Italian Cuisine: A Cultural History

SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE

What is the glory of Dante compared to spaghetti? is among the memorable lines in this prodigiously learned yet always readable and entertaining book. The authors have in fact written a veritable diachronic encyclopedia, and how refreshing it is for once to read a chronologically grounded exposition. A chapter devoted to science and technology in the kitchen traces cooking techniques, utensils, and devices as they progressed from Roman antiquity through the Middle Ages to the present. In so doing, Capatti and Montanari connect various forms of government, regional topographies, and economies (since Italy’s well-documented regionalism leads at times to a specifically local culinary vocabulary and technology).

But what emerges from this book is that, regionalisms aside, there is a national Italian culinary culture. In a compelling study of the linguistic resources of cookbooks and menus, the authors demonstrate how the amazing number of Italian cookbooks published from the Middle Ages onward evolved from Latin, at the outset, through the courtly seventeenth-century French (and its on-going snob appeal), into a Tuscan-Italian still burdened by a thick web of gastronomic Gallicisms. In this richly documented chapter (really a history unto itself) recipes from the thirteenth through the sixteenth centuries are adduced to trace the Orphic naming of new products unknown to the early Romans. All this, with a full authorial awareness of political and social developments, makes for a fascinating narrative.

Equally intriguing is the history of military diets: how availability of products in specific locales of conflict and the need to feed troops on the battlefield led to new technologies and tested the limits of culinary availability. At the same time, the military regime, especially during World War I, forged a national diet that led to the unity of what we now know as la cucina italiana.

Linked to the military is the evolution of chefs’, cooks’, and servers’ attire in restaurants. The absurdity of highly formal tails for headwaiters, say, maintained in our own era of vestimentary informality, reflects the same military hierarchical order found in the emblem of the toque itself. Only the officers (maîtres d’, executive chefs, et al.) were allowed beards and mustaches; as immediate inferiors, underlings and servers had to be clean-shaven in deference. Another favorite chapter (chapter nine) traces the history of appetite. How much did medieval Florentine merchants consume to celebrate the prosperity of their nascent bourgeois society [which they themselves called il popolo grasso (the stout people)]? What foods constituted a satisfying diet for the glutton? How did this contrast with the regimen in monasteries? And how did the liturgical calendar, with its distinction between fat and lean days and its repertoire of symbolic foods, affect production, economics, and development of those specifically Italian culinary traditions so easily contaminated by their ancient Roman ancestry?

To be sure, there are other histories of Italian cuisine, but none are as richly documented as the present volume, which nevertheless remains eminently accessible and pleasurable. This monumental grouping of a constellation of culinary histories convinces us incontrovertibly of both the diversity and the unity of la cucina italiana.

Albert Sonenfeld

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.

CHAPTER ONE

Italy: A Physical and Mental Space

Mare Nostrum

Sausages from Lucania, ham from the Marsica, wild boar from Tuscany and Umbria. Eels from Lake Garda and the Strait of Messina, bass from the Tiber, golden bream from Lake Lucrino, moray eel from the Strait, turbot from Ravenna, sea bream from Brindisi. Sea urchins and shellfish from the sea of Misena, from Altio and Taranto. Cheeses from the Vestini hills, from Trebula in Sabina, the distinctively large cheeses from Luni, the pyramid-shaped variety from Sarsia, as well as cheese from Ceba in Liguria. Turnips from Norcia, and rutabaga from Amiterno. Radishes from the Alban Hills, onions from Marsi and Pompeii, and the smaller, sweeter sort from Tuscolo. Asparagus from Pozzuoli as well as the cultivated variety from Ravenna. Cardoons from Sicily, leeks from Taranto and Ostia, tight-leafed cabbages from Ariccia, and the big, sharp-tasting cabbages from Bruzia, Cuma, and Pompeii. Broad beans from Marsica, lentils from Gela. Stuffed olives from Piceco. Venafro oil. Semola wheat from Campania. Bread and sweets from Piceno. Salt from Ostia. Wines from Piceno and the Sabine Hills, Sorrento and Falerno….

