokesperson. The language of the domestic sphere, the idiom used by women, is predominantly oral. At least until the era of compulsory schooling, this spoken language maintained a type of secret osmosis—and is therefore difficult to evaluate—with the elevated, professional language recorded in culinary texts. Ignored for a long time, the language of women has only recently been recognized in cooking manuals.
We must now add a more contemporary note to this brief outline. The attempts to impose order on the languages of cooking, particularly noteworthy after Italian unification, came to nothing. So too did the efforts of Fascist legislation to enforce a new policy of linguistic purity. Since the 1950s the Italian language has absorbed a new wave of influences from abroad, some French and some English. Yet this is hardly tantamount to foreign domination, since we can also discern a countervailing trend because of the increasing exportation of Italian skills, industrial products, ingredients, and dishes. Culinary Italian is used today in restaurants around the world, where it is colorfully emblazoned on signs and menus. The pizza—whatever its etymology—has reversed all previous biases and tendencies.
Until the seventeenth century and beyond, Latin was the educated language used by scientists writing about food. The Liber ruralium commodorum by Piero de’ Crescenzi (1304–1309), which was translated into the vernacular between the fourteenth and the sixteenth centuries, is one example of a successful agronomical treatise composed in Latin. In the Summa lacticiniorum (1477), Pantaleone da Confienza, a physician, agronomist, and traveler, provides an account of his travels, written in Latin, in which he expounds on cheese-making procedures and their typologies in Italy and elsewhere in Europe. Understood by all well-educated individuals, this was the written language par excellence. Hence medical texts on nutrition were composed in Latin, at least to the end of the seventeenth century. Clearly, scientific terminology was conceived for the exclusive use of the educated classes, even if it was eventually absorbed on a broader scale and became intelligible to some degree to the unlettered population. The prescriptions written by members of the Salerno school were articulated in a rhythmic pattern using Latin words that were quite close to the Italian spoken by the people: “bona sunt ova candida, longa, nova” (“pale, large, fresh eggs are good”).1
As was the case in other disciplines that called for a didactic literature, culinary texts were written in Latin up to the middle of the fifteenth century. This Latin was enriched by neologisms from the vernacular, which were assimilated into the system of classical grammar and syntax. It was described in Italian as latinuccio or latinaccio (coarse Latin) and in French as latin de cuisine or latin rosty. The oldest cookbook that has come down to us is the Liber de coquina, which was probably created for the Angevin court of Charles II in Naples around the end of the thirteenth century. In addition to international recipes—“Provençal, Teutonic, Gallic, and Hispanic”—the collection includes instructions for very modest tasks presumably delegated by the cook to the kitchen workers: “Recipe cicera et pone ad distemperandum per unam noctem in lexivio ben salsato. Mane autem, abluas bene cum aqua tepida” (“Take chickpeas, and steep them overnight in salt water. In the morning, wash them carefully with lukewarm water”).2 Latin allowed the writers to set down quick, authoritative precepts and instructions while paying attention to the simplest phases of preparation. In addition, some handwritten recipe collections composed in the vernacular, such as Maestro Martino’s Libro de arte coquinaria, used Latin in their titles.
Latin and Italian are not used as alternatives, and neither do they seen to designate two hierarchical levels of speech and familiarity in cooking. Each is open to contamination from the other, providing stimulus for the work of translators. A recipe titled “De la torta parmesana” in the fourteenth-century Libro della cucina, by an anonymous Tuscan, begins with the following instruction: “Togli pulli smembrati e tagliati e friggili con le cipolle ben trite” (“Take dismembered, cut-up chickens, and fry them with finely chopped onions”).3 The Latin instruction in the original text, which is taken from the Liber de coquina, reads: “Ad tortam parmesanam recipe pullos bene depilatos et incisos vel demenbratos.”4 In the same manuscript we also find a recipe for green beans “as used in the Marca trevigiana”: “Pone faseolos bullitos descacatos ad coquendum cum carnibus salsatis.” These Latin instructions are translated into the vernacular, without much attention to grammar or the use of the article, by the anonymous Tuscan: “Metti fasoli bulliti, descaccati, a cocere con carne insalata” (“Cook trimmed, boiled beans along with salted meat”). It would be a mistake to regard Latin as a vehicular language that predated or was superior to the vernacular. Recipes written in Latin and translated into Italian are placed side by side in the manuscript collections, but the Latin version is not presented as the refined, international version of the recipe.
The opposite phenomenon is not unusual: in De honesta voluptate et valitudine Platina, a humanist, translated passages from Maestro Martino’s recipe collection into Latin, rendering Martino’s vernacular in an elegant style that is also a model of erudite writing. The hierarchy of the two languages has an emblematic value here, without inhibiting other modes of expression. The dissemination of Maestro Martino’s work did not end with the publication of De honesta voluptate et valitudine.5 The Libro de arte coquinaria was plagiarized in Italian by Giovanni de’ Rosselli in 1516. It was loosely translated into French and published in Lyons in 1505 with the title Platine en français. Von der Eerlichen zimlichen, auch erlaubten Wolust, a German translation, appeared in Augsburg in 1542. The transfer of recipes from one language to the other occurred not through precise translation but through a process of freely adapting or remolding a preexisting body of work. This practice is still the most common way of transmitting a recipe from one country to another, a fact that must be taken into account when evaluating the linguistic models used in recipes.
Terminology is another issue. Since similar terms were used in Italian and Latin, it was not necessary to make specific reference to one of the two languages in order to explain this or that operation: raviolos6 is the Latinization of ravioli, closer to current usage than the variant rafioli.7 Some terms, however, still seem obscure. When we find beans described as “descaccati” in the vernacular and “descacatos” in Latin, we are faced with the problem not of comparing the two terms but of determining their meaning—which is probably “shelled” or “removed from the pod.”
Without going into the merits of a genre that would otherwise require analysis of a literary kind, we must acknowledge the existence of a body of writings in contemporary Latin (latinuccio) that could be described as mock-heroic, even before such writing became fashionable. In the work of Teofilo Folengo, alias Merlin Cocai, the vocabulary of latinuccio attains poetic dignity, enriched with a substratum of re-Latinized words from the Po Valley. This mock-heroic idiom does not so much enable us to measure the degree of hybridization of Latin and Italian as allow us to observe the influence exerted by dialects and the bastardization of classical culture in both these languages. Communication in Latin was not limited to early recipe collections and their ribald imitations, such as the “doctrinae cosinandi viginti,” the twenty-two recipes found in Folengo’s Baldus.8 Latin also proved a durable vehicle for the composition of monographs and satirical pamphlets throughout Europe from the end of the sixteenth to the beginning of the seventeenth century, from De re cibaria by Bruyerin Campier (Lyons, 1560), a description of the panorama of French food, to De naturali vinorum historia by Andrea Bacci (1596), a vast encyclopedia of wines, to the Tractatus de butyro by the Dutchman Martin Schookius (Groningen, 1664), which is devoted to a single product, butter. In such cases we are dealing with a linguistic code that was reformulated along humanistic lines and addressed to an erudite audience. It is very different from the modest if not uncultured language used in the recipes. The custom of writing Latin poetry in the classical style with didactic and scholastic ambitions is another important thread visible in documents from the seventeenth century. The short Latin poems composed by the Abbot Gaetano Buganza on milk, coffee, and cucumbers fully belong to the historiography of food products.9
Frontispiece of Giovan Battista Crisci, La lucerna de corteggiani (Naples: Domenico Roncagliolo, 1634).
