Italian Identity in the Kitchen, or, Food and the Nation

By Massimo Montanari

Another entertaining and surprising food history by the scholar who has come to define the discipline, this volume draws readers into the far-flung story of how regional cuisine came to shape a collective Italian identity. From the Romans’ encounters with barbarian tribes to the revival and reinvention of local Italian cooking in the twentieth century, Massimo Montanari shows how regional food practices flavored the nation’s political and cultural making over time.

The fusion of ancient Roman cuisine, which consisted of bread, wine, and olives, with the barbarian diet, rooted in bread, milk, and meat, first formed the basics of modern eating across Europe. From there, Montanari highlights the importance of the Italian city in the development of gastronomic taste in the Middle Ages, the role of Arab traders in positioning the country as the supreme producers of pasta, and the nation’s healthful contribution of vegetables to the fifteenth-century European diet. Italy became a receiving country with the discovery of the New World, absorbing corn, potatoes, and tomatoes into their national cuisine. As disaster dispersed Italians in the nineteenth century, new immigrant stereotypes portraying Italians as macaroni eaters” spread, yet two world wars and globalization brought the reunification and revival of Italian national identity, centered on its global strength as a traditional regional food producer.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Release date: Jun 18, 2013
• ISBN: 9780231535083

Massimo Montanari

Massimo Montanari is Professor of Food History at the University of Bologna and one of Europe’s foremost scholars of the evolution of agriculture, landscape, food, and nutrition since the Middle Ages. His works have been translated into many languages across the globe.

Book preview

ITALIAN

IDENTITY

in the Kitchen, or Food and the Nation

Arts and Traditions of the Table

ARTS AND TRADITIONS OF THE TABLE: PERSPECTIVES ON CULINARY HISTORY Albert Sonnenfeld, Series Editor

Salt: Grain of Life, Pierre Laszlo, translated by Mary Beth Mader

Culture of the Fork, Giovanni Rebora, translated by Albert Sonnenfeld

French Gastronomy: The History and Geography of a Passion, Jean-Robert Pitte, translated by Jody Gladding

Pasta: The Story of a Universal Food, Silvano Serventi and Françoise Sabban, translated by Antony Shugar

Slow Food: The Case for Taste, Carlo Petrini, translated by William McCuaig

Italian Cuisine: A Cultural History, Alberto Capatti and Massimo Montanari, translated by Áine O’Healy

British Food: An Extraordinary Thousand Years of History, Colin Spencer

A Revolution in Eating: How the Quest for Food Shaped America, James E. McWilliams

Sacred Cow, Mad Cow: A History of Food Fears, Madeleine Ferrières, translated by Jody Gladding

Molecular Gastronomy: Exploring the Science of Flavor, Hervé This, translated by M. B. DeBevoise

Food Is Culture, Massimo Montanari, translated by Albert Sonnenfel

Kitchen Mysteries: Revealing the Science of Cooking, Hervé This, translated by Jody Gladding

Hog and Hominy: Soul Food from Africa to America, Frederick Douglass Opie

Gastropolis: Food and New York City, edited by Annie Hauck-Lawson and Jonathan Deutsch

Building a Meal: From Molecular Gastronomy to Culinary Constructivism, Hervé This, translated by M. B. DeBevoise

Eating History: Thirty Turning Points in the Making of American Cuisine, Andrew F. Smith

The Science of the Oven, Hervé This, translated by Jody Gladding

Pomodoro! A History of the Tomato in Italy, David Gentilcore

Cheese, Pears, and History in a Proverb, Massimo Montanari, translated by Beth Archer Brombert

Food and Faith in Christian Culture, edited by Ken Albala and Trudy Eden

The Kitchen as Laboratory: Reflections on the Science of Food and Cooking, edited by César Vega, Job Ubbink, and Erik van der Linden

Creamy and Crunchy: An Informal History of Peanut Butter, the All-American Food, Jon Krampner

Let the Meatballs Rest: And Other Stories About Food and Culture, Massimo Montanari, translated by Beth Archer Brombert

The Secret Financial Life of Food: From Commodities Markets to Supermarkets, Kara Newman

Drinking History: Fifteen Turning Points in the Making of American Beverages, Andrew Smith