We can scarcely accuse the writers of Ancient Rome, such as Cato, Columella, Pliny, Varro, Martial, Horace, and Perseus, of neglecting to tell us about the food products and culinary specialties of regions we would categorize today as Italian. The items just listed are merely the most famous among the many examples found in Latin literature.¹ Yet we cannot claim that the mental geography underlying these references corresponds to an idea of Italy. Place names are one thing; the myths embodied in the gastronomic culture of ancient Rome and in its ideological conception of food are quite another. The first of these myths was the Arcadian dream of domestic self-sufficiency (a little garden providing simple, frugal food), and the second, the idea of Rome as the center of the world, the universal marketplace that drew products from gardens far and wide and where every culinary resource, whether invented by humans or found in nature, could be located, purchased, and consumed. The first, Arcadian image denotes attachment to a local culinary culture, barely in contact with neighboring regions, those nearby Italic territories to which Rome could trace its roots. In a kind of inverted reflection, the other image sharply contrasted with this, evoking a world economy largely coinciding with the area around the Mediterranean, then the undisputed center of the known universe. For Plato, the Greeks were like toads around a pond.² This was more or less true for the entire population of the Mediterranean basin. Mistress of the world at large, Rome insisted on forging a link among all these people, effectively turning the sea—mare nostrum (our sea)—into a lake.

During the years of the Roman Empire, the Mediterranean was a formidable melting pot of different cultures and their diverse culinary traditions. It embraced all the diversity within reach and dispatched it onto a circuit of exchange that ultimately wound up in the capital, a gigantic commercial emporium and extraordinary center of consumption. Cultural and territorial identities did not disappear during the empire. Rome respected and absorbed them all, without bothering to construct new identities. The politically compact Italy of Roman times remained consistently outside the scope of this unifying principle. Indeed, Rome never identified itself with the land that had witnessed its birth but preferred the empire to Italy.³

From the Mediterranean to Europe

Europe gradually came into being as a cultural and geographical concept in the High Middle Ages, thanks to the confluence of Roman and Germanic cultures, which had been diametrically opposed to each other up to that time. From the culinary viewpoint, these cultures were very different and may even have seemed incompatible. While the ideology of the Romans, based on the Greek model, continued to regard wheat, grapes, and the olive tree as instruments and symbols of an agricultural and urban civilization, the Germanic population maintained close links to the forests, on which they relied for most of their food, obtained through hunting, gathering, and raising livestock. The culture of bread, wine, and olive oil clashed with the culture of meat, milk (or beer, at best), and butter, which implied a different balance between humans and their environment, a different way of conceptualizing and using the land.⁴

For a long time, these dietary models were indicators of two different civilizations, one of which—the Roman—despised the other, considering it inferior and barbaric. But when the Barbarians invaded the empire and gradually took it over, grasping the reins of power, their culture—culinary habits included—prevailed and finally became fashionable, as always happens with the customs of conquerors (exemplified by the triumph of the American way of life in the twentieth century). Hunting game and raising livestock were no longer considered uncivilized or undesirable activities. On the contrary, these now became the mainstay of the economy. At the same time, the Roman agricultural tradition spread among the so-called Barbarians, both by virtue of the prestige it still commanded and through the practice of the Christian faith, which was also gaining ground, having become fashionable during the early Middle Ages. It was not at all by chance that Christianity, which grew out of a Mediterranean culture, had adopted as its own alimentary symbols the bread, wine, and oil of the Greco-Roman tradition. (The first two became Eucharistic symbols and the third an instrument of sacramental anointing.)

Culinary Italy by Umberto Zimelli (1931).

Source: L’albergo in Italia (Milan: Touring Club Italiano, 1932).

During the Middle Ages, a new food culture was born from the encounter of these diverse influences. Now recognized as European, the new culture placed bread on the same level as meat and agriculture on a par with animal husbandry. The two dietary models no longer denoted opposing options but different components of the same value system. Bread, wine, and meat (especially pork, the primary player in the economy of the forest) were the main elements constituting this new identity. Liturgical obligations brought about the rest, requiring all Christians to rotate the consumption of fat and lean at different times of the year or days of the week, thus accelerating the fusion of the two culinary systems through the practice of alternating specific types of foods and flavors (meats, fish, and vegetables, lard, oil, and butter) on the dinner table at all latitudes of the continent.