Finally, we must not forget an aspect of modern Latin literature that has special historical relevance. The food preferences and dining habits of ancient Rome, studied by publishers and learned men, provide early historical evidence of gastronomy, circumscribed by antiquity. This is the focus of De triclinio romano by Ciacconius and Fulvio Orsini.10 It is also the topic of De conviviis antiquorum by Andrea Bacci, a sequel to the book on wines written by the same author, where he compares the eccentricities of the pagan world to Christian, ecclesiastical culture. Contemporary Rome was the focus of similarly vivid interest from other perspectives. De victu romanorum by Alessandro Petronio (1581)—translated into Italian eleven years after its initial publication in Latin as De viver delli romani (On the life of the Romans)—is an investigation into the environmental, dietary, and health conditions in the city.11 With citations from classical texts and philological analyses, these scholars attempt to reconstruct all aspects of everyday life in antiquity, and, persuaded of the continuity of some basic paradigms, especially in medicine and nutrition, they proceed to compare foods and rituals. Despite their use of time-honored sources and their methodical examination of letters, laws, and memories, what we discern here is not just a historical interest but also a religious, apologetic intent (the Christian supper) and a myth: that of the unsurpassed magnificence and extravagance of a banquet that offered flamingo tongues, crests torn from live roosters, and camels’ heels.12 The level of awe and indignation implicit in the humanist reaction to antiquity is still evident in several academic texts and dissertations written years later, among which the most famous example in Italian is Del vitto e delle cene degli antichi (On the food and meals of the ancients) by Giuseppe Averani, published posthumously in 1761.
Rather than exerting a concrete influence on research, other writings played a purely symbolic role. This was true of Apicius’s De re coquinaria, which, though printed in Milan in 1498 and later reprinted in Venice, was apparently unknown to Ciacconius and Bacci. Yet these writers focus on Apicius as a pretext for their reflection on the diversity of culinary models down through the ages and on the changing relationships among food, taste, wealth, and civilization. Apicius was a highly respected figure, widely recognized though rarely read, and his name was periodically resurrected in Italian culinary writing simply to celebrate the founders of a splendid art and a didactic literary genre.
In France, Germany, and England the dissemination of recipe collections in the vernacular can be uniformly documented in the second half of the fourteenth century. Some manuscripts in circulation were attributed to a cook (Le viandier, by Taillevent),13 while others were presented as household notebooks (Buoch von guoter speise, from Wurtzburg).14 Tuscan prevails in the recipe books produced in Italy during the same period, with some exceptions, including the Libro per cuoco, transcribed if not composed in Venetian.15 The Libro de arte coquinaria is the first authored cookbook conceived in what was to become the learned language of didactic texts. This is the work of Maestro Martino of Ticino, who lived in Rome around the middle of the fifteenth century. Compared to earlier manuscripts in both Latin and the vernacular, Martino’s recipes are strikingly original, as are his use of elaborate terminology and his descriptions of products, cooking procedures, decoration, presentation, and service. Along with well-known ingredients mentioned in the recipe titles (vegetables, meats, and fish), there is no lack of original culinary terms: zanzarelli, for example, which is made from a mixture of eggs, cheese and grated bread, shaped into “morsels,” and cooked in broth.16 Examples of the international code also appear here, with mirrause catalano and the biancomangiare that we find in medieval recipes written in French (blanc manger), German (blamensir), and English (blank manger, blomanger). The writer’s use of verbs (indicating culinary procedures) is especially indicative of his assured command of vocabulary, describing various methods of cooking in their different phases as well as the mixtures obtained by blending (distemparando) and incorporating (incorporando) various ingredients.
Maestro Martino’s intellectual counterpart was Bartolomeo Sacchi, also known as Platina, who probably wrote his De honesta voluptate sometime around 1470.17 (Platina pays close attention to Martino’s creations, as when he mentions “zanzarelle.”) Many have suggested that this work was in fact composed by two individuals, one a cook and the other a humanist.18 This kind of partnership, wherein the cook would dictate his experience to an educated scribe, often resulted in some degree of success. Alternatively, in the course of his career a cook might acquire a level of fame, distinction, and prestige that would allow him to sign with credibility the work sent to the printer. The roles of those responsible for the prince’s dining needs were varied, and their education was generally uneven. Stewards and carvers, who were in direct contact with their noble masters, might even be endowed with noble titles (Messisbugo was a Palatine count and Latini would become a “count of the Golden Spur”). There was a hierarchy among cooks, and Scappi signed himself “cuoco segreto,” the “secret,” or private, cook of Pope Pius V. We know little of the actual transcription of their texts, since a recipe collection down to this day eludes certifiable proof of literary paternity.
The sixteenth-century cookbook incorporated two different forms of expertise: that of the cook and that of the employee in charge of the food and dining protocols of the prince or pope. It also implied the collaboration of an individual who could record the recipes on site, as well as the assistance of a learned man capable of preparing the text for printing. The organization of the material had to take into account different levels of service, market sectors, religious requirements (for fast days and meat days), dietary rules, and internal distinctions. Menus and banquet reports were coordinated with the recipes. Here the names of dishes have a special status. Since they are used in the kitchens and at the banquet table, they belong to the terminology characteristic of both service and consumption. There is a rich variety in the titles used in the sixteenth century. In Scappi’s Opera the prescriptive model prevails for recipes (“to make dried-pea soup”) and the descriptive model for menus (“pea soup with sturgeon belly”), organized according to ingredients and condiments (“cooked artichokes served with salt and pepper”), methods of preparation (“fritters”), types of cooking (“fried saltwater fish served with sliced limes”), utensils (“to cook sardines on the grill”), and so on. In summarizing the recipe the menu mentions its characteristics. It thus provides information to both preparers and consumers. A dish could be attributed to a particular culinary tradition (“French style” or “Milanese style”) or might indicate the provenance of the ingredients (“Parmesan cheese,” i.e., from Parma). Unlike late-nineteenth-century usage, in Scappi’s work recipes are almost never dedicated to anyone, nor are the names of the cook and steward attributed to a dish. What is important is the desire to clarify the nature of the object consumed (“To roast an India hen or rooster, which in some parts of Italy are called Indian peacocks”).19
In addition to providing a repertory of dishes and menus (which is the sole objective of works such as Rossetti’s Dello scalco),20 the recipe collection offers a compendium of linguistic and lexicographical knowledge. It provides definitions of food products (“Pike is a well-known fish, with a long, round shape and with a row of sharp teeth in its mouth. The large ones are mostly caught in lakes such as Perugia, Bolsena, and Vico”),21 the appropriate terms for specific cuts (“take the loin with some of its fat”) and cooking methods (“Heat the pan and, when it is quite hot, grease it with a pork rind”), and a list of instruments for cooking and serving food, sometimes accompanied by illustrations. The practice of consulting a doctor and formulating diets for convalescents and the sick ultimately makes the cook’s mission a delicate one, which he embraces knowing not only that he is doing good work but that he is able to make suffering less painful. Thanks to Scappi, the recipe collection is no longer merely a memorandum used in food preparation but becomes an encyclopedia of nutritional knowledge.
