Introduction: Identity as Exchange

Italy, the country with a hundred cities and thousands of bell towers, is also the country with a hundred cuisines and thousands of recipes. Mirroring a history marked by provincial loyalties and political division, a huge variety of gastronomic traditions makes Italy’s culinary heritage unimaginably rich and more appealing today than the cuisine of any other country, now that the demand for diversity and for distinctive, “provincial” flavors has become especially keen. Variety is also the element that immediately strikes the visitor’s eye and palate. Is this enough to conclude that an Italian cuisine in the strict sense has never existed and (fortunately, perhaps) does not exist even today?

This is what one is often led to believe, but the task of this book is to show the contrary, based on a series of considerations that do not strike us as self-evident. Rather, they tend to undermine certain commonplaces, as well as the more usual ways of approaching culinary history. Because this book is entirely organized around a few fundamental themes, we would like to clarify them at the outset.

In the first place, we must restore to culinary history its own particular dimension. The temptation to subordinate this history to the hegemony of literature—regarded for centuries as the highest and most authoritative expression of good taste—has led to contradictory results. On the one hand, there is the attempt to show that patterns of consumption and styles of conviviality reflect an ideal of civility; on the other, there is the ongoing tendency to consider the minor, material arts as subordinate to the major, intellectual ones. To see a baroque stamp on seventeenth-century cuisine, like the rational character attributed to the cuisine of the Enlightenment, has been a means of “ennobling” diet and food, of talking about culinary matters by alluding to something else. But cooking does not require analogies. It has its own history and documentary autonomy, even if it can (and should) be studied by consulting many different sources, including literature.

Another, even stronger, temptation has been to subordinate the history of food to considerations of a very different nature, such as the landmarks of political history, which map out the boundaries of countries and states and assign clearly marked spaces to the population as a whole. Clearly, there are striking connections between these two aspects that go beyond the functional to the symbolic, which we will emphasize in the pages to follow. We will also point out the links between culinary history and the history of economics and modes of production that regulate supply and demand and are in turn related, not insignificantly, to political and institutional events. But again, the history of food cannot be reduced to extraneous dimensions. It is related more closely to the sciences and technologies of everyday material culture, to the rituals and necessities of ordinary life, and to forms of taste than to anything else. If it is true that the problem of “creating Italians” emerged after national unity had been achieved, it is nonetheless also true that the original characteristics of the country called Italy—“il paese Italia,” as Ruggiero Romano titled his recent collection of essays¹—cannot be encapsulated in the short, contentious history of the unified state but must be sought in the dense network of customs, habits, and styles of living that somehow distinguish an “Italian” identity. Culinary practices and the culture of food are essential elements of this identity. It may in fact be useful to reflect on these, perhaps to discover that Italians existed long before Italy,² even if only on a few levels of society. But that is another story, and we will come back to it shortly.

A preliminary reflection precisely on the nature of identity thus seems indispensable at this juncture. In the context of culinary traditions, one might assume as self-evident that identity has to do with belonging to a particular place and that it involves the products and recipes of a specific location. Thinking about it like this may cause one to forget that identity may also—and perhaps primarily—be defined as difference, that is, difference in relation to others. In the case of gastronomy, one thing is quite clear: “local” identity is created as a function of exchange, at the moment when (and to the degree that) a product or recipe is brought into contact with different systems and cultures. Food products are sometimes consumed exclusively at their place of origin. Even in cases where the local economy is only partially self-sufficient, the restriction of local products to local consumption indicates an intimate, ritualized valorization of these foodstuffs, but it also means that the same foods are prevented from reaching the marketplace and from being exposed to public opinion. The “local” product, if consumed only at a local level, is devoid of geographical identity, since identity comes into play through a process of relocation, of “delocalization.” Mortadella from Bologna is called “Bologna” only when it leaves the city where it is produced. “Ascoli-style olives” (olive all’ascolana) assume this name when they travel beyond the borders of Ascoli, even if they are promptly shipped back there, bearing this name, in a kind of boomerang effect.

What we propose to do in this book is to transfer the concept of identity from the sphere of production (where it is usually placed) to the sphere of exchange. It will thus be relatively easy to distinguish a network of culinary customs, food lore, and cooking practices, dating back to the distant past, that make explicit reference to an “Italian” context. Clearly, it is Italian not on the basis of the uniformity of local cultures (each of which maintains its specific connotations and differences) but on the basis of their diversity, which comes into play at the same moment that food enters into circulation. Cuisine is then revealed for what it actually is and has always been: an unparalleled site of exchange and contamination, beyond its origin. If a product can be the expression of a particular territory, its use in a recipe or on a menu is almost always the result of hybridization.

