Why Italians Love to Talk About Food (7 page)

The magnificence of the new landscape which comes into view as one descends is indescribable. For miles in every direction, there stretches a level, well-ordered garden surrounded by high mountains and precipices.

. . . We drove on a wide, straight and well-kept road through fertile fields. There trees are planted in long rows upon which the vines are trained to their tops. Their gently swaying tendrils hung down under the weight of the grapes . . . The soil between the vine rows is used for the cultivation of all kinds of grain, especially maize and millet.
⁵

 

The atmosphere in the bucolic Veneto is harmonious, industrious, cheerful, and folksy, and the cuisine is primarily that of the mainland, while in Venice, as one can easily intuit, it is entirely fish-based. In Venetian kitchens, and nowadays particularly in trattorias, little-known local fish and shellfish are generally served, such as sardines, sea snails (
caragoi
), clams (
caparossoli
), razor clams (
cape longhe
and
cape de deo
),
⁶
and mussels (
peoci
). They also serve clams known as
pevarasse
, mantis shrimp (
canoce
),
and crabs (
granseole
), including those without a shell during the molting period (soft-shelled crabs, or
moléche
), which are eaten after being dipped in egg, floured, and fried. In the
bàcari
(taverns) scattered throughout the city, on the other hand, everyone consumes a
cichéto
(a little snack) from time to time, to soothe their hunger pangs: a little anchovy wrapped around an olive; half a hard-boiled egg with oil and pepper; creamed
baccalà
on toast; a little marinated fish; a roasted, seasoned scallion; a slice of artichoke heart with garlic and parsley or fried in batter; a little meatball; Spanish white beans boiled and seasoned with oil, onion, vinegar, and parsley;
nervéti
(pieces of gristle boiled and seasoned the same way). To eat them, you spear them with a toothpick. After which, an
ombra
(equivalent to an eighth of a liter) of white wine is called for to cleanse the palate.

Few spectacles are as picturesque as the daily fish market in the city of Chioggia or in the center of Venice, a couple of steps from the Rialto bridge. Here prized fish and crustaceans, even imported ones—grouper, monkfish, lobster—make a fine display, along with poor man's fish, such as
sarde
(sardines) cooked
in saòr
, or in a sour sauce (that is,
in carpione
, fried and marinated with onions and vinegar).
Sarde in saòr
is one of the oldest Venetian dishes, a very important source of nourishment for sailors and fishermen, who carried it with them, on board the boats, packed in precious barrels: the salt, vinegar, and oil served to preserve the fish, while the vitamin C in the onions helped to prevent scurvy.

By contrast, fresh fish is not eaten in the rest of the Veneto, between Padua and Verona, in the cities formerly under the powerful duchy of the Sforzas. Instead, dried fish is generally consumed, such as
baccalà
Vicenza-style, a great classic. Here vegetable gardens dominate, with their unforgettable local varieties. In the markets one glimpses bunches of wild herbs from the lands around the lagoon, such as
bruscandoli
(hop sprouts) and
carletti
(hop flowers), and numerous artichokes in all stages of growth.

Artichokes have a truly eventful “life journey” and can appear for sale in five distinct forms. In their youthful period they are known by the name
canarini
(the first cutting); these are very small, and are dipped in
pinzimonio
, olive oil with pepper and salt, or breaded and fried. Then come the
castraure
(literally “castrations”), fruit of the second cutting of the buds of the main stem; farmers do this to stimulate the growth of the remaining artichokes. The
castraure
are small, vernal artichokes to be cooked with garlic and oil or fried in batter. Finally, true artichokes (resulting from the third cutting) appear, to be prepared in a variety of ways. But that's not the end of it,
because there are also artichoke bottoms (from the fourth cutting), delicious morsels to be sampled boiled, grilled, or fried, while the fifth cutting of the plant yields the flowers that have bloomed, to be gathered in bouquets and admired in all their purple glory.

The artichoke of the Veneto (from Sant'Erasmo, an island in the Venetian Lagoon) is so famous that its cultivators are interviewed as if they were movie stars, revealing Shakespearian passions behind the relaxed image of the produce gardener:

 

When he speaks about
castraure
his eyes shine, as if he were in love. Giovanni Vignotto, a Sant'Erasmo native born in 1935, has an uncontrollable passion for the cultivation of the purple artichoke of Sant'Erasmo:

“Is it true that there are false
castraure
of Sant'Erasmo?”