We might well ask to what extent the emerging field of lexicographical research acknowledged this genre of didactic writing, which was especially prevalent in the second half of the sixteenth century. The first edition of the Crusca dictionary, published in 1612, clearly indicates how scholars kept their distance from culinary terminology. If we search the dictionary for procedures that Scappi describes in a simple way, such as the preparation of eggs, we find that it fails to acknowledge the existence of uova barbagliate or uova affrittellate. Even frittata is absent, either because the most commonplace words seem irrelevant outside the context of their usage or because the Crusca will see fit to include them only after they have been accepted by poets or narrative writers. The term maccheroni makes an appearance, since it can be traced to Boccaccio, but gnocchi is excluded, even though the two terms were sometimes used synonymously, if we are to judge by the title of one of Scappi’s recipes: “To make a soup of maccaroni, otherwise known as gnocchi.”22 Leaving aside the Crusca, when we consult bilingual dictionaries of the period we also search in vain. Pierre Canal’s Dictionnaire françois et italien, published in 1598, includes both gnocchi and pappardelle, but the first is translated as macarons, and the second is defined as “a type of food made with dough.”23 Though the compilers of foreign-language dictionaries acknowledged many more words from the spoken idiom, their definitions and translations were nonetheless imperfect. This terminology—for the most part orally codified and transmitted by semiliterate practitioners to men who could write and by palace authorities to scholars—thus received little attention from members of associations such as the Accademia della Crusca, who privileged fine writing and found the compilers of bilingual dictionaries lacking in expertise and hardly aware of their existence.
Lexicographical resistance to all types of professional jargon is typical of the Italian cultural tradition, reflecting the fact that the nobility linked the culture of food to the servant class. It also suggests a lack of interest on the part of the literary class in the mechanical arts and in domestic life in general. Even the body of culinary terms included in the Grande dizionario della lingua italiana edited by Salvatore Battaglia is limited to those provided in an anthology of texts compiled by Emilio Faccioli.24 Certainly, Torquato Tasso’s Il padre di famiglia is included here. We also find the complete text of Artusi’s La scienza in cucina, though we cannot avoid the suspicion that its inclusion is linked to the author’s neopurist agenda, which we will discuss below. At the same time the dictionary excludes both the terms that the stewards had borrowed from the international linguistic code and the Gallicized vocabulary used in the eighteenth century.
Recipe collections have become the subject of productive scholarly research only in the past twenty years. An examination of Cristoforo Messisbugo’s vocabulary has allowed us not only to date many culinary terms back to 1549 but also to evaluate some of their basic traits: the use of Tuscan imposed by the courts and the publishing industry and uniformly adopted by all authors and the persistence of a certain number of foreign terms, among which those of French origin prevail, and a significant number of dialect words. Written in the authoritative Tuscan vernacular, though receptive to loanwords, Messisbugo’s Banchetti, compositioni di vivande et apparecchio generale (Banquets, preparation of dishes, and general presentation) was unquestionably one of the principal works to contribute to the birth of professional culinary terminology.25
Recipe collections are not, however, the only linguistic source that languished in oblivion for several years before being rediscovered. Ribald literature, which incorporates abundant eating terms, was cautiously incorporated into the Crusca dictionary in 1612. Giulio Landi’s Formaggiata di sere Stentato, which consists of satirical chapters on every kind of food capable of generating bawdy, salacious double meanings—as was the case with carrots, figs, and sausages26—fully belongs to literary writing, as does Ortensio Lando’s Commentario delle più notabili e mostruose cose d’Italia, an extraordinary review of characteristic food products and local or regional dishes. The proliferation of mock-improvised poems and impertinent hymns of praise represents the other linguistically creative sector of sixteenth-century culinary literature. Here we find an aspect of food that is often ignored by the recipe collections: its consumption. These texts are omnivorous in their appropriation of the full range of gastronomical and geographical specialties, assigning a term to every product and permitting us to compare—in a discussion of preserved or cured foods—the qualities of cheeses and cured meats.27 Taste is powerfully expressive. This is especially true when it is interpreted by those who describe the physical quality of foods, who evaluate flavor or the effect of a dish and its reception. The best interpreters, or culinary “judges,” are in fact those who by virtue of their talent for writing were invited to the prince’s dinner table.
Erudite men who loved to eat were not in short supply, men who assigned a grammar to flavors and praised the skill of cooks and stewards as embodied in the cuisine. The belief that the most noteworthy of these culinary practitioners—at the courts of Ferrara, Rome, and Mantua—had scant cultural preparation is belied by their writings, which, though clearly revised and corrected, required extensive knowledge of the marketplace, familiarity with the ceremonies of the court, and a keen awareness of appetites. L’arte di ben cucinare by Bartolomeo Stefani, a Bolognese cook in the service of the Gonzaga household in Mantua, would also prove that an elegant dedication and the display of refined wisdom in the instruction of head cooks were advantageous. Stefani possessed a fine, personal command of rhetoric, or at least he had a collaborator of high station. His presentation of his “theses on messy philosophy” to the “Most Illustrious and Excellent Lords” is worthy of a man of letters, as is his research on the best ingredients, with calendar and map in hand. His catalog of the best things in Italy rivals that of Ortensio Lando, or rather it reformulates it from a perspective that is no longer that of the curious traveler but of a person with memory, good taste, a large team of servants, and access to the purse of an affluent prince.
Did two centuries of recipes, from Maestro Martino to Stefani, leave Italian cooking with an established, long-lasting style of communication? The reply can only be uncertain. Without adequate lexicographical acknowledgment and without institutional recognition, the refined language of Scappi and Stefani, regarded merely as a reflection of courtly life, remained a fragile voice, destined at best to be copied by a few ambitious head cooks. Despite borrowings and adaptations, this language did not exert influence outside Italy, and neither was it translated even in France, where between 1570 and 1650 no new cookbooks appeared on the local scene. If we turn the terms of the problem around and impute the decadence of this genre (didactic culinary texts) to culinary models that originated in the world of banquets and feasts, the result is still the same: a body of work without parallel in Europe had no heirs after the publication of Stefani’s L’arte di ben cucinare. Decades of silence ensued, broken only by modest translations of minor scope. Clearly, the vocabulary of the pantry, of cooking and baking, along with the description of culinary procedures and garnishing, continued to be understood and used, but changes occurred in the overall scheme of things and hence in the composition of dishes. We note the increasingly frequent inclusion of foreign terms and the acceptance of the teachings of the French canon, which, having prevailed among the diners, were now imposed on the most intelligent members of the cooking staff.