The new alimentary culture did not emerge only through a process of accumulation that reflected the encounter of the Roman-Christian and Germanic cultures. It also defined itself through exclusion. By this time, on the southern shores of the Mediterranean, the non-Christian world constituted by Islam had developed a different dietary tradition. Muslims excluded wine and pork from their diet, regarding them as impure, but they allowed bread. In Islamic culture, however, bread was just one among many foods and was devoid of the special symbolic meanings it had accrued in Christian regions. As a result of these circumstances, a change occurred in culinary habits and patterns of consumption, and the cultural unity of the Mediterranean—which the Romans had constructed by sheer force—ultimately collapsed.

The mare nostrum thus became a maritime frontier, though traffic between one shore and the other did not completely cease.⁵ Saracen pirates never blocked the transportation of merchandise from the Orient to Europe. Indeed, thanks in part to the Arabs, use of the eastern trade route increased during the High Middle Ages, as we will show in the following chapters, citing some important examples. After the Crusaders set sail for the Holy Land toward the end of the eleventh century, maritime access to the Orient increased to a greater degree than ever before. What occurred in fact was the expansion or strengthening of existing routes, facilitating European access to goods produced in distant lands. Venice, which had already become the principal gateway for trade with the Orient, functioned as a center of distribution from which precious Oriental merchandise—spices and all other products—were dispatched to the heart of the continent. Thus, while goods traveled across the Mediterranean, they were ultimately destined for points beyond its shores.

To be sure, the southern regions of Europe continued to manifest a specifically Mediterranean character. The age-old melting pot is vividly evoked in a twelfth-century account by John of Salisbury. Here, while attempting to characterize the ostentatious excesses of the wealthy classes of his time, the writer recalls a banquet he attended at the home of an Apulian merchant, where guests were offered the finest products from Constantinople, Babylon, Alexandria, Palestine, Tripoli, Syria, and Phoenicia, as though the products of Sicily, Calabria, Apulia, and Campania were insufficient to adorn such a refined banquet.⁶ Furthermore, southern tastes and cooking customs never fully adapted to the habits of the continent. What made the cuisines of the south special and diverse was in fact their proximity to the Arab world, which, following its expansion into Sicily and Spain during the Middle Ages, included significant portions of Europe. But these Arab influences soon penetrated all of continental Europe also, giving rise to a system of food preferences that eventually characterized the whole of Europe, including England and Germany. The dominant element in this system was the culinary tradition of the south, a tradition already mixed with northern influences (we have only to remember the presence of the Visigoths in Spain or the Lombards, and later the Normans, in Mediterranean Italy). In short, despite the stubborn persistence of older models, a new mental and economic balance was clearly beginning to take shape in the Middle Ages, a new cultural space that we have already described as European.

Naturally, this space coincides mainly with the culinary practices of the elite. The inevitably local character of rural consumption was juxtaposed with the cosmopolitan tendencies of the European gastronomic scene (and would continue to be for centuries), yielding a sort of culinary international Gothic style still in evidence, despite the changes occurring in the interval, in the recipe books that appeared more or less throughout the continent toward the end of the Middle Ages.

From Europe to Italy

Within Europe, after the emergence of Europe, diverse languages, cultures, and nations—including Italy—gradually emerged. Italy established its identity in a very clear and relatively rapid manner, despite many contradictions. The fact that the country was not entirely a new invention facilitated this process. At least in the geographical sense, some concept of Italy had existed from antiquity, and this was maintained or reinforced in the course of the Middle Ages, partly because of the disintegration of the numerous roads the Romans forged through the Alps—increasingly perceived as the natural boundary of a physical entity to the south, which was naturally cut off and protected by the mountains. Early medieval writers adopted the imperial concept of Ytalia, a land divided into provinces, roughly corresponding to the model envisaged by the Romans. Elements linked to dietary and culinary heritage were certainly present in the delineation of this territory. In the sixth-century, when Narses, a Byzantine general, asked the Lombards to leave Pannonia for Italy, he enticed them with descriptions of a fertile land, sending his ambassadors with samples of the types of fruit and other produce that Italy can offer in abundance.⁷ Yet this Italy is essentially a geographical space, occasionally identified with political entities, such as the Regnum Italiae, which coincided only in part with the physical territory of the peninsula. It was not until the middle years of the medieval period, beginning around the eleventh or twelfth century, that the earliest signs of a real, consciously perceived identity began to emerge, an identity that was no longer determined merely by territorial belonging but by a common sentiment, a kind of solidarity based on culture and a way of life. As Le Goff puts it, the political and mental realities of the Italian Middle Ages have to do with Italians and not simply Italy.⁸ Salimbene of Parma, a monk and chronicler, had something similar in mind when he observed in the thirteenth century that the red wines of Auxerre are not as good as our Italian wines.⁹

