Food in Italy

Food Museums in Italy

2012-04-14T17:07:44Z

on Italian Food History: Food Museums in Italy

The triumph of the Annales school is not in its long-running journal (which is likely ignored by most of Europe’s population), but rather in the acceptance of the “structures of everyday life” (to use a phrase from Fernand Braudel) as objects worthy of the inquisitive gaze not only of academics but also of the common [Read full article...]

Vaquero—Fishing in the Papal States

2012-05-04T18:10:03Z

on Italian Food History: Vaquero—Fishing in the Papal States

The stereotype of the Neapolitan and papal economies as stagnant under alternating policies at once too laissez faire and then too controlled is one widely disseminated in the years following Italy’s unification in 1860. In a recent article, Manuel Vaquero Piñeiro contests that characterization by following the story of the intervention of the papal states [Read full article...]

Gluten-Free in Italy

2012-04-12T14:25:12Z

on Italian Food History: Gluten-Free in Italy

I believe I am not alone in being surprised with the speed with which “gluten-free” and Celiac’s disease have become common terms. I’m not sure, despite being interested in food, that I would have been able to define the latter four years ago. I wonder if the seeming explosion in gluten intolerance is a product [Read full article...]

Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs Uses Local Food

2012-04-11T08:57:43Z

on Italian Food History: Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs Uses Local Food

A recent press release from the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs stated that the ministry, as part of an effort by the Italian government to reduce the severity of global climate change, was working to be more green. Two of the specific efforts cited regarded food: the Ministry’s cafeteria has begun to use 20-30% locally-sourced [Read full article...]

Making Traditional Sardenian Bread, Pane Carasau

2012-04-11T08:39:51Z

on Italian Food History: Making Traditional Sardenian Bread, Pane Carasau

This fascinating video shows the making of the traditional Sardinian bread, pane carasau, also called “carta musica” in Italian. The bread is extremely dry and likely originated where there was little opportunity to bake and bread had to keep for a long time (see also Puglian frise). The video was made in 1990 by the [Read full article...]

Laudan—“The French Terroir Strategy, and Culinary Modernism”

2012-04-14T17:07:29Z

on Italian Food History: Laudan—“The French Terroir Strategy, and Culinary Modernism”

Slow Foodists are unlikely to take kindly to this cogent and blistering criticism of the Slow Food movement and its gourmand-chief, Carlo Petrini. Rachel Laudan’s piece on Slow Food is ostensibly a review of Petrini’s 2004 book Slow Food: The Case for Taste, is in fact a history of the (conscious) development of terroir—pointedly referred [Read full article...]

Eat With Your Hands in Milan

2012-03-30T12:20:53Z

on Italian Food History: Eat With Your Hands in Milan

Eating with one’s hands is normally associated with the brutish Middle Ages, where trenchers and racks of lamb were the norm for the upper classes, not the refined elegance we associate with Renaissance eating (aside from the excesses in quantity). A number of restaurants in Italy have decided to return to this tradition, proposing plates [Read full article...]

Peace — “Political Theater and Ritual Rhetoric in the Slow Food Movement”

2012-03-30T12:19:16Z

on Italian Food History: Peace — “Political Theater and Ritual Rhetoric in the Slow Food Movement”

Adrian Peace’s 2008 piece about Slow Food’s Terra Madre event in 2006 is, despite the chronology, quite relevant today. Professor Peace, an anthropologist, attended the gathering in Turin in 2006 and describes it without the wide-eyed excitement of so many observers of Slow Food’s culinary (secular) mass. Peace mentions the standard critique of Slow Food–that it [Read full article...]

Siporin — “a Contemporary Legend From Italy”

2012-04-12T14:26:09Z

on Italian Food History: Siporin — “a Contemporary Legend From Italy”

For those of us who love a good food myth, reading Professor Steve Siporin’s article “A Contemporary Legend from Italy” is a chocolately pleasure. This urban legend, collected by the author in Perugia in 2008, relates the story of a would-be groom who has the engagement ring for his would-be fiancée placed inside a dark [Read full article...]

Giorgio Fidenato and GMO in Italy

2012-03-03T20:14:46Z

on Italian Food History: Giorgio Fidenato and GMO in Italy

In April 2010 contrarian farmer Giorgio Fidenato posted a video on YouTube showing himself planting six seeds of a variety of corn called MON180, Monsanto’s YieldGuard genetically modified mais. While this GMO mais had been approved in the European Union since 1998, the lack of a clear application process for permits to use MON180 on [Read full article...]

