Pellegrino Artusi (1820-1911), born into a wealthy merchant family from Emilia-Romagna, successful money-lender and dabbler in literature, is most famous for his cookbook Science In The Kitchen And The Art Of Eating Well (1891). It set a standard for Italian cuisine twice over: in culinary terms it remains a touchstone but also because, published so soon after Italian unification, it was the first great nationalist cookbook, with recipes from the different regions as the patrimony of all.
Perhaps what has been lost is the idea of pleasure as an ethical art...- Ranier Fsadni
His writing and commentary is as flavoured as the food he describes, a pioneer of anecdotal food writing and still, today, miles in front of most of the competition. That’s partly because Artusi lived in interesting times, his life beginning in the decade that Napoleon was defeated and ending in the year of Italy’s invasion of Tripoli.
One notorious recipe, for minestrone, is embedded in an anecdote of how a few days later his innkeeper succumbed to cholera. Other darker experiences, such as having his entire natal family taken captive by an outlaw, his sister raped and driven insane, he kept to himself, although they are part of the social and cultural background of the book.
Artusi was a well-fed lover of the kitchen. But I’m mentioning him today because of his recipe (no. 103) for Lenten Spaghetti. It’s simply pounded walnuts with breadcrumbs, confectioner’s sugar and allspice – a common dish in Romagna, he says, ridiculed by many but which children loved as did he (and as do I, although I prefer the dish with spaghettini, perhaps because of my fond childhood memories of tarja bil-butir).
I suspect that most Maltese coming across this recipe would have a different reaction to that which Artusi anticipated. They would not consider it ridiculous as much as puzzling. Confectioner’s sugar? In a dish meant for Lent? A meal meant to give pleasure in the season of fasting?
Yes, there may be other standards for children but, the modern attitude would go if one is going to mark Lent at all, for oneself and for children, one should mark its true spirit. Otherwise, one is superficial.
It’s a minor recipe but a major sign of a cultural gulf between the cultural Catholicism of Artusi’s world and ours. And, no, it’s not just Emilia-Romagna either. Mary Taylor Simeti’s great book on Sicilian food, filled with authentic recipes and nuggets of historical research, carries similar signs of cultural great faults.
She describes, for example, the feast of St Joseph (March 19), falling in the middle of Lent, as being marked by the ritual banquet known as the “altar of St Joseph”. It varies from town to town, could be a votive offering by the whole community or taken care of by a family grateful to the saint for a grace received. It could be simple (but massive) or highly elaborate.
In this case, one could argue that such banquets had a “famine feast” dimension. That is, they are rituals appropriate for societies where regular hunger is common, where poverty is the cause of meals missed.
It is certainly true that the laden altars of St Joseph were a source of succour for the poor. And eating – and the right to eat without restriction – was a symbol of more than nutritional potency.
Taylor Simeti cites the 1970s’ memoir of a Sicilian nobleman whose family had the right to hang a golden cauldron above its coat-of-arms, meaning that the family was exempted from fasting during Lent for services rendered during the Moorish wars, centuries before (although the memoirist ruefully comments that his mother made her children fast anyway, as an education in the noblesse oblige of solidarity with the poor).
It is in many ways a world that we should be grateful that we have lost. One of socially induced hunger and in which carnival was accompanied by huge feasts partly because all the eggs and forbidden foods had to be consumed before they spoiled during Lent.
But to reduce the difference to this is too easy. It does not explain, for example, why a Lenten sweet – like our own kwareżimal – should have been developed at all. It does not explain a widespread attitude today towards fasting as spiritually superficial.
The difference encapsulates more than differences in affluence. It marks a revolutionary shift. How we prepare food and how and when we eat it is never superficial. Artusi’s world – indeed, the Żejtun I lived in as a teenager – was a world in which the scent of food was a smellscape, just like the radio was later part of a soundscape.
Certain herbs and stocks were always on the fire, emitting comfort by their familiar smell before one ate them. During Lent, the smellscape changed, as did a thousand other things. Fasting was inseparable from the pleasures of feasting just as eating was inseparable from one’s personal and social identity.
It’s not that today the link between identity and eating has been broken – not in a world of diet programmes, bulimia, anorexia, food journalism and food holidays. In a world of global warming, the connection between food production, security and love of neighbour is stronger than ever.
Perhaps what has been lost is the idea of pleasure as an ethical art, involving something more meaningful than a bursting moment. The senselessness of fasting, to us, is a mark of this loss.
ranierfsadni@europe.com