Food in Italy

Wilson, Bee “Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat”

2013-05-20T12:59:13Z

on Italian Food History: Wilson, Bee “Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat”

Wilson, Bee (2012) Consider the Fork: a History of How We Cook and Eat, Basic Books: New York. This fascinating book traces the history of cooking technology from prehistoric to contemporary times. The author shows that “technology” is far more than the highly sophisticated pieces of electronic equipment that we call [Read full article...]

Mueller–Extravirginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil

2012-09-13T09:45:07Z

on Italian Food History: Mueller–Extravirginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil

I won’t reprint it all here, but I just had a review of Tom Mueller’s excellent new book on olive oil (Extravirginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil) come out. Find it here. ZN (Copyright Petites Propos Culinaires. Thanks to Tom Jaine for the permission to reprint)

Terroir and Parmesan Cheese: Update

2012-09-13T09:37:28Z

on Italian Food History: Terroir and Parmesan Cheese: Update

I had already written about my doubts concerning terroir, using the example of parmesan cheese as a case study. I’ve just had an article on my research published in Petites Propos Culinaires. I’ll warn everyone that it’s a polemic, not an academic essay. ZN Find a copy of the article here. (Thanks to Tom Jaines [Read full article...]

Italian or Italian American: 10 Food Myths

2012-05-14T13:47:11Z

on Italian Food History: Italian or Italian American: 10 Food Myths

Not a scholarly source but an interesting look at what North Americans consider “Italian” food. Well worth the click. ZN Grazie a Daniela Buglione per la segnalazione.

Ruiter—“Fruit of the Womb: Prenatal Food in Renaissance Italy”

2012-05-10T13:58:14Z

on Italian Food History: Ruiter—“Fruit of the Womb: Prenatal Food in Renaissance Italy”

Food historian Heather Ruiter recently posted a draft copy of her forthcoming essay on prenatal food in Renaissance Italy. Basing her research on Michele Savonarola’s Ad mulieres ferrarienses, Ruiter examines the sixteenth century author’s recommendations for pregnant women, comparing them to what modern medical science recommends. Particularly interesting is a passage in which Savonarola recommends [Read full article...]

Sharecropping in Italy

2012-05-07T09:29:44Z

on Italian Food History: Sharecropping in Italy

A recent video about Rita Bordone, a popular Perugian fruit and vegetable vendor, has set off a chorus of people upset that she is closing her little shop in Via dei Priori to retire to the countryside where she has her gardens. I had the opportunity to talk with Mrs. Bordone recently and was shocked [Read full article...]

Torta Al Testo and Traditional Italian Foods

2012-05-04T18:24:52Z

on Italian Food History: Torta Al Testo and Traditional Italian Foods

This blog has touched on the idea of “traditional Italian foods” a number of times, mostly in a somewhat heretical way. In a riff on Rachel Laudan’s fundamental essay on the subject (“A Plea For Culinary Modernism: Why We Should Love Processed Food”), I would say that most traditional food, isn’t. Laudan gives a shockingly [Read full article...]

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...]