Holloway Et Al.— “Managing Sustainable Farmed Landscape…”

2012-04-23T22:15:11Z

on Italian Food History: Holloway Et Al.— “Managing Sustainable Farmed Landscape…”

It is difficult to find research published in English on sustainable food in Italy, and it’s a happy find especially when the article is a valuable source. This 2006 article’s full title is “Managing sustainable farmed landscapes through ‘alternative’ food networks: a case study from Italy.” Its authors review an intriguing farm scheme from the [Read full article...]

Italian Wine Overproduction and Underconsumption

2012-03-03T19:21:51Z

on Italian Food History: Italian Wine Overproduction and Underconsumption

I recently had the pleasure of a guest lecture for my course on The Business of Food in Italy, a lecture on the economics of wine by Dr.Stefano Castriota from the University of Perugia. Castriota described a European market which had too many incentives for overproduction. Wine consumption in Italy has shrunk dramatically in the [Read full article...]

Vineyards From Italy in the 1950s

2012-03-09T14:57:52Z

on Italian Food History: Vineyards From Italy in the 1950s

We’ve posted other modern pictures of the remnants of the agricultural system coltura promiscua (mixed farming), a system in which a polyculture of plants combine to make a highly productive field. The following pictures (used with the kind of the Fondazione Lungarotti) are from the early post-WWII period and clearly show the persistence of the [Read full article...]

Terroir and Parmesan Cheese

2012-03-01T14:49:18Z

on Italian Food History: Terroir and Parmesan Cheese

Terroir is a French word which literally means “territory,” but which usually is used to mean “the taste of place.” Food enthusiasts claim that there is a combination of physical factors (e.g. soil chemistry, climate, altitude, precipitation, etc) and cultural variables (traditional practices) which together give food products a non-reproducible taste. I just finished reading [Read full article...]

What Are Lupines?

2012-02-24T12:02:32Z

on Italian Food History: What Are Lupines?

What are lupines? Botanically lupines (or lupins) are a genus in the Fabaceae (legume) family: its cousins include peas, beans, and even the mimosa tree. The commonly-cited etymologies are fanciful and unsatisfactory: one is that lupins take over land likes wolves (lupus meant wolf in Latin), another has is that the legume was fit only [Read full article...]

Etymology of “Droga”

2012-02-19T19:57:12Z

on Italian Food History: Etymology of “Droga”

Our guide today to the Aboca Museum (a musem dedicated to herbal medicine run by the Italian herbal medicine giant Aboca) in Sansepolcro gave an interesting etymology which my special dictionaries later partially confirmed. Droga in Italian, and its obvious cognate in English “drug,” are both likely from Dutch or Low-German droge, which meant “dry” [Read full article...]

Beer in Perugia

2012-02-23T14:00:43Z

on Italian Food History: Beer in Perugia

Beer consumption in Italy has been relatively flat for decades but there seems to be an uptick, if not in consumption per se, then at least in interest. We’ve reported the University of Perugia’s center for beer research, but there’s something new in the center of Perugia. The name of the new pub is “Non [Read full article...]

Cannabis in Italian Cooking

2012-02-05T15:08:25Z

on Italian Food History: Cannabis in Italian Cooking

As recently reported by UPI (and featured by the Venerdì magazine on 3 February 2012), the Università dei Sapori (University of Tastes) in Perugia has begun adding a “magical ingredient” to some of its recipes: cannabis. This excites the likes of those for whom a Martini is practically a sin, but the university’s director hastens [Read full article...]

Curtis– “in Defense of Garum”

2012-02-19T19:20:48Z

on Italian Food History: Curtis– “in Defense of Garum”

As Robert Curtis explains, “Garum and its related sauces (liquamen, allec, and muria) suffer from a bad press. The mere mention of these fish sauces, products widely used both as a condiment and a medicine, usually evokes the image of an expensive, ill-smelling product derived from the fermentation of fish.” Curtis goes on to argue [Read full article...]

Coldiretti and the Mediterranean Diet

2012-02-12T20:13:45Z

on Italian Food History: Coldiretti and the Mediterranean Diet

The Mediterranean Diet remains, as we have seen on this blog on other occasions, a matter of some controversy. However, it is interesting that it has been taken up Coldiretti, the national farmers federation, as its battle standard in its war on trash food. ‘Coldiretti claims that Italian food education is going downhill because of [Read full article...]