Thirteen reprintings of La Varenne’s Il cuoco francese were published between 1682 and 1826 and eight of François Massialot’s Cuoco reale e cittadino between 1724 and 1791. Il cuoco piemontese perfezionato a Parigi enjoyed even more widespread success, with twenty-three editions in Turin, Milan, Florence, and Venice between 1766 and 1855. The longest interval between any two translations was nine years. Contrary to the implications of its title, this last book is not an account of a cook’s apprenticeship in Piedmont and his subsequent experience north of the Alps but a compilation “for the most part taken from Menon’s La cuisinière bourgeoise.”28
Italy’s last great recipe collection was that of Antonio Latini. After 1694 the invasion of foreign texts began, imported in the original language and in translation. In addition, Italy’s publishing centers, which used to be Mantua, Bologna, Rome, and Naples in the seventeenth century, shifted for the most part to Piedmont and would remain there throughout the subsequent centuries. The fact that there were only two German editions of Massialot’s work, along with the Parisische Kuchemeister, inspired by La Varenne and published in 1667, suggests that that the invasion of foreign texts was a specifically Italian phenomenon.29
What is visible here is not merely a sense of curiosity vis-à-vis Versailles, which was manifest in much of Europe from the first half of the eighteenth century onward, but a profound change in culinary Italian, evidenced in the use of translations and neologisms. A comparison between Latini’s Lo scalco alla moderna, published in Naples between 1692 and 1694, and La Varenne’s Il cuoco francese, printed in Bologna in 1682 and 1693, is instructive. Onion soup and rice soup become potacchio con le cipolle and potacchio di riso, respectively, signaling the success of a term derived from French (potage) and used by Scappi in the variant pottaggio. Similarly, bisca (from bisque) appears for the first time in La Varenne’s text, where it is also described as potacchio alla francese. The titles of dishes show early evidence of this phenomenon: these names, used in the preparation and serving of food, seem, when heard by the diner, the first clear, indispensable sign of a new fashion. Incongruities arise as typical dishes, or those thought to be typical in France, are attributed to a geographical “origin”: “les caillebottes de Bretagne” become “rappreso di Brettagna.” Titles are doubled or extended in cases when the Italianized version fails to render a term intelligible, hence we find “rissole specie di tortelli” (“rissoles, a type of tortelli”).30
Entries with foreign titles begin to make an appearance with the publication of Il cuoco piemontese perfezionato a Parigi. Here, of the thirty-one recipes dedicated to beef, twelve have titles containing French terms relating to types of preparation and cooking. Another title includes a term adapted from French: carbonata o costa di bue in papigliote. “In papigliote” is selected in imitation of the French en papillotte rather than the Italian designation al cartoccio to signify cooking the meat in a paper wrap. There is also one term derived from English (beest steks a l’inglese). The infiltration of foreign terms is even more noticeable within individual recipes, where, for example, scaglono (shallot) is replaced by échalotte. In menus and instructions for serving we find references to entrées, hors d’oeuvre, and assiette (a noun, erroneously transcribed in the singular, that designates the little dishes of biscottini and dried fruit served at the end of the meal). Repeated from one cookbook to the next, these loan words constitute a hybrid terminology that privileges bilingualism or, to put it differently, presents us with a trilingual lexicon of Italian, French, and Franco-Italian elements, transcribed freely and phonetically, with broad variations in spelling. With the publication of L’Apicio moderno in 1790 one could say that the Gallicization of culinary terminology was complete, even in texts written in Italian.
Born in Rome, Francesco Leonardi spent his novitiate in Paris in the kitchen of the maréchal de Richelieu before moving to Naples, where he worked for the prince of Francavilla (“all French cooking”). He then became the steward of Prince Orlov in St. Petersburg and was later appointed the chief cook of Catherine II.31 Though he developed his career far from Rome and even from Paris, Leonardi’s work clearly reflects the dominance of the French model. This provided him with a terminology that had international currency but did not prevent him—a native of Rome—from attaining fame and originality. At the beginning of the first volume he describes with the flair of an alchemist the broths that constitute the foundation of all sauces, listing “brodo generale, suage, consomè, biondo di Mongana, restoran, tablette, sugo, culì, essenza.” Six of the nine terms come from French, and two are written correctly—suage and tablette—while the others are approximated. Leonardi prefers the phonetic transcription of foreign terms over the original spelling, which is impracticable for servants: “Regarding the names of dishes, soups, sauces, or other things, it is impossible to change them. Their original titles in Italian, French, or the language of another nation should be maintained. I believe that I was doing this by using French words, though in the Italian spelling. My aim is to make them understandable to those who do not know [French], for they will be amazed to find the words spelled the way they are pronounced and not as they are [usually] written” (p. xii).
Clumsy spelling, awkward accents, and phonetic Italicizations render the French spoken by the head cook a macaronic, high-flown idiom, difficult to learn and even more difficult to retain. For this reason, at the beginning of L’Apicio moderno, before the recipes, Leonardi offers an “explanation of some French and Italian cooking terms that the author used in the composition of this book.” We will cite some of these, in the order in which they appear, to convey a clearer sense of the issue: passare sul fuoco (meaning in this case to fry); gratinare (to grate); legare (to bind, as in thickening a sauce); liason (for liaison, or binding); mittonare (steep or boil); carne rosolata (browned meat); fior di latte (fresh mozzarella today, but this may not have been the meaning then); teste d’arancio (orange slices); coperte (silverware); and so on (p. lxi). This type of jargon prevailed in elegant restaurants up to the end of the nineteenth century.
The first effect of this fashion, which undermines culinary conventions and terminology, was to accentuate the distance between creative cuisine and the food served in taverns or modest family homes in the provinces. The existence of two irreconcilable registers, high and low, luxurious and modest, international and vernacular, became customary, and those who practiced a style of cooking impervious to the novelties arriving from France were considered to live in the backwaters. The use of domestic notebooks, which recorded personal secrets, dishes, and preparations, was a spontaneous reaction to this state of things. A modest publishing industry dedicated to bringing out texts on domestic cooking thus established itself with some success from the early nineteenth century onward. La cucina casereccia (Home cooking), printed twenty-five times between 1807 and 1885 in Naples, Milan, and Palermo, is written in the version of Italian spoken in Naples, clearly distinct from both Tuscan and dialect usage. The author’s most pressing concern is to ward off the condemnation of potential purists: “If, in my use of nomenclature and cooking instructions, I happened to use words that are different from those provided by our vernacular, I would have put those wishing to take advantage of my work to the trouble of using an interpreter or frequently consulting the Crusca dictionary.”32 We find some Gallicisms (gattò for gâteau, bignè for beignet, and ragù for ragoût)—though there are no terms transcribed directly in French—along with titles of dishes from Naples and Lombardy and a few from other Italian states (fritters and Roman-style pappardelle, as well as Genoese cockle soup). Naples was the principal city where aristocratic dining flourished, in both its French and Neapolitan versions, and where popular cooking was practiced in all its variations, in private homes and on the streets. It was also the place where the best dishes from all parts of Italy, including those from another prestigious city, Milan, were reformulated.