Even as late as the fourteenth century, recipe collections still seem driven more by a European than an Italian logic. The names used to describe dishes, in the few cases where names appear, refer to Teutonic or Hispanic usage or to France or England (not to mention dishes that are clearly of Arabic provenance) no less often that they invoke local customs from the Italian peninsula. Yet local references are certainly present (and are much more specific than other references), bringing to light regional and urban realities that imply a pattern of mutual familiarity and exchange. The oldest book on Italian cuisine, the Liber de coquina, which is thought to have been written in Naples at the end of the thirteenth century, offers a recipe for Roman-style cabbage (ad usum romanorum), a recipe for small leaves prepared in the Campanian manner (ad usum campanie)—probably another cabbage dish—and another for beans in the style of the Marca di Treviso. In addition, we find an Apulian "simula, a Genoese tria, a Parmesan pie or torta (a term to which we will return), and a compositum lonbardicum," indicating the relish we know today as mostarda di Cremona.¹⁰ Comparative allusions are plentiful, giving the references a striking authority. On one occasion, having described a German-style compositum, the author of the text notes that "according to the Lombards you can add gambussi to the mix," perhaps referring to cappuccio cabbages.¹¹ Other fourteenth-century recipe writers mention a Roman "pastello,"¹² a Lavagna pie, and salt from Sardinia or, alternatively, Chioggia.¹³

How much importance should we attribute to these designations? We must admit that in many cases we are dealing with names given to mark a special occasion or to honor an individual, with little significance on the culinary level. It is quite possible, for instance, that Lavagna pie does not refer to a culinary preparation originating in the Ligurian town of Lavagna but to a dish thus named to celebrate the ascent of Sinibaldo Fieschi, count of Lavagna, to the papal throne. Giovanni Rebora has argued this point persuasively, carefully noting the more or less explicit Guelph or Ghibelline allusions that can be discerned in the titles of medieval recipes.¹⁴ In other cases, however, the geographical designation seems more closely related to the culinary context. Yet this is not the preeminent issue here; more important is the fact that such denominations (above and beyond their actual meaning) demonstrate that people generally believed in the existence of local specialties. As Flandrin notes, leaving aside the question of the originality of national and regional cuisines, it is clear that people distinguished them from each other.¹⁵ It is also clear that, within the broader European idiom, there was a special emphasis on the Italian dimension of gastronomic culture in its multiple local variants.

Celebration by the people of Rome (Urbino faience, 1560–1565).

We can confirm that this local culture was in some sense widely shared and that this effectively meant the birth of an Italian cuisine—understood as a common framework of exchange among different realities—not simply by studying the names of the recipes but, more importantly, by observing that these texts circulated throughout the Italian peninsula, emanating from the two principal areas of influence: the Angevin kingdom of Naples and the city-states of Tuscany.

The Liber de coquina, capstone of Italian gastronomic literature, was almost certainly written in Naples toward the end of the thirteenth or the beginning of the fourteenth century. As was pointed out by Marianne Mulon,¹⁶ who was the first to publish the manuscript, there should be no doubt regarding its southern character.¹⁷ Mulon’s claim is further supported by the careful research carried out by L. Sada and V. Valente, which is based on formal aspects of the text (such as the many linguistic elements that belong to the basic dialect pattern common to southern Italy, with a particular prevalence of Neapolitan and Apulian examples) in addition to its contents (the recipes and ingredients that we will discuss in the following chapter).¹⁸ This does not take away from the fact that the text is the expression of a syncretistic culture, international in character, of the kind that was emerging in Europe at the time and that in this case proved particularly sensitive to the Arabic influences of southern Italy. Derived from this work, with adjustments that generally take into account different regional realities, are the Libro della cocina of an anonymous Tuscan, which was compiled toward the end of the fourteenth century,¹⁹ and numerous other variants that Bruno Laurioux patiently sought out in various European archives, arriving at the conclusion that "the Liber de coquina was used in its diverse incarnations from the end of the fifteenth century onward and achieved renown all over Italy and abroad, in France and Germany."²⁰ The success of this cookbook on a broad European level may also be attributed to the fact that it was written in the international language of Latin. With regard to Italy, the extent of its dissemination over time and space is the sign—and partly the channel—of a gastronomic culture that, though hardly uniform, was widely shared.

