PRESERVATION SOCIETY
The Mediterranean diet is a compelling myth, but it’s peasant cuisine that truly captures the spirit of Italian food, with charcuterie front and centre, writes JOHN IRVING.
It’s peasant cuisine that truly captures the spirit of Italian food, with charcuterie front and centre.
Barring the inhabitants of a few coastal strips, especially in the south and the islands, it’s a myth that Italians adhere to a “Mediterranean diet”. They like to think they do, but they don’t. Mountains account for 40 per cent of the national territory and in the icy Alpine and Apennines winters you’d be hard pushed to get by on fresh fish and vegetables and fruit alone.
Charcuterie and offal – to be consumed only sparingly according to Ancel Keys, the American physician who elaborated the Mediterranean diet thesis in the first place – play a huge part in the cuisines of most Italian regions. Antipasti everywhere invariably feature boards of affettati, and even seaports like
Naples or Genoa pride themselves as much on their tripperie, or tripe shops, as on their fishmongers.
One summer I stayed with a family in Crotone, in Calabria. They lived near the harbour, and on my first day they served me stewed tripe and potatoes for lunch. The sea was glistening in the sun at the bottom of the street, but the food on the table wasn’t exactly what you would call Mediterranean.
As for Italian charcuterie, it can be roughly divided into two branches: salumi, cured pieces of meat; and insaccati, minced meat stuffed into an intestine and aged. It’s dominated, of course, by pork – a memory of times when most peasant families kept a pig and waste wasn’t an option. Cucina povera – the art of eking out a few basic ingredients and, in the case of charcuterie, preserving protein for the winter – probably captures the essence of Italian food better than the “Mediterranean diet” label. It’s exemplified by the salame di patate of the Canavese district in Piedmont, a salami of pork scraps, mashed potatoes and spices, cased in a pig’s intestine and eaten spread on bread or fried with onions.
There’s an old saying, “Del maiale non si butta niente” (No part of the pig can go to waste), the concept that now informs nose-to-tail cooking. A traditional winter ritual on farms across the Po Valley is the Maialata, a banquet in which every course involves one porcine titbit or another. Including the blood.
Blood sausages or puddings form an insaccati sub-category. In Piedmont’s Waldensian Valleys, they have mustardela, similar to the Basque morcilla negra. Made with bits of pork, onions, leeks and blood, it’s eaten boiled with mashed potatoes or polenta. In Tuscany the sweet-and-sour mallegato is a concoction of fresh blood, diced lard, nutmeg, cinnamon, pine nuts and sultanas, which is fried and served with beans.
In southern regions, pig’s blood goes not into charcuterie, but into confectionery. Nicola Larizza, my tobacconist in Turin, where I used to live, came from Basilicata. He and his family would blend the blood with sugar, chocolate, dried fruit and spices, and sprinkle it with hundreds and thousands to create a creamy dessert.
Some Italian charcuterie includes no pig at all.
For a variety of historical and cultural reasons, not to mention religious dietary regulations, the most wild and wonderful delicacies – not all of them recommended for the squeamish – are made with other meats.
In the pastoral region of Abruzzo, the shepherds driving their flocks into the mountains in spring and back to the plains in winter needed something substantial but non-perishable to eat during the long months away from their farms. What better than insaccati made from the meat most easily available, mutton. Hence salame di pecora, pinkish, mottled with fat and cased in a sheep’s intestine.
Further south, Puglia is a region of horsemeat lovers. My father-in-law, who came from the province of Taranto on the heel of the Italian boot, recalled seeing horses roaming wild on the beach when he was a child in the 1930s, and large horse farms are still to be found in the Valle d’Itria on the Taranto-Bari road.
The English-speaking world finds the idea of eating horse repugnant, but Italians are less sentimental, a trait they’ve inherited from the days when the country was predominantly agricultural and the horse had a dual purpose: as a draught animal and, at the end of its working life, as a source of protein.
In Puglia, they eat horseflesh fresh, especially in the form of brasciole (roulades), cooked in tomato and served with pasta. Elsewhere, it’s preserved. At one time, Roman taverns would serve you a plate of coppiette ciociare – strips of cured horsemeat linked in pairs and flavoured with chilli and other spices – with your flask of wine. In Padua, in the Veneto region, sfilacci, scraps
of horse, dried, smoked and smashed to pieces with a hammer, used to be considered poor man’s fare but now appear on the menus of even the smartest restaurants.
Back in Piedmont, in the area around Alba, burgundy-coloured salame di cavallo (horse salami) has always been considered a great delicacy, to be saved for special occasions. Here, donkey meat is also popular. Bale d’aso are exactly what their name says: “donkey’s balls” – spheres of donkey meat, that is, not testicles – a sort of boiling sausage, like an equine cotechino.
In areas where there were strong Jewish communities, goose appears. In the 15th century, under the auspices of Ludovico Sforza, the Jews living along the Po river in the Lomellina district of Southern Lombardy farmed geese and cured their meat to make salame d’oca, a salami wrapped in the skin of the bird’s neck, and, using the breast, the prosciutto-like petto d’oca. Similar specialties also survive in the Friuli region and in the town of Pitigliano, a Jewish enclave in the Tuscan Maremma. As does kosher beef sausage.
Which leads me to salsiccia di Bra, named after the small town in Piedmont where I now live. Today, my butcher Domenico Scaglia makes this sausage with 85 per cent veal and 15 per cent pancetta, but originally it consisted entirely of beef. It apparently came into being by royal decree for the Jewish community in nearby Cherasco, where there’s still a synagogue. Each butcher in Bra would have their own secret recipe and only divulged it to the person appointed to carry on the business. But now, thanks to EU regulations on transparent labelling, I can reveal that Scaglia’s includes mixed spices (Ceylon cinnamon, cloves, coriander, pimiento, nutmeg, mace and caraway seeds), Grana Padano cheese and local Arneis white wine.
The particularity of salsiccia di Bra is that it’s eaten raw. An elderly couple from Rome recently stopped in Bra to eat at the restaurant of a friend of mine, Giacomo Badellino. They wanted something local, so he served them an antipasto of salsiccia. They were shocked. “Is this meat raw?” asked the wife. “Sì,” said Giacomo. “Haven’t you people discovered fire yet?” asked the husband sarcastically.
In the Alps, charcuterie goes wild with the meat of the local fauna. In restaurants in the Val d’Aosta you’ll find bocon du diable, “the devil’s morsel”: sliced mocetta, or cured chamois venison, served with toasted rye bread rubbed with garlic and spread with butter and honey. In Friuli, pitina is a ball-shaped sausage traditionally made with chamois or roe deer venison flavoured with rosemary.
In the mountain valleys of Lombardy, finally, they make the weirdest salume of all, violino di capra, using goat meat or roe deer or chamois venison. It owes its name, “violin”, not only to its shape but also to the way it’s sliced – propped against the shoulder, swishing the knife like a bow. If, as Robert Burns claimed, the haggis is the “great chieftain o’ the puddin’-race”, the violino is certainly the Stradivarius of salumi. It’s Italian, but it’s far from being Mediterranean – literally, but also in spirit and in substance.
Cucina povera probably captures the essence of Italian food better than the “Mediterranean diet” label.