In La cucina teorico-pratica (Theoretical-practical cooking) by Ippolito Cavalcanti, duke of Buonvicino, we observe a high-flown, hybridized linguistic style that assimilates different jargons, rewriting French phonetically in Italian, rather similar to the orthographic reform promoted by Leonardi and adopted by cookbook authors (orduvre for hors-d’oeuvre, antrè for entrée). In 1846, following the advice of a priest who wanted him to add menus and recipes for Holy Week, Cavalcanti shifted to Neapolitan dialect: “e bè, mo sa che faccio, te scrivo la Semmana Santa tutta d’uoglio co la lengua bella nostra, che a te piace assaje” (And well…now I’m writing to you on Holy Week full of oil in our fine language that you like so much).33 The thirty-page appendix with the title “Della cucina casereccia in dialetto napoletano” (On home cooking, in Neapolitan dialect) demonstrates that there is a linguistic problem implicit in the transmission of indigenous dishes and suggests the need to find an expressive idiom capable of connecting elite cuisine with the festive cuisine of the clergy and the middle classes.
The proposal put forward by the duke of Buonvicino seems eccentric, given the culinary culture of the Italian states where the opposite tendency prevailed: that is, using Italo-French terminology as an element of linguistic and gastronomic unification and assigning to the upper-middle culinary range, which was prevalently urban, the task of representing all traditions, local and rural. The adoption of a foreign language did not simplify communication, however, creating the problems of professional terminology mentioned above, as well as other difficulties. These include the spelling standards used in food lists or menus to be presented to guests and the issue of titling recipe books according to uniform conventions, respecting a single model. The difficulty of codification was further complicated by the fact that in the tradition of French manual writing, there was disagreement among cooks even with regard to commonly used terms. Carême wrote magnonaise for mayonnaise,34 for example, and béchamel was spelled at least four different ways.35 There was also the fact that the invention of dishes and pastries in private homes and restaurants had resulted in strange neologisms. The use of the words “à la” in a recipe title, followed by the name of the cook or the host, a historical figure, an actress, a city, or a state, had caused some confusion for diners consulting the menu, even in France. We find this contagious trend in Italian recipe titles also, and it becomes stranger and more confusing as one goes down the price range of culinary publications. It would take someone already familiar with French and Italian phonetics to figure out that “dolce alla sciantile” is the equivalent of “crème Chantilly.”36 The professional collections of the second half of the nineteenth century tried to restore some order to the situation. Il re dei cuochi (The king of cooks) gives titles in both languages, and, if a dish is Italian, Nelli translates it into French, confirming that this is the international language (Panettone à la milanaise).37 Dictionaries for both professionals and amateurs began to appear, such as that of Giacomo Giardini,38 while translations of the more authoritative manuals began to aim at linguistic elegance and propriety.39 This pervasive aspiration was inspired by the ubiquitous presence of French cuisine toward the end of the nineteenth century: Meisterwerke der Speise und Getranke: Französisch-Deutsch-English, printed in Leipzig in 1893, presents one of the most complete linguistic and synoptic repertoires of elegant cooking for restaurants. Its function went beyond the basic requirements for the training of a maître d’hôtel, since it facilitated the standardization of professional terminology in restaurant dining rooms and kitchens from country to country. Its multilingual vocabulary, particularly its rendering of French terms in Italian, became a guide that enabled cooks and waiters to decipher menus where the two languages came together and overlapped and to explain terms whose origin even if recent had already been lost. With this goal in mind, Hoepli published Il gastronomo moderno. Vademecum ad uso degli albergatori, cuochi, segretari e personale d’albergo (The modern gastronomic expert: A manual for the use of hoteliers, cooks, secretaries, and hotel staff). This is not a prescriptive text, but it provides all that is necessary to explain and translate the name of a given dish to a waiter ignorant both of who Gambetta might be (“lawyer, statesman, and French patriot”) and how les oeufs Gambetta are prepared (“scrambled eggs on croutons, alternating with onion purée, preserved tomatoes, parsley, and truffles”). Through the intervention of the appropriate person, the manual could resolve the Italian client’s curiosity and uncertainty. Providing brief instructions on the spelling of the menu and grammatical information on the use of singular, plural, and partitive construction (consommé au riz), the author addresses a serious gap in the training of hotel personnel, individuals who were educated in apprenticeships rather than schools and were expected to straddle different languages at a young age. The manual, which was published in 1904, was not reprinted, showing that early pleas for a national, purist reform of the Italian language, which would put an end to the disastrous consequences of Franco-Italian usage and the jargon of the hotel trade, had begun to fall on attentive ears.
On December 19, 1896, Olindo Guerrini wrote a letter to Artusi, reproduced in the fourth edition of La scienza in cucina (1899), which provides a pastiche of a recipe by the famous court cook Giovanni Vialardi, humorously titled “grillò abbragiato” (braised grillò). It begins: “Once stripped of its feathers the bird is burned not boiled” (“la volaglia spennata si abbrustia non si sboglienta”). This text is tantamount to a manifesto against “translations from French and clumsy compilations” by the two culinary experts who made the greatest contribution to the reform of domestic culinary terminology.40 Self-taught and the editor of an edition of Giusti’s letters for children, Pellegrino Artusi lived in Florence, could read French, used Florentine dialect in conversation and writing, and wanted to be understood by all Italians. For this reason, he prefaces his recipe collection with “an explanation of words from the Tuscan vernacular that may not be intelligible to all.”41 He is not a scholastic purist and welcomes some French terms, occasionally followed by translations (“Are ‘potatoes alla sauté’ perhaps ‘browned in butter’?”) and sometimes left in the original for the sake of clarity (quenelles), since he does not wish to become embroiled in too many Italian neologisms.42 A businessman little versed in foreign languages though possessing enough vocabulary to catch examples of simple correspondence, he sometimes makes a slip, such as his unfortunate use of soufflet for soufflé, probably transcribed directly from Il cuoco piemontese perfezionato a Parigi, which unwittingly suggests an image of defiance (since soufflet means a slap).43
Artusi took on the role that suited him: to provide a kind of paternal mediation between Italian and various dialect traditions, such as Florentine (he was a resident of Florence), Romagnolo (he was born in Forlimpopoli), and the idiom of important cities that had left their mark on culinary customs (he traveled to Naples, Rome, Bologna, Milan, Padua, and Turin). The bibliography of historical recipe books is of little interest to him, and he seems to forget the existence of an already substantial body of published work. As a guest in the homes of others, he is happy to learn new recipes, and he enjoys reading them on loose sheets of paper or receiving them by mail. He observes the work of other cooks with close attention. On the way to a fair in Rovigo, after traveling for many hours by horse, Artusi stops at Polesella, enters an inn, and asks the innkeeper what she has to offer him. The woman prepares a dish of “risi.” Artusi listens to her, observes her closely as she works, and mentally registers every phase of the preparation, from browning to boiling, down to the final addition of a good handful of Parmesan cheese before serving.44 “I risi” will end up translated as the recipe for riso alla cacciatora (rice, hunter style) that appears in his book. Artusi records many recipes, like this Venetian one, as he watches someone preparing the food who speaks simultaneously in dialect and whose commentary he must then translate into Italian. Two cooks help him to try out the dishes, Marietta Sabatini from Massa and Francesco Ruffilli from Bologna, both of whom knew how to write (as we see from their correspondence with Artusi) and above all how to cook.