The same is true for the second family of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century recipe collections, the first example of which is a text compiled around 1338 or 1339, probably in Siena.²¹ This book did not emerge in a courtly, aristocratic environment, as had occurred with the Neapolitan Liber, but was compiled in a city-state with a strong bourgeois character—though this adjective must be used with caution when applied to a social context such as that of the city-states of medieval Italy, where families of the traditional nobility shared the exercise of political power and cultural influence with members of the burgeoning middle classes involved in commerce, trades, and the professions. But it is very important to note that, unlike the recipes that originated at the Angevin court in Naples, which were aimed explicitly at an audience of aristocrats, or signori,²² those of Tuscan derivation address a group of friends. These men, known as the Twelve Gluttons (XII gentili homini giotissimi, XII ricchi goditori) are frequently invoked in the recipes, where there is a special emphasis on the notion of wealth, an emphasis that does not seem characteristic of the traditional nobility but rather of the new, moneyed elite.²³ It is not the court but the private home that constitutes the reference point in this second group of texts. Equally significant is the precision (completely bourgeois in terms of quantity, costs, and previsions) with which the texts specify the amounts of ingredients in each recipe. The Liber de coquina and the recipe collections that derive from it by contrast never bother to mention particulars of this kind but offer sketchy instructions that presuppose the ability to consult professionals rather than domestic cooks or perhaps even individuals who are simply curious or interested in the subject (such characters, avid readers of culinary manuscripts, appear in other sources, such as short stories).²⁴ Unlike the recipe collections of the earlier compilers, those of the subsequent group were never disseminated outside Italy. Yet they remained in circulation over a longer period of time—until as late as the sixteenth century²⁵—and reached all parts of the peninsula, from Tuscany to Bologna, from Liguria to the Veneto (if we include a version written in Venetian dialect), and even the southernmost regions of Italy.²⁶

Le fait de la cuisine, an important recipe collection compiled by Maître Chiquart, a cook at the royal court of Savoy in the fifteenth century,²⁷ merits separate consideration. Even if it functioned as a bridge between the cultures of Italy and France, it belongs to the French circuit, and its dissemination was extraneous to the Italian pattern of distribution that characterized the other recipe books. We shall in fact see how long Piedmont was destined to remain marginal to the historical development of Italian cuisine.

The Fifteenth-Century Definition of the Italian Model

By the second half of the fifteenth century the Italy evoked in culinary texts was already clearly delineated. This was in fact the mental map on which Maestro Martino de Rossi worked. Martino—the earliest important signature in the history of Italian cooking—compiled Il libro de arte coquinaria, a recipe collection that marks a genuine, qualitative leap in content rather than form with respect to the preceding culinary literature. Born in the Blenio valley of Ticino, Martino’s work gives voice to an interregional culture spanning the entire peninsula. Working first in Lombardy at the courts of Francesco Sforza and Lodovico Trevisani, he later moved to Rome, where he was employed by the Patriarch of Aquileia. Finally, toward the end of his career, he moved back to the north, where he worked for the condottiere Gian Giacomo Trivulzio. Maestro Martino may also have worked in Naples for a time. According to some writers, it was here that that he developed his professional skills,²⁸ which would explain the frequency of southern elements found in his cuisine and, particularly, a certain Catalan influence (which others explain simply as due to the culinary cosmopolitanism of the papal court).²⁹ In any case, Maestro Martino’s Libro—probably written in Rome between 1464 and 1465 and updated in subsequent versions, the manuscripts of which have fortunately survived³⁰—has a strong, interregional character, making a decisive contribution to the definition of an Italian model of cooking. The collection continued to circulate until the middle of the sixteenth century and then