Why Italians Love to Talk About Food (23 page)

At the beginning of the modern era (from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century), both northern and southern Italy, typically so distinct from each other, suffered an identical, agonizing poverty. In all of Western Europe, a substantial part of the population lived in destitution during these two hundred years. In Italy malnutrition, if not starvation, reigned in rural areas. Poverty in the south meant filling stomachs with plants, fortunately rich in vitamins. In the north, on the other hand, where the population was hard-pressed to find nourishment in spelt soups, diseases raged and mortality was extremely high.

Things began to change in the eighteenth century, when the majority of territories in northern Italy were governed by the Hapsburgs: with the enterprise and the soundness typical of this dynasty, the Hapsburgs took energetic measures to fight poverty, promoting effective, constructive fiscal policies and introducing scientifically based reforms to agriculture. Hunger in the north was conquered thanks to the introduction of new crops in the rural areas of this vast region—crops that had been imported from the New World a century and a half earlier. The Austrian government supported and disseminated corn, and in some areas the potato, making them part of the Italian diet. The tomato did not need to be promoted: it was already widespread in the south and by unanimous, blissful acclaim was happily part of southerners' daily rations.

And so corn, a novelty that had reached Europe from America at the end of the sixteenth
century, became widely known in Italy thanks to the Hapsburgs, who at the time ruled Austria, Hungary, the Netherlands, northern Italy, and the Balkans. Up until the end of the seventeenth century, they had also exercised authority in Spain, to whom the discovery of the New World was owed. It is true that popular tradition, scientifically unfounded, attributed a different origin to this plant. The Tuscans called it (and still call it)
granoturco
, the Venetians
sorgo turco
(Turkish grain and Turkish sorghum). The Turks, however, call the same grain Egyptian wheat, while the Egyptians refer to it as Syrian wheat. The French who live in the Pyrenees call corn Spanish grain, which is in fact closer to the truth. Surprisingly, no one has ever given it the name that is most appropriate, namely, Mexican grain.

By Andrei Bourtsev

From Columbus's letter reporting to the Catholic sovereigns, it is clear that after having seen corn in the newly discovered lands, he and his crew were quite impressed by it:

 

They then had bread and various fruits brought, and red and white wine, but not made from grapes, rather they must have been made of fruit, the red from one kind and the white from another, and similarly some other wine made of maize, which is a seed contained in a spikelet like a panicle that I brought to Castile, where there is already much of it; and it appears that the best maize is considered to be of great excellence and has great value.
¹

 

Among the many testimonies, the comments of other travelers of Columbus's time—Gerolamo Benzoni (1572),
²
Pietro Andrea Mattioli (1568)
³
—are curious, and also those of later observers: José de Acosta (1589),
⁴
Juan de Cardenas (1591),
⁵
and on the Inca, Garcilaso de la Vega (1609).
⁶
In Pietro Martire of Anghiera we read:

 

They also make bread, with little difference, from a type of grain,
panìco
, which is found in great abundance among the Lombards and the Spanish of Granada. Its panicle is longer than a hand's span and ends in a point, almost the size of an arm; the kernels are arranged by nature in admirable order, according to shape and size, and they resemble a pea: when they are unripe, they are white, once matured they become very dark; when broken their candor exceeds that of snow; they call this species of grain maize.
⁷

 

In the charming children's book
Il pentolino magico
(The magic pot), Massimo Montanari, a famous historian of Europe and of food, popularized an eighteenth-century text from the pen of the writer Giovanni Battarra. The latter recounted a curious dialogue (set in 1780), typical of a family of small tenant farmers in Romagna:

 

“The custom of planting corn,” the father says in response to a question from his son Ceccone, “goes back about forty years ago [that is, to around 1740]. In the beginning we planted it in small quantities, just enough to make polenta eight or ten times; then, seeing that the harvests were successful, we allotted it more space. And if you, my sons, had been here in 1715, the year of the famine, you would have seen the families of poor peasants like us searching for grass and roots to eat plain, without any condiments, or making bread from acorns or vine shoots. Now that we have this new food instead, we are able to get by even in the worst years. What's more, they are introducing certain foreign roots now, similar to truffles, that they call potatoes.”

“What are they used for?” Ceccone asks.

“They are an excellent food for men no less than for animals,” the father explains, “and if we, too, are able to plant them, we will no longer suffer from scarcity.”

“Are you joking?” Mingone, the other son, interrupts.

“I'm serious,” the father admonishes him. “This morning the landowner gave me two haversacks of those tubers, which are eaten cooked in several ways: boiled, roasted under the coals, flavored with milk or butter . . . and bread is also made from them.”

“Bread? But the bread that is made from these roots will taste different than that made with wheat flour.”

“A bread with good taste and color, that does not harden for a month, and does not get moldy . . .”

“That would be a great advantage,” Mingone comments. “Those of us who consume eleven or twelve sacks of wheat per year could save by half. But tell me, can bread be made using only potato flour?”

“It can be,” the father replies, “though they say that such bread is somewhat difficult to digest.”