Artusi’s reform emerged in a climate of patriotic nationalism, the scholastic quest for purity, and a distinctive pedagogical sensibility. For this reason, he understands intuitively from the outset that he must not only do away with “barbaric” terms but must also adapt all cooking terms—in Tuscan and in various dialects, whether used by professionals or by servants, by women or by men—to standard Italian. “After the unification of Italy it seems logical to consider the unification of the spoken language, which few people pay attention to and which many oppose, perhaps out of vain self-regard or perhaps out of a long and inveterate habit of speaking in dialect.”45 In one area, the careful management of the dining table—ignored by educational programs and to an even greater extent by literary figures—Artusi’s suggestions seem to make good sense, as they are easily absorbed and remembered. The success of his book gave him authoritative status. He accepts the dual pattern of naming fish with their Adriatic and Tyrrhenian terms and vegetables with Florentine and Italian names (gobbi and cardi for cardoons, for example); he translates a dozen Bolognese terms, choosing from the most expressive ones such as the half-size maccheroni called “denti di cavallo” (horse’s teeth); and he reduces to the single word “migliaccio” the different ways of naming a dessert based on pig’s blood that had been familiar to him since childhood. Offal and various cuts of meat, fats and pastas attain a municipal identity from one recipe to the next. Artusi prefers to adopt the principle of the existence of local and Italian variants rather than the idea of hegemony. His linguistic map bears a single table, triangular in shape, whose three corners are Florence, Bologna, and Forlimpopoli. The dishes that come from outside this area are already Italianized, thus gentrified. Perhaps to ennoble a sauce that his palate greatly appreciated, he graces it with the term balsamella, a dialect word already used by Alberto Advise, the cook of the bishop of Imola (1785–1800),46 which, in a popular etymology and semantic analogy, suggests “balsamo” (balm) as a substitute for “besciamella” and “béchamel,” the second of which is derived from the seventeenth-century patronage of its presumed creator, the marquis Louis de Béchamel.
To provide housewives with a model of writing was probably not part of this confirmed bachelor’s initial intentions, but it was the most important aspect of his success. Before Artusi’s time the language of maternal cooking was an oral idiom, spoken in dialect or—as occurred in the case of Caterina Prato’s Manuale—translated from French or German, and it stood in opposition to the language of the chefs, who were professional men. By the time women’s writing was submitted to the printer it had already taken on the dry tone of scholastic Italian, the style used by the promoters of domestic economy rather than the language of ordinary women gathered around the hearth or friends conversing in a pastry shop. With La scienza in cucina, a familiar Italian that sounds more like a spoken than a written language and evokes the tone of a personal, informative conversation swept aside the awkward jargon thick with irritating Gallicisms that was then characteristic of culinary writing, giving voice to domestic speech. The exchange of letters and the recipes sent to Artusi from every city in Italy (from which he selected recipes for inclusion in the expanded editions of his book) provided a network through which he retransmitted his own messages. Artusi’s teachings achieved their goal thanks to the broad dissemination of his book from Florence to every corner of Italy. In the course of conversations between one woman and the next, these teachings would be retransmitted in the form of recipes dictated and jotted down in pencil and would resurface later in further confidences shared. La scienza in cucina mixes the vocabulary of mothers and visiting ladies, dignifying the verbal style of the entire tradition of didactic writing in a minor, domestic key.
The audience that welcomed Artusi’s writings and the support of Olindo Guerrini, a well-known poet who was also a publisher of ancient culinary texts, helped to bring back into focus the need to reform the language and terminology of food. The acknowledgment, both direct and indirect, of La scienza in cucina proved a decisive factor. In a climate of cultural purism and exalted “italianità” (Italianness), Alfredo Panzini took a favorable position toward Artusi’s ideas in his Dizionario moderno in 1905, paying tribute to his “native grace and purity of language that would cause many an academic writer to blush.”47 In subsequent editions of the dictionary, the tribute grows louder. This might seem a conspiracy of compatriots, since Artusi and Guerrini were born in Romagna, while Panzini was a native of Sanigallia with a house in Bellaria. In reality, however, it was the spontaneous gesture of a retired businessman, a librarian, and secondary-school teacher. The degree of nationalism that weighs on this new dictionary can be understood by focusing on one fact: there are only two dishes in La scienza in cucina that are described as all’italiana (tortellini and recooked boiled meat), while Tuscany appears in twenty-one recipe titles and Emilia in fifteen. This linguistic reform was not carried out in order to force the citizens of Italy to sit at the same table but rather to allow them to communicate their own diversity.
Artusi’s name began to circulate even among the promoters of high cuisine. In 1909 Alberto Cougnet recommends him as “the inspirer of this perceptible national reform to achieve a terminology and a language that is properly Italian.”48 At the instigation of the Milanese Culinary Society, Cougnet edited L’arte cucinaria in Italia (Culinary art in Italy), a monumental encyclopedia of recipes for professional cooks where we naturally find dozens of birds that are “grillettati,” meaning cut into pieces and pan-fried. Is this a contradiction or merely the beginning of a change of heart? Perhaps the excessive use of Gallicisms was already beginning to tire Italian diners, and it was time to drop them, but the problem was how to replace them. Beginning on January 1, 1908, the menus of the royal courts were written in Italian, and the word “menu” itself underwent review. How should it be correctly renamed? Minuta, lista, distinta, and gastronota were among the profusion of proposals for replacements, but the question was redundant, as it was merely a matter of flag-waving. In reality, little had changed in the kitchens of the Savoy family, the reigning monarchs. Consumato alla diplomatica replaced consommé diplomate to describe a chicken broth thickened with tapioca. But is consumato not a French-based term? As Panzini observes, even Scappi used the word consumato to describe a broth (“brodo ristretto o consumato”).49 As for the “alla diplomatica,” it is “a pompous term” that makes much out of very little.50 To retranslate from French, to restore the older terms, is simply to shift the terms of the problem, creating an equally artificial vocabulary without reforming the cuisine.
