ACROSS THE BORDER
From spaghetti with meatballs in the US to coffee in Melbourne, Italy’s food identity has evolved with the movement of its people, writes JOHN IRVING.
Italy’s food identity has evolved with the movement of its people.
When Pellegrino Artusi published his cookbook La Scienza in cucina e l’arte di mangiare bene (Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well) in 1891, Italy had only been unified politically for 30 years. His aim was to unify the country gastronomically by collecting its regional recipes. His readership was urban, middleclass and literate, but even as he wrote – and for different reasons – food was also on the minds of other Italians. Namely the peasants who, victims of a nationwide agrarian crisis, were fleeing the country to seek fortune across Europe and beyond. They might as well have been from a different planet.
Between 1876 and 1914, about eight million Italians sailed to “La Merica” – not so much a geographical entity as a dream of a better life. It was their hunger that shaped the popular image of Italian food worldwide. Their wonder at the abundance they found on reaching their destinations transpires from their letters home. “Here everyone, from the richest to the poorest, eats meat, bread and soup every day,” wrote one new Venetian arrival in Argentina.
Regional and family ties and shared skills made some emigrants stick together. As author Primo
Levi wrote, “Anywhere in the world, you’ll find a Neapolitan making pizza and a man from Biella building walls.” In Peron and Fremantle in Western Australia, Sicilians and Pugliese established themselves as lobster fishermen. Queensland received the inhabitants of the village of Conzano in Piedmont, who emigrated there to work as cane cutters in the sugar plantations. Today menus at the functions of the Piemonteis Association of Queensland feature dishes such as lengua con bagnet (calf’s tongue with parsley sauce) and friciulin dos (sweet semolina fritters) whose names are incomprehensible to Italians from other regions.
They still “eat in dialect”.
Other emigrants adapted to local demand. People from Barga in northern Tuscany monopolised the fish-and-chips business in Western Scotland (families who have since returned to the small town now stage an annual “Pesce e patate” festival). In London, Italian restaurateurs catered for the tastes of their British clientele. The speciality of Isola Bella, established in 1923, was suprême de poulard, while La Famiglia offered “French cuisine with Italian names”.
Little Italies popped up everywhere from Manhattan in New York City to Boca, the port district of Buenos Aires, and, later, Lygon Street in Melbourne. To the outsider these neighbourhoods appeared homogeneous, but inside they were babels of different dialects. “What do we have in Little Italy if not a number of villages?” asked the migration historian Amy
Bernardy in 1911.
Through interaction at street markets, food shops and eateries, enclaves coalesced. At the table diversity produced uniformity in a culinary model based on P-words universally identified with Italy: pasta, pizza, parmesan, prosciutto.
Not to mention pomodoro and peperoncino, which had originated in the Americas anyway, proof of the fact that the evolution of food identity is nothing if not a conversation between cultures.
To underscore their newfound prosperity, Italian communities in the USA added extra oomph to their dishes with local high-protein ingredients.
Hence hybrid recipes such as spaghetti with meatballs,
To underscore their newfound prosperity, Italian communities in the USA added extra oomph to their dishes. Hence spaghetti with meatballs, fettuccine Alfredo and chicken parmesan.
fettuccine Alfredo and chicken parmesan. Not dishes that an Italian would recognise, let alone eat, but now mainstays of the world’s idea of Italian food.
Pasta is arguably the foodstuff that best evokes the idea of Italianità, Italianism. Its consumption abroad became a badge of “diversity”. Locals stereotyped Italian newcomers derisively as “macaroni”, but ended up instilling in them a sense of national as opposed to regional origin.
The postwar years, Italians left their devastated nation in their hordes in a second major exodus. Many settled in Britain, where their arrival coincided with that of the Gaggia coffee machine, invented in Milan in 1947. Coffee bars sprang up in bombedout city centres as the Brits fell in love with the cappuccino, and trattorias with chequered tablecloths proliferated in London’s Soho. In 1954, while Kingsley Amis was pooh-poohing spaghetti as “coagulated flour-and-water” in his comic novel Lucky Jim,
Elizabeth David was introducing the public to “real” Italian country cooking with her classic Italian Food.
Cucina povera became fashionable, deserving of serious interest, and even polenta, a symbol of rural poverty gained star-billing on restaurant menus. More recently, non-Italian TV cooks like Nigella Lawson and Jamie Oliver have romanticised Italian food with a surfeit of colour and peasant chic. “A land of mammas and nonnas,” is how John Dickie, author of the Italian food-history book Delizia!, describes Oliver’s vision.
The food-and-wine writer Matthew Fort fears fallout on restaurants in Italy itself. “Tourists bring the experience of Italian food that they’ve enjoyed in their homelands,” he told me. “This bears little resemblance to the true food of Italy. Increasing numbers of chefs and restaurateurs are giving up the struggle to preserve the purity of local dishes, and give the tourist-customers what they want – the Italian food they have in their home country.”