Clearly, all this applies mainly to the ruling classes. For a long time, the persistence of an “Italian” model of cooking could be observed only in aristocratic circles and among the urban elite, which sometimes coincided with the aristocracy. The middle and lower-middle classes were involved only in a marginal and discontinuous way, depending on developments in the economy and in market prices. To appreciate the unevenness of this model, we must look at its unexpected decline in relatively recent times. Over the past half-century Italy has seen the last of malnutrition and inequality of nutrition, ending a long cycle in the country’s culinary history that could be defined as preindustrial. The increase in economic well-being has meant that people in rural areas have adapted to urban ways of living, without this leading to national homogeneity. Instead of translating itself into the large-scale adoption of ready-to-eat foods, often prepared hundreds of miles from the place of purchase, as occurred in England, Germany, and the United States, Italy’s increased wealth has led to the new prestige enjoyed by traditional recipes and products, to a preference for small-scale food producers (which enables their survival), and to the cult status of wines and gastronomy. Home cooking has remained an important criterion in culinary matters, whereas the fast-food business supplies meals to less than 3 percent of the population. With the Europeanization of Italy’s agriculture and food industry, the nation is now diversifying its image and retrieving the history of its own recent past. Having banished inequalities but not their cultural significance, Italy is reconceptualizing its past with the help of new commercial strategies. The labels “rich” and “poor,” “aristocratic” and “peasant” acquire new meanings when applied to today’s foods. Even in its relation to modernization, the Italian model presents particular, though easily recognizable, contradictions.

A different but closely related issue now needs to be addressed. Over the course of the centuries, Italian history had revealed a trait that distinguishes it from the history of other countries, namely, the prevalence of strong urban centers throughout the land and the great power wielded by the city-based tradition going back to Roman times and revitalized during the Middle Ages. This power has played itself out in various ways, according to the particularities of each historical region. The points we have argued so far derive their form and meaning from this specific context. In effect, the city constitutes a strategic setting for the creation and transmission of a culinary heritage that is at once local and national. An unparalleled site of commercial exchange, the city is also (though only in Italy) the administrative center of a territory that, whether large or small, depends on the city in matters of governance, productivity, and culture. For this reason, the city is a decisive element in the interpretive model we are proposing here, since it represents the surrounding territory, and, in a more or less direct and often violent way, it appropriates the area’s material resources and culture, including its culinary traditions, adopting them, exporting them, and perpetuating their use. Italy’s culinary heritage is usually asserted and recognized through references to city-based identities. This is evident not only in the names of elaborate recipes and food preparations that were devised in urban settings, in the workshops of culinary artisans or, more recently, in industrial establishments (Cremona relish and Neapolitan spaghetti, for example) but also in the names of products originating in the countryside, the mountains, and the sea. When we speak of Treviso chicory, Bitonto oil, Ravenna turbot, Messina swordfish, Sorrento walnuts, or the ewe’s-milk cheese called pecorino romano, we are highlighting marketing centers rather than the areas where these foods are actually produced. It is understandable that the most successful “typical” products in the history of Italian food are those with the strongest industrial support (we have only to think of pasta, Parmesan cheese, and tomato sauce). These, in effect, are the products that travel best. “Exporting the territory” may seem a provocative expression, but it is clearly an essential key to understanding the history of Italian food down through the centuries. In our account of this history, the city and the surrounding countryside play leading roles, but so does the perception of a common national point of reference. The internal articulations of this model, made up of the urban center, the outlying countryside, and the broader political and cultural territory, can alone convey the complexity of the inventory of dishes and food products, without destroying it. The rural estate functioned as the gateway to the city residence, and in the eyes of the peasants it represented the style of genteel, urban living. In addition to providing increased familiarity with fish and game products, the estate offered peasants opportunities for managing and preserving foodstuffs, as well as experience in raising livestock and growing garden products.

Of how many geographical areas is Italy composed? What are its internal and external boundaries? We will propose a fresh perspective on these questions. Or at least we will offer a few tools to achieve it by pinpointing the complex origins of dishes and food products and by rejecting some commonly held beliefs. We will have to put aside for the moment, at least with respect to the entire span of history preceding the contemporary period, the broader “regional” dimension of the culinary legacy so often stressed today. This is in fact a very recent phenomenon on the cultural and political level, and by its very nature it is foreign to the internal concerns of culinary history. A gastronomic map of Italy must therefore deconstruct or incorporate the administrative divisions of the land, shaping them into more culturally homogeneous and meaningful units.