This problem was again addressed during the twenty years of Fascist rule. Artusi died in 1911 at the age of ninety, but Panzini continued to expand his dictionary after World War I and included the term balsamella.51 In 1929 he sat in the front row of the newly created Accademia d’Italia, which had the express mandate of stripping the Italian language of foreign elements. The project had new implications for cooking, quite different from the reforms in protocol ordained by the House of Savoy. The credit given to regional identities by the regime, the censoring of local resources and culinary traditions, the reorganization of tourist boards and the promotion of Italian products abroad gave publishers the opportunity to expand and enlarge Artusi’s recipe collection, since it was now receiving the kind of acknowledgment from official sources that it had previously obtained from families. The success of the ideological training of housewives, carried out through the press and the propaganda ministry, through culinary competitions and festivals, made the dual objective of culinary self-sufficiency and linguistic self-sufficiency increasingly explicit. Women, and the servants who worked for them, were expected to give concrete form to the Fascist project even with their words. This was facilitated by the circulation of handwritten recipes, stimulated by women’s magazines with the creation of a column for letters from female readers, and the emergence of the radio, which gave an element of modern prestige to oral communication. The reform of French terminology became a matter for academics, as family cooking and the food served in popular restaurants represented the capstones of Fascist gastronomy, and the unity of the spoken language began to gain ground. This was an ambitions project, given the age-old confusion that reigned among cooks, accustomed from youth to juggle with a little French and to practice their trade even on ships, and inclined to mix in a confused fashion bourgeois and refined dishes with other popular, vernacular foods, the names of which were muttered rather than pronounced and were almost always impossible to spell.
Though univocal, this national passion for the Italian language is expressed by the most diverse voices. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who sat in the literature class at the Accademia d’Italia with Panzini, translated what the literary pages of the newspapers and editorials repeated daily into the style of the avant-garde. After condemning pasta dishes and inserting a series of scandalous recipes, signed by “aero-poets” and “aero-painters,” La cucina futurista (The Futurist Cookbook), which was published in 1932, returns to the linguistic question by providing a “little dictionary.” There are Italian words to replace both Gallicisms and Anglicisms, all of which were being debated by Alfredo Panzini over the same period: castagne candite for marrons glacés, consumato for consommé, fondenti for fondants, fumatoio for fumoir, lista for menu, miscela for mélange, sala da te for tea-room. It is not so much the purist face of a noisy avant-garde movement but the spirit of linguistic reinvention that inspires these suggestions. Besides, Marinetti, a well-known and esteemed author in French also, carried on his poetic war as if autarchy provided the opportunity for resounding gunshots. In fact, the dictionary reveals some striking intuitions on his part, nonetheless misunderstood: traidue (between-the-two) for “sandwich” and pranzoalsole (lunch-in-the-sun) for “picnic,” which, like polibibita (polydrink) for “cocktail,” had an esthetic rather than colloquial success.52 The culinary neologisms of futurism favor a process of accumulation, giving rise to porcoeccitato (excited pig) for a mixture of salami, hot coffee, and eau de Cologne, dolcelastico (elastic-sweet) for zabaglione and licorice, and brucioinbocca (burn-in-the-mouth) for a drink created by layering in a glass whiskey, sugar, Strega, vermouth, and alkermes. This is a way of binding terms together, like ingredients in a sauce, that is unusual in restaurant culture and has had few lasting effects, among which the most famous contemporary example is tiramisù (pick-me-up).
To what degree was Marinetti seriously playing this game? To make us reflect on the ritual basis of the futurist extravagances we have only to consider the strange list of dishes shown on hotel menus, thrown together and distorted in peculiar, incomprehensible ways, and the amused response to this battle of words on the part of the peaceful newspaper readers. Within the context of linguistic reform, Marinetti also has an intuitive grasp of the importance of new references and the need to adapt his neologisms to new ways of cooking and serving food. Wishing to promote art objects rather than consumer goods, his suggestions do not conform to criteria of a commercial nature. Thus the polibibita is not a cocktail but a mixture of spirits and other drinks according to a rule of explosive contrast—wine with quinine plus rum, plus boiling Barolo, plus mandarin juice is a decisone—or assonance—while three ingredients featuring the vowel a in a prominent position are required for the inventina: Asti Spumante, liquore d’Ananas (pineapple liqueur), and sugo d’Arancio (orange juice). Even if none of these drinks goes beyond the confines of the avant-garde, futurist cooking had the merit of restoring linguistic initiative to Italians.
Frontispieces from Paolo Zacchia, Il vitto quaresimale (Rome: Facciotti, 1637); from Giovan Battista Rossetti, Dello scalco (Ferrara: Mammarello, 1584); from La cucina casereccia (Naples: Giordano, 1828); and from Pellegrino Artusi, La scienza in cucina e l’arte di mangiar bene (Florence: Landi, 1891).
The lists of words to be substituted for corresponding words in a foreign language were issued only from 1941 onward in the “Bulletin of the Royal Academy,” after stimulating a wide debate between linguists and literary experts, journalists and cooks. To create neologisms by the thousands (five thousand appear in the appendix of the eighth edition of the Dizionario moderno published in 1942) implied a systematic analysis of terminology as well as a major input of creativity, and this meant that the representatives of various sectors were often in difficulty or dispute with the academics. To call marrons glacés (glazed chestnuts) “marroni canditi” in Italian (candied chestnuts) meant to suppress the difference between glazed and candied products, just as to abolish the French term “omelette” meant to relinquish a term that in the idiom spoken in the kitchen meant a frittata, but “softer, half cooked”). Foreign words also reflected techniques of the trade, codified over time, using the vocabulary available: the difference between a parsley frittata and a ham omelette is one of cooking time and temperature, not just flavoring. Two centuries of work in French kitchens could not be swept away by an erudite list.
How many of these subtleties were apparent to the women of Italy? Many in fact, because of the existence of a system of information that traveled vertically through the kitchens giving the issue of the language question concrete meaning. The magazine industry had the task of transforming the academic tenor of the debate into a popular discussion at the national level. Product advertisements ultimately disseminated the results all over Italy. Listening was only the starting point—in a passive way, of course—of a project of reform that scholastic channels and professional training would finally render operational. The outcome of the policy on linguistic self-sufficiency (autarchia) was very different, as we know. In fact, as the Accademia was publishing its lists, war bulletins grew increasingly numerous, and these were followed by events that led to rationing, ration books, and finally famine. When the linguistic instrument for the unification of culinary terminology was finally made available, offering the basis for a new tradition of didactic writing on food, the country was divided, and Italians were beginning to die of hunger. American aid brought an end to the issue of foreign loan words.
Italian in the Kitchens of Babel
The fall of Fascism and the American invasion did not bring about an unfettered hybridization of culinary Italian but signaled the prudent exercise of linguistic freedom. Arlecchini and polibibite did not have the time to stick before the old word “cocktail” replaced them. Everything returned to its previous state. L’ABC della cucina, with which the publication of La cucina italiana resumed on January 1, 1952, would not have raised any objections, except to the term “menù,” even from an academic in Fascist uniform. The monthly magazine devoted space periodically to the establishment of vocabulary, obviously without mentioning foreign expressions. Here it was not the allusion to some international sauce but the advertising, beauty products, perfumes, and Coca-Cola that foreshadowed a rupture in the language that the bourgeoisie considered one of the important aspects of its own continuity and equilibrium. There are also the reports of Arnaldo Fraccaroli: “The Javanese Meal, Lunch, Italian Style, but with Surprise Elements in Singapore.”53 Exotic travel to countries in the process of decolonization and foreign advertising were new elements, a phenomenon that sped up only a decade later, very sensitive in other, less conservative headlines of Cucina italiana, which brought an unexpected result.