Dario Cecchini and the Possibility of Sustainable Meat

2012-02-07T11:40:30Z

on Italian Food History: Dario Cecchini and the Possibility of Sustainable Meat

[This is an essay I wrote a while ago, trying to place Dario Cecchini in the Italian culinary tradition.] Dario Cecchini is, according to the Los Angeles Times, “the world’s most famous butcher.” The New York Times, the Guardian, and countless other newspapers and general interest magazines, not to mention specialty culinary publications, write paeans [Read full article...]

Asparagus in the Olive Orchard

2012-01-20T18:59:46Z

on Italian Food History: Asparagus in the Olive Orchard

In an article in issue 7-8 of OlivoeOlio (2011), Adolfo Rosati discusses the possibility of going back to the Italian tradition of mixedfarming (coltura promiscua), in which perennial polycultures have elevated yields because of botanic synergy. Rosati, in an article entitled “Asparagi nell’oliveto: E la produzione raddoppia” (Asparagus in the Olive Orchard: And the Production [Read full article...]

Manifesto of Italian Molecular Cuisine

2012-01-20T12:01:13Z

on Italian Food History: Manifesto of Italian Molecular Cuisine

Manifesto of Italian Molecular Cuisine 1. Any novelty must broaden the Italian gastronomic tradition. 2. New cooking and preparation techniques and new dishes have been studied and created to enhance natural ingredients and quality Italian raw materials. 3. Italian molecular cuisine will be attentive to the nutritional values and the well-being of the eater. 4. [Read full article...]

Pinocchio Comes to Perugia

2012-01-20T10:25:39Z

on Italian Food History: Pinocchio Comes to Perugia

This post was originally supposed to be on references to food in the writings of Carlo Collodi, primarily from his classic Pinocchio, but in doing some searching, I happened on an intriguing restaurant concept just outside of the city where I live, Perugia. The “Osteria di Pinocchio” is a restaurant and play concept created as [Read full article...]

Starbucks to Open in Italy?

2012-02-03T10:35:52Z

on Italian Food History: Starbucks to Open in Italy?

A news story of kinds has begun to do the rounds claiming that Starbucks will soon be opening in ‘Milan, Venice, Rome and Naples’, after years of absence from the peninsula. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. It transpires that this was all a huge practical joke. But the speed with which [Read full article...]

Wartime Cooking in Italy

2012-01-20T10:10:33Z

on Italian Food History: Wartime Cooking in Italy

Professor Carol Helstosky’s excellent book on Italian cooking from unification to today, Garlic and Oil, mentions a variety of cookbooks to draw upon as primary sources for those who would try to get into a housewive’s of the past’s brain as she takes out her knife and onions. One of the titles is La cucina [Read full article...]

Dangerous Ancient Sweeteners

2012-01-31T22:20:54Z

on Italian Food History: Dangerous Ancient Sweeteners

A fascinating I09 article on use of a dangerous sweetner in ancient Italy. SY Romans used an artificial sweetener, Sugar of Lead, to sweeten and preserve their foods without taking on additional calories. Sugar of Lead, likely the first artificial sweetener, is now known as the chemical compound Lead (II) Acetate, and it’s a poisonous [Read full article...]

Can Italian Cuisine Federate?

2012-01-15T08:48:33Z

on Italian Food History: Can Italian Cuisine Federate?

Those interested in Italian history likely know the famous quote by Massimo D’Azeglio: “L’Italia è fatta. Restano da fare gli italiani.” (“We’ve made Italy. What remains is to make Italians.”) The quote is so iconic and so apt, even today (perhaps especially today) that it is often misquoted and misattributed (mostly to Cavour). The point [Read full article...]

Response to My “disgustazione” Post on Ancient Wines

2012-01-20T10:13:06Z

on Italian Food History: Response to My “disgustazione” Post on Ancient Wines

A recent comment on the disgustazione post: “[It] seems that your disgustazione is pointed in a specific direction for reasons I don’t quite see. While you describe one possible path of historically accurate wines, there are whole strands of historical tradition that you’re ignoring! The Romans, to take an example off the top of my [Read full article...]

Convenience Stores Arrive in Italy

2012-01-15T09:25:24Z

on Italian Food History: Convenience Stores Arrive in Italy

Italy’s restrictive laws have long separated the sale of certain products, a remembrance of guilds past. A new law, to be introduced 20 January 2012, will “liberalize” the market and allow, among other things, gas stations to sell food. Thus the iconic American store, the convenience store, arrives in the penisola. ZN