The dynamic relationship of city and province brings us to another issue that we wish to take into account in this volume: the relationship between the culture of the masses and that of the elite, between “poor” and “rich” culinary traditions. There is no doubt, as we will try to show, that an intense exchange of information and techniques took place between the two social and economic planes. The horizontal exchange that assigns the city the most important role in the diffusion of the culinary culture of the area is constantly supported by a vertical exchange (between the world of the countryside and that of the city) that constitutes its necessary precondition. This obviously involves agricultural production and the raising of livestock, but it also involves recipes.

Only a hasty, preconceived image of so-called subaltern culture can lead us to believe that elaborate culinary preparation is the exclusive prerogative of the ruling classes. Inventiveness thrives not only in circumstances of power and wealth but also in poverty and necessity. At bottom, the most fascinating aspect of studying culinary history is the discovery of how ordinary people, with their physical effort and imagination, sought to transform the pangs of hunger and the anxieties of poverty into potential moments of pleasure. The techniques devised in times of famine to render edible even the smallest, most basic resources of the land—the ability to make bread out of wild berries and grape seeds, recounted in so many medieval and modern chronicles, or to concoct a soup with roots from the underbrush and herbs from the ditches—all clearly testify to the difficulties of people whose daily lives were constantly threatened by the outbreak of catastrophe. But they also bear witness to the mental resources of a population capable of believing in the future even in times of great hardship, armed mainly with experience, ability, and imagination—or, in a word, with culture. In an account of the terrible famine that afflicted Italy in 1338, we read: “The poor were eating thistles cooked with salt and wild herbs. They would cut weeds and the roots of milk thistles and cook them with mint.”³ How can we deny that this qualifies as culinary art? It is unquestionably a kind of gastronomy based on hunger, one that is not devoid of rules and norms suggested by common knowledge and somehow codified by collective practices. The Chronicon Parmense informs us that not even during the famine of 1246, when bread was made from linseed and yet deemed “excellent,” did the people of Parma choose to go without their beloved torta, a culinary genre then at the height of fashion. Still, they had to make do with cooking it almost devoid of filling, piling one scantily filled layer on top of the other, along with some roots and greens: “People would make their pies with a couple of crusts, or maybe four or five.”⁴

The theme of hunger does not belong exclusively to the distant past, even if it appears today in a different guise. Observing the dietary behavior of Italians, one might assume that caloric deficiency was an episodic phenomenon, occurring on the margins of society and linked to shortages that cannot be ascribed to production or distribution. Nevertheless, the first half of the twentieth century was characterized by phases of obligatory food restrictions linked to war—including an especially severe period from 1940 to 1946—euphemistically described as “rationing.” The greatest disparities between need and availability of goods, involving millions of people, are recent. Paradoxically, these shortages mainly affected urban areas, the very places purportedly protected by reserves of food administered by public officials. In wartime cooking we find all the classic ingredients of the culture of hunger: the substitution of other items for agricultural produce, the retrieval of elements usually discarded, the careful use of leftovers, the revision of recipes based on diminished resources, as well as the observance of formal rituals and rules of presentation. But we must add to these characteristics the constant presence of culinary concerns. In fact, the war years witnessed the continuous publication of recipe books or guides to the best use of ration books and of the few foodstuffs available in the marketplace. These publications were designed to make poverty bearable and to teach people how to transcend it with ingenuity. Lack of food, vitamin deficiencies, malnutrition, and chronic shortages are elements pertaining to a history that we unhesitatingly call contemporary, marked by severe economic recessions and the policies of war. All these elements have had an influence on the compensatory quality of the culinary models that have emerged over the past fifty years. The human stomach has a memory. We will therefore add some additional information pertinent to the construction of a history of the appetite.

The traces of a culinary tradition that came into being in the face of hunger are abundantly evident even in patterns of elite consumption and in recipe books of haute cuisine. They can be observed above all in techniques for the long-term preservation of foods, perhaps the primary culinary value discernible among the poor (where there the quest for security prevails). But more generally there are many products, recipes, and flavors in the culinary tradition that enable us to identify an aftertaste of the customs of ordinary people, despite the supposed ideological oppositions between the food of the rich and the food of the poor, a distinction that has been fundamental to the collective imagination down through the centuries. A slight adjustment in culinary forms, usages, and accompaniments suffices to reveal an insurmountable class difference: when garlic is mixed with costly oriental spices, its image as a peasant flavor will be profoundly modified. When the humble potato is enhanced by a prestigious butter sauce, who would recognize the original character of this tuber linked to dramatic tales of famine and regarded as animal fodder? And again when a dish essential to the caloric balance of the peasant diet—such as polenta or soup—shows up on a menu as an accessory, intended to enhance something more refined and costly (a dish of roast game, for example), who can deny that this is merely a whimsical, folkloristic allusion to something that belongs to a different culture? Yet all this points to a systematic exchange of information between the different social levels. Echoes reverberate in the opposite direction as well. The reformulation of recipes at the “upper” social level transmits, enriches, and modifies their basic components and in turn conditions the behavior of the so-called lower classes through a process of imitation.