The paradox of the last fifty years can be summed up in this way: as linguistic freedom developed in the heart of the republic and as neologisms of Anglo-Saxon origin, promoted by the food industry and fast-food chains, began to take over from French terminology, relaunched in the 1970s with nouvelle cuisine, the Italian language multiplied outside its native borders in signs and menus. This is the pizza effect. Though the term does not exist in the 1938 edition of Larousse gastronomique, it takes up two columns in 1984, and is the subject of two recipes. If we compare it to “spaghetti,” its introduction seems all the more surprising. Under the letter s in the first edition of the Larousse gastronomique we find: salami, spaghetti, and stracchino. To these are added saltimbocca, scamorze, and spalla. The expression “al dente,” referring to pasta as well as green beans, has its own entry in 1984.54 Distortions and squabbles also grow more plentiful: “un panini” is given as the singular form of panini, and it indicates—in France in the 1990s—a sandwich toasted on the grill.55 An American pepperoni pizza, on the other hand, features sausage not peppers (peperoni in Italian) among its main ingredients.
In Italy the use of culinary terms in dialect has grown rarer as the custom of local or rural dining has increased. We also see that the industry participates in this phenomenon. Adding to this contradiction is another: the persistent presence of barbarisms has not diminished with the diaspora of Italian terms abroad in a climate of total anomie, invasion, and transition. One may now teach regional cooking with the aid of the chinois and the court bouillon, for example, as Gualtiero Marchesi does,56 or anglicize Piedmontese dialect expressions, as Suor Germana does with “pollo alla baby.”57 As a result of the invasive publishing industry and its proliferation of all kinds of encyclopedias and recipe dictionaries, a culinary vocabulary of the publishing business is what prevails today, and there is an absence of an Italian terminological handbook, with multilingual terms, definitions, and translations. This is the only instrument that could standardize the names of dishes in all parts of the world, even though the conditions necessary to bring this to pass probably do not exist.
When Artusi’s work achieved the honor of being published by Einaudi in 1970, his teachings were already close to being entombed by Piero Camporesi with all the historical and local, aristocratic, and popular cooking of Italy.58 Not that La scienza in cucina was lost in the rubble of the Fascist regime, but there were few women, it seems, who were fighting to revive it or imitating its style in their letters. It is no longer even mentioned. Shelves of books already satisfy every fantasy. In the past before writing down one’s secret recipes one had to try them out repeatedly, and learn by making mistakes. The new dishes are simple and infallible or complicated and unachievable. The hereditary thread that allowed menus to be handed down from mother to daughter had been broken. The link between restaurants and family cooking that had kept in check the damage done by the French menu had also been broken. With the car and the highway system, the regions themselves became unified according to the model of the tourist industry, responding to a transient experience of gastronomic identity. Translated into the jargon of communication, this means that the style of the recipes dear to one’s grandmother now seems obscure and antiquated, while simply reading a weekly paper or the menu at a restaurant will provide one with new culinary terms. Even without traveling, anyone can try out unknown foods, if one can manage to remember their names. When traveling one can find dishes with familiar names thousands of miles from home.
The family has maintained a level of decorum worthy of Artusi, especially in the provinces, at least at festive meals, and yet the cult of fine things seems more a question of temperament or talent than of upbringing. The myth of Paris seems rather tarnished from the culinary perspective, especially among the bourgeoisie, which in Italy distrusts everything and is not very familiar with the three-star restaurant. In addition the teaching of foreign languages is no longer a matter only for the rich, and other languages are now taught more frequently than French, the idiom in which the high cuisine of the Western world has been codified. Even the type of Italian that was spoken and written by Artusi with deliberate decorum has lost its function as a model of elegance and as a norm at the dinner table, which is now open to all forms of communication. This table, a permanent fixture in the middle of the kitchen, is increasingly casual, erratic, and attuned to the television rather than the radio, for it is situated within view of that other meal, the television commercial.
Through diaspora, the traditional image of Italian gastronomy has continued to perpetuate itself with the popular concept of the pizzeria or the Roman or Tuscan trattoria and the more refined idea of the elegant restaurant, especially since the 1980s. Internal migration has led to the dissemination of “typical” restaurants, a phenomenon that is juxtaposed with the gradual loss of older inns and eateries. External emigration on the other hand serves above all to project an echo of ethnicity under the sign of an Italian proper name. California and Florida are the areas in which the food of Italian Americans is resurrected and spreads by contagion in the most extraordinary, lavish forms. Like all hegemonic cuisines it is prepared by personnel from all parts of Italy and by others of every nationality, who learn in the course of their usually brief training the model’s most rudimentary terms. In the wake of the cuisine of the fathers (the chefs), followed by that of the mothers, what we witness here is the food of the sons or rather the orphans. Gastronomic syncretism is the principal source of authenticity in a restaurant system run by those who have long left Italy behind, and it brings together at least three variables: the cuisine of the original Italian territory, that of the practitioner’s birthplace, and that of the host country. Here we find a mixture of dialect, standard Italian, and another language, such as American English, for example: “Italian restaurants abroad are moving toward the creation of a pidgin menu, a lingua franca of the restaurant business.”59 This outcome is far from new. It was reflected from one end of the twentieth century to the other by the compilers of glossaries and handbooks: the language of cooks and waiters is a Volapük, a volatile Esperanto, continuously called into question and resistant to rules.60
When the culinary idiom seemed close to being reorganized and correctly standardized, it fell apart again as a result of the combined effect of the loss of personal, local origins, and dialects and the increasing sense of openness to all influences, so much greater for those living beyond the borders of their birthplace. Internal migration in Italy decimated the new idiom at the base, and creativity generated confusion as the new vocabulary became bloated with a profusion of invented or translated terms misunderstood by cooks and culinary experts. A similar conclusion must prompt us to reexamine the terms of the gastronomic debate and the various phases of a very uneven linguistic history. Perhaps the best proof of the illusory character of Artusi’s project to provide a single, streamlined, correct language for cuisine is precisely the Babel-like image of culinary Italian both before Italian unification and after Fascism—or perhaps without interruption—amid a confusion of dialects, Gallicisms, and distortions in the first of these historical phases and the proliferation of commercial brands, Anglicisms, and contrived formulas of rural life in the second. Given this conclusion, we are faced with a paradox that might be of consolation to the cultural historian but is unproductive for those who look to the future and imagine they can hear or read its messages: only the cuisine of the nobility, in the books of Messisbugo and Scappi, spoke a language that measured up to its own ambitions.