“Unfortunately some scoundrels sell small Tuscan artichokes as
castraure
from Sant'Erasmo. Generally the authentic
castraure
are found at the Rialto market and in some of the best restaurants in Venice, which reserve them in advance. The crates that contain them have carried down the brand of the Consortium of the Purple Artichoke of S. Erasmo. Those who want to make the little Tuscan artichokes pass as Sant'Erasmo
castraure
are swindlers who should be exposed. They should be considered
castraure
thieves.”
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In the Veneto there is an extensive peasant culture, similar to that found in Holland, which is unrelated to Mediterranean alimentary rituals. Indeed, the southern part of the region, the Polesine, is sometimes referred to as “Italian Holland” in the tourist guides. This area is situated below sea level and, like Holland, is the result of the reclaiming of marshes and swamps. The Veneto outside of Venice is a region without a center; there are neither inhabitants of the capital nor provincials here, but only numerous towns of modest dimensions, all with equal rights (Verona, Vicenza, Treviso, Padua, Bassano), none of which try to overshadow or surpass the others. They have only one thing in common: they seem committed to doing the opposite of what is done in Venice, or at least to doing the same things in a different way. Therefore, while legumes are an important ingredient in the cuisines both of Venice and of the rest of the Veneto, the capital and the region handle them differently. For the mainland part of the Veneto, dishes such as
risi e bisi
(rice with tender fresh peas) are characteristic. In Venice, this rice dish is almost exclusively made on April 25, for the spring festival of San Marco. On that day the doges would once solemly and publicly
sample the
risi e bisi
and the
castraure
. During the other months of the year, Venice prefers risotto, especially with shellfish.

In the rest of the Veneto, risotto is made with
zucca
(pumpkin), with asparagus, with Treviso radicchio, or with frog's legs (see “Risotto”). The swamps and the immense semiflooded zones close to the Venetian Lagoon abound with eels, which the local inhabitants call
bisati
. And only a simpleton confuses
risi e bisi
, rice with peas, with
risi e bisati
, rice with eels. Along the coast, lagoon and marsh birds, ducks especially, are hunted and roasted.

The Veneto was often used as a testing ground by aristocratic gastronomes and advocates of a culinary science who, when visiting their estates and dispensing advice to the farmers, experimented with new techniques of cultivation and selection on their lands, sometimes achieving truly remarkable results. In the fourteenth century, the physician and astronomer Marquis Giacomo Dondi Dall'Orologio imported hens never before seen from Poland and introduced them in the Veneto. Particularly esteemed for their beauty, they were meant to stroll around the marquis's garden. This species is today called the Paduan hen,
pita padovana
. It has long feathers, large wattles, and plumage that displays a remarkable variety of colors, from black and white to silver and gold. Paduan hens, according to the age-old recipe, are prepared with an herb stuffing and placed in an ox or pig bladder, which is then boiled in a pot of water. The air is let out of the ox bladder through a narrow tube, to prevent it from bursting. This type of cooking method is called
alla canevera
, or
canevera
-style (the
canevera
is simply the tube or hollow cane that acts as a vent).

We cannot overlook a Venetian specialty esteemed throughout the world: carpaccio. Carpaccio is thinly sliced beef, served raw like the Alba-style veal salad so loved by the Piedmontese (raw slices dressed with oil and lemon) or Alba-style raw beef (another Piedmont specialty, essentially a typical steak tartare). And yet, among all the different types of raw meat dishes that exist, it is the Venetian version that has managed to stand out. Today it is found on menus throughout the world. Its name transformed from that of a Venetian-born painter into the name of a dish, carpaccio can plainly be considered a local specialty. It was prepared for the first time around fifty years ago in Harry's Bar in the center of Venice. The most famous haunt in Venice, Harry's Bar was opened in 1931 by Giuseppe Cipriani, a virtuoso of appetizers and cocktails. Located not far from Piazza San Marco in a fairly inconspicuous alleyway, Calle Vallaresso, it was intended for informed, select customers. Frequent visitors to the bar included Ernest Hemingway, Somerset Maugham, various members
of the Rothschild family, Arturo Toscanini, Orson Welles, Aristotle Onassis, Maria Callas, Truman Capote, Peggy Guggenheim, Charlie Chaplin, and so on, down to Princess Diana and many other contemporary VIPs.