“Well!” Mingone exclaims. “Indigestion doesn't bother peasants. On the contrary, they think they are more full that way.”
⁸

 

Educated gentlemen subsequently introduced corn to the people, teaching them to make polenta from it. The trouble was that corn had been brought to Europe without any notion of its correct dietary use.
⁹
The absence of vitamin B
₃
(niacin) in corn caused pellagra, sometimes called “sickness of the rose,” to begin spreading among the Italian population, afflicting them with a disease that throughout the world assumed the name of Italian leprosy (
lepra italica
). Another disease of those who ate polenta exclusively was goiter (cretinism), caused by a deficiency of iodine in the water and in the food. A deficiency of iodine (and an excess of polenta) was typical of the diet of the mountain province of Bergamo; consequently the people of Bergamo became the favorite targets of long-standing jokes.

The Europeans did not know that the Mayas and Aztecs softened corn with lime water to make it more edible.
¹⁰
Only later on, once Italians realized the need to introduce a protein component into the diet, did they add cheese or butter to polenta, along with highly salted foods: anchovies, spicy salami, game (in Bergamo), hare (in Lodi). Only then was polenta freed of its reputation as a harmful, dangerous food for the poor.

The corn that was first imported had a particular flavor, and the panicles or cobs contained
only eight rows of kernels. Present-day corn, a product of genetic selection, has cobs with kernels arranged in fifteen or as many as twenty-four rows. Unfortunately, however, genetic selection has diminished corn's flavor quite a bit. In recent times, the Slow Food Association has been engaged in rescuing the original variety of this plant, the eight-row corn of the Garfagnana region. Only a few cobs of this variety remained in Italy in the final years of the twentieth century. And although this species is grown in vast plots of land today, that is still not sufficient to avert the danger of extinction.

 

Besides corn, authorities in northern Italy also imposed “from above” the potato, the so-called American chestnut. The potato arrived, naturally, from America, though not through Spain, as corn did, but rather through France, where it had been introduced into daily life (with great success) by the gastronome of the court of Louis XVI, Augustin Parmentier. Parmentier had planted the first potato tubers experimentally at the royal riding academy. Given the Italians' strong aversion to and rivalry with France, they received the potato grudgingly. It was only when forced by circumstances, against the background of a new, tragic famine at the beginning of the nineteenth century (caused by several wars), that the potato was successfully introduced into the population's diet.

 

Unlike the other early gifts from America, the tomato (
tomatl
, “succulent fruit” in the Nahuatl language) took root spontaneously in the south. In the second half of the sixteenth century, Europeans attributed magical virtues and aphrodisiacal properties to the tomato. At first they called it
pomme d'amour
(love apple), but the Sienese botanist Pietro Andrea Mattioli successfully renamed it
pomme d'or
(golden apple). The French, British, and Germans instead followed the American phonetic pronunciation and began calling the new fruit tomatoes.

People of the sixteenth century could not help but be struck by the beauty of tomatoes when observing them. Costanzo Felici, a physician from Modena, wrote that they were “more beautiful than beneficial.”
¹¹
The first pictorial representation of tomatoes in Europe, like the first representation of corn, is found in a painting by Arcimboldo of 1592: in the portrait of Rudolph II as Vertumnus, cherry tomatoes (
Lycopersicon cerasiforme
) make up the lips.

The tomato's story is the complete opposite of the potato's. While the potato was imposed from above, introduced almost by force, tomatoes first caught on among the
lower classes in the sixteenth century, and later aroused the interest of aristocrats. Toward the middle of the sixteenth century, common people in southern Italy were already eating tomatoes, frying them in oil with salt and pepper, like eggplants. The dominant classes, on the contrary, showed a certain resistance in accepting the crop.

Only toward the end of the eighteenth century did the great chefs and gastronomes, starting with Vincenzo Corrado, begin to take a serious interest in tomatoes. And only beginning in the mid-nineteenth century (only 150 years ago and not before) did the very dish that is considered an authentic gastronomic emblem of all Italy appear in Naples:
pasta al pomodoro
(or
vermicielli c'a pummarola
, as pasta with tomato sauce is called in the Neapolitan dialect).

Ippolito Cavalcanti, Duke of Buonvicino, describes these feasts in the book
Cucina casareccia
(Home cooking), written in the Neapolitan dialect, along with the
Cucina teorico-pratica
(Theory and practice of cooking) of 1850, describing how he happened to taste pasta with tomato sauce for the first time in 1839.

In Naples—where they had spontaneously invented fast food by selling steaming hot macaroni along the city's streets—pasta was still
bianca
, or
incaciata
, that is, sprinkled with cheese, in Goethe's time. Only toward the middle of the nineteenth century did Neapolitan
pastasciutta
acquire that very emblematic and patriotic look that we all know—white and red with a touch of green basil—which subsequently entered the bloodstream of every Italian and became famous throughout the world.
¹²

It was at this time that the four-tined fork was invented in Naples, in consideration of these innovative macaronis bathed in scarlet sauce. Upon the explicit request of the Bourbon king Ferdinand II (1831–59), the royal majordomo Gennaro Spadaccini in the 1830s introduced into use a short fork with four tines, replacing the longer one with three. While it was practically impossible to wrap the spaghetti around a three-tined fork without losing the sauce, the task became fairly easy with a four-tined one. Thus, thanks to the importation of the tomato from America, humanity was forever enriched with this utensil.