ITALIAN IDENTITY

in the Kitchen, or Food and the Nation

MASSIMO MONTANARI

translated by

Beth Archer Brombert

Columbia University Press

New York

Columbia University Press

Publishers Since 1893

New York    Chichester, West Sussex

cup.columbia.edu

Copyright © 2010 Gius. Laterza & Figli. All rights reserved. Published by arrangement with Marco Vigevani Agenzia Letteraria

Translation copyright © 2013 Columbia University Press

All rights reserved

E-ISBN 978-0-231-53508-3

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Montanari, Massimo, 1949–

[Identità italiana in cucina. English]

Italian identity in the kitchen, or Food and the nation / by Massimo Montanari; translated by Beth Archer Brombert

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-231-16084-1 (cloth: alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-231-53508-3 (ebook)

1. Food—Italy. 2. Cooking, Italian—History. 3. Italy—Social life and customs. 4. Italians—Ethnic identity. 5. National characteristics, Italian. I. title. II. Title: Food and the nation.

TX360.18M6613 2013

394.1’20945—dc23

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [e-mail].

Jacket design by Julia Kushnirsky

Jacket photograph by Veer

References to websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

CONTENTS

Translator’s Preface

Preface: Italy and Italians

Before There Was an Italy There Was a Europe

Italy Is a Network of Cities

Models of Cooking Between Unified and Varied

Popular Culture and Culture of the Elite

People and Products That Travel

Preservation and Renewal of Alimentary Identities

Macaroni-eaters: How a National Stereotype Arose

The Artusian Synthesis

The Number of Italians Increases

The Italian Miracle: Between Modernity and Tradition

The Invention of Regional Cooking

Epilogue: In Search of Home Cooking

Related Readings

Index

TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE

Massimo Montanari has devoted some thirty years and thirty books to the study and diffusion of Italian alimentary history and, more broadly, to the role of food as culture. As a medievalist his training provided him with a rich background in the literature, politics, economics, and sociology of medieval Europe and of an Italian cultural entity that lacked a political reality, an Italy that was not to become a nation for another half millennium—not, in fact, until 1861. His prolific writings, erudite but never pedantic, investigating the history of eating, from the hunting and meat-eating of barbarians to the civilization of agriculture and bread, the significance of foods, the origins of customs, markets, locutions, products—all the many factors that entered into the alimentary culture of Europe, and ultimately of the New World as well—have reached a wide audience, from scholars to gastronomes. Thanks to his close readings of medieval and Renaissance literature and to his generous quotations, nonspecialist readers have been granted a rare glimpse into the medical thinking and early cookbook writing that created an Italian cuisine when much of Europe was still unaware of such refinements.

The present volume, on Italian identity in cooking, has a personal resonance for me. Long before I knew what, or even where, Italy was, I had become acquainted with its culinary identity, or to be more precise, the identity that had been exported beyond its borders. As an only child growing up in downtown Manhattan I was frequently taken to restaurants, most often Italian. My familiarity with Italian food was not, however, limited to restaurant dishes. My mother, a great consumer of fresh fruits and vegetables (I don’t remember ever seeing cans of either in our kitchen), was a regular client of the municipal market on 10th Street near Second Avenue, whose stalls were operated exclusively by Italian immigrants. They spoke their local dialects to each other and broken English to their customers. Before the construction of that indoor market, some of these same vendors and many of their earlier fellow Italians had stands, really pushcarts, all along First Avenue and the side streets. Many of those pushcarts were still to be seen when I was child, piled high with fruits, vegetables, dried fish, tripe, olives, all things never sold in non-Italian grocery stores. I remember eating artichokes, prickly pears, fennel, broccoli rabe, beet greens, broad beans, fresh peas that I learned to shell when my schoolmates ate peas out of a can. And when most people were eating iceberg lettuce, if they ate salad at all, we had romaine, escarole, radicchio, dandelion greens (my mother drew the line at garlic). Not even my college roommates had ever seen an artichoke.

However, in matters Italian other than food, I was abysmally ignorant. I had no idea of Italian as a language or of Italy as a geographic entity, let alone its literature or history. But I had a very intimate knowledge of the flavors of that world, or at least the southern part of it, since most of the immigrants who provided food in restaurants or markets were from regions south of Naples: the smells and tastes of cooked tomatoes,