These phenomena are not easy to examine, given the diversity of agents and languages involved, but perhaps we can recognize the cook as a key player or pivot in the dynamics of intercultural exchange. Often hailing from the lower social strata, cooks work in proximity with the upper classes. They bring their own culture with them, reshaping it in response to the needs of others. Thus modified, they bring it back to the social environment from which they came. In the cities not only household cooks but also those who ran cookshops and bakeries frequented by a large portion of the public constituted a kind of filter between different cultures, offering an environment that favored exchange. In all these cases, as Rebora writes, with particular reference to the Middle Ages: “Rather than an invention of the upper classes, cooking is a need of the elite that is met thanks to the skill of the common people.”⁵ At least until the eighteenth century, moreover, class differences did not prevent the daily intermingling of members of the nobility, the bourgeoisie, and the lower classes, who may have been rigidly divided in terms of rights, privileges, and prerogatives but who rubbed shoulders with each other in residential buildings, in neighborhoods, and on city streets.

This exchange among socially diverse cultures was not limited to urban environments. It had a special place in the dynamic juxtaposition of city and countryside already emphasized above and in equally important contexts such as the feudal castle and its holdings during the High Middle Ages, the monastic settlement, and the masseria, the farming compound in the southern countryside.

The culinary identities of the rural areas, cities, and regions of Italy emerged over the course of the centuries through the process of these vertical and horizontal exchanges. As the outcome of historical circumstances, these identities were continually changing and constantly reformulated and redefined on the basis of new experiences. Though temporally, spatially, and socially diverse, they referred to a common experience, a single image—also the fruit of a slow process of development, of perpetual modification and revision—that we have no choice but to call “Italian.” This is precisely how it is named in various documents, reflecting perceptions that go back at least as far as the High Middle Ages.

The Italian image can hardly be taken for granted. In a culinary repertory favoring designations such as “risotto alla milanese,” “Florentine steak,” and “Neapolitan pizza,” the adjective “Italian,” like the expression “all’italiana” (Italian-style), is not typically applied to the name of a dish, whether a pasta, a pastry, or any other kind of food. We thus realize that adjectives evoking nationality belong to an outsider’s perspective, and it would be more natural for a foreigner in a foreign country to use the expression “spaghetti all’italiana” (Italian spaghetti) than for an Italian to do so.

The effects of exchange are especially evident today, insofar as the territorial range of the Italian culinary model stretches well beyond the nation’s political borders. A country exists through its products, and some of Italy’s cheeses have been replicated in Argentina since the second half of the nineteenth century.⁶ Recipes from Italy are known and copied in homes and restaurants all over the world. Italian cuisine, while still embodying all the rich diversity of its origins, no longer requires an arduous search for authentic or imported ingredients, as these have long been available in the markets of major cities everywhere. Pizzas and pastas, the dishes on which this tradition built its foundation, are among its most recognizable signs, and they contribute to the creation of a coherent, unified image of Italy that becomes more pronounced the farther away one goes from Italy. Thus Italy truly exists thousands of miles from home, where it has an unmistakable identity, especially at the dining table.

“What is the glory of Dante compared to spaghetti?” Prezzolini wondered in 1954, noting that pastas had “entered many American homes where the name of Dante is never pronounced.”⁷ Reformulating this question today, its prophetic import becomes strikingly clear, along with the relevance of the debate on the notion of culinary identity. There is no paradox underlying the juxtaposition of the two commodities—Dante’s poetry and the creations of the cook—but rather a new way of finding a point of contact among the innumerable elements that make up a particular civilization. Spaghetti and pizza belong to a legacy that has spread throughout the world, just as books have, but unlike books these foods are immediately recognizable and accessible to all. They represent a culture of commerce and craftsmanship, based on taste and manual skill, that reconstitutes a body of knowledge through imitation and an element of reminiscence, despite the distance from the place where this knowledge originated. Cooking is perhaps an unlettered art, but it also survives thanks to remembered knowledge—the memory of what has not been lost as well as what will be recorded in writing—and it is thus a civilizing force. Literary writers have no precedence over cooks, and neither do their artistic visions have any particular usefulness in matters of cooking. Yet their role is no less important than the cooks.’ Along with the exchange of food products, dishes, and flavors, there is also an exchange of documents and recipes. This lively traffic has been going on since ancient times and is vital for good taste. In fact, without realizing it, when we eat spaghetti we also ingest something of Dante.