A number of interesting gastronomic innovations were created in this bar, all christened with names of artists: the Tiziano cocktail, the Bellini. Carpaccio is part of this same tradition. The story goes that this famous dish was born in the second half of the fifties, when a doctor prescribed that an illustrious Venetian lady, Amalia Nani Mocenigo, eat raw meat in order to combat anemia. And so Giuseppe Cipriani made her a fillet of beef cut into very thin slices (the fillet is first wrapped in wax paper and placed in the freezer for a quarter of an hour; at that point, transformed into a solid block, it can be cut into slices half a millimeter thick).

This thinly sliced, seasoned meat with arugula and the sauce later called carpaccio (Worcestershire, fresh mayonnaise, a few drops of Tabasco) took its name from Vittore Carpaccio (c. 1455–c. 1526), the painter to whom numerous rooms of the Gallerie dell'Accademia, in Venice, are dedicated. The name was chosen because an exhibit of Carpaccio was having enormous success just when Giuseppe Cipriani tried out his dish of sliced raw meat. Carpaccio's fame is now so boundless that “carpaccio” is synonymous with thinly sliced raw meat, and in recent times also with sliced raw fish and sliced raw mushrooms. The term no longer indicates a specialty, but a type of preparation.

 

Between 1949 and 1979, the photographer Fulvio Roiter portrayed the Carnival of Venice in celebrated images that were repeatedly displayed and published. In these photos, color is the undisputed protagonist: round sad masks, stark white faces that stand in contrast to the aggressive vividness of the costumes, with dark, glittering water as background. Roiter's tragic, distinct photographs, immediately recognizable, are often reproduced on postcards and calendars. Anyone who has seen them does not forget them: nocturnal landscapes, sickly hues, and, among hundreds of wretched Pierrots, not a single Harlequin.

In 1841 the historian Pietro Gaspare Morolin lamented: “The worst vice of the Venetians is gluttony,” alluding to the excessive gormandizing of the
buongustai
and the passion for rare and expensive foods. But in our era of mass tourism, when the majority of people who flock to the Carnival bring sandwiches from home and munch them as they walk the streets, leaving Venice with greasy wrappings rather than
tourist dollars, the Venetian catering collective, though bitterly mourning the once elegant banquets in exclusive, semiclandestine restaurants, has nevertheless developed a broad range of more than fairly good sandwiches, from
panini
(on hard rolls) to
tramezzini
(on soft sliced bread).

The typical sweets of the Carnival are intended to be consumed on the go:
galani
(dough strips),
fritole
(sweet fritters), and
crapfen
(filled doughnuts), variations on the theme of sweet dough deep-fried in oil. In Italy every city has its own variety, and in Venice the shape and name of the Carnival treats even change from one district to another. On the island of Murano they are called
zaleti
, but if you move to another island in the lagoon, Burano, you'll find another name:
buranelli
. In Milan these sweet fritters fried in oil are eloquently called
chiacchiere
(gossip, idle talk). The name recalls the Florentine term for the last Thursday of Carnival,
berlingaccio
, that is, the day for
chiacchiere
.

A Florentine gloss from the eighteenth century helps clarify how closely these two sweet joys of the mouth—the pleasures of language and of eating—are associated:

 

ERCOLANI
: But what does
berlingare
mean?

VARCHI
: This is a word that applies more to women than to men, and it means to chatter, prattle, jabber, particularly when others have their gut full and their belly (for that is what vulgar people call the body, or the stomach) heated by wine: and from this verb the Florentines derive the names
berlingaiuoli
and
berlingatori
, which they call those who take delight in filling their mouths, gobbling, and lapping; and they call the Thursday that comes before Carnival day
berlingaccio
, which the Lombards call
giobbia grassa
, Fat Thursday, on which day, by a common custom so prescribed, it seems that everyone is permitted to enjoy themselves, feasting and brawling, with gluttonous delights and delicacies.
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