Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well (6 page)

Structured as the personal diary of a boy attending the last year of elementary school (and thus compulsory education),
Cuore
focuses on episodes involving children from different social classes: some will continue to study and become doctors, lawyers, politicians, professors; others will learn a trade and disappear from the protagonist’s horizon. All of them, however, are summoned to gestures of exceptional abnegation, in defense of motherland, family, and other “peculiar” values such as honesty and unselfishness. In recent years, the tales of these little heroes of the bourgeoisie, working class, and urban sub-poletariat have been frightfully castigated by “smart” critics who have chosen to show how impudently paternalistic and pathetic the author really was, not realizing, perhaps, that De Amicis had already ravaged his own writing, describing it as a kind of “watered-down Manzonianism, bereft of any courageous statements; a perpetual see-sawing between I believe and I don’t believe; a desire to make something heard without compromising it with words; a double-edged fear of making misbelievers laugh and upsetting the pious people; a constant catching of the heart by surprise, when it is the head that should be surprised instead.”
⁶⁷

Quite revealing, of course, is the distinction between heart and head, and the deliberate and, judging from his other works, reluctant choice De Amicis made in favor of the former: “Show me you are good-hearted boys; our class will be like a family,” implores schoolteacher Perboni upon meeting his class on the first day of school. Whatever our take on the book, there is enough poverty in it to convince readers of all persuasions that, even when not explicitly referred to, hunger must be close by.

Distressing signs of penury are certainly not the exclusive legacy
of fictional narratives. In accounting for the dissemination of Artusi’s book, which was “especially brisk among the bourgeoisie,” Professor Camporesi reminds us that the success of the book “could be called class-oriented” and that “Venetian farmers continued to eat their polenta and southern workmen continued to eat olives, fava beans, and tomatoes unaware that things were changing at the tables of other Italians.”
⁶⁸

The scarcity of food and the poor nutritional value of the staples consumed day in and day out by the lower classes were indeed the talk of the nation. Ideas were conceived, proposals examined, projects debated. They ranged from the bizarre to the tragic, and none was found that could resolve the problem. Professor Paolo Mantegazza, a pathologist and Darwinian whose lectures in anthropology and ethnology at the Istituto di Studi Superiori of Florence (where he began to teach in 1870) were assiduously attended by his good friend Pellegrino Artusi, suggested a truly astonishing way out of the predicament. Mantegazza joined in the widespread condemnation of the nutritional poverty of the food habitually consumed by the lower classes (“Of all his dishes, the poor city dweller prizes most of all his soup which is meager nourishment even if consumed in large volumes; the poor country dweller lives but for polenta and yellow bread …, a barely digestible and niggardly food that makes his blood listless and ill”). Having traveled extensively in Latin America, and having noticed the prodigious effects of coca leaves chewed by Andean peasants, he declared that their diffusion among the working classes would stymie the onslaught of hunger from which they perpetually suffered. Mantegazza, who wrote extensively on the subject, beginning with “Sulle virtù igieniche e medicinali della coca” (On the medicinal and hygenic virtues of coca; Milan, 1859), and who is likely to have been the first to advocate the introduction of the plant to Europe, made his point with a “symptomatically reassuring” stylistic levity: “A pinch of leaves chewed slowly and gently during the day helps us to smoke fewer cigars, it warms our hearts and lungs, and it sustains us above all during hard physical labor and especially during long
marches.”
⁶⁹
His “revolutionary” line of thinking met, apparently, with little enthusiasm.

A second, much more persuasive strategy would be adopted by agencies of the Italian government with the unconditional approval of the reigning monarch. Four years after the despicable handling of the Sicilian Fasci, thousands of people took to the streets of Milan to protest economic policies that had reduced them to utter destitution: they were brutally mowed down by the soldiers of General Fiorenzo Bava Beccaris.
⁷⁰
Fifty years earlier the Milanese had rebelled against the Austrian rulers of their city in an attempt, officially celebrated as “The Five Days of Milan,” to join the Piedmontese in the creation of a unified nation. God only knows how many of those who defied the Italian army with stones and sticks had reason to regret the patriotism of their forebears. After four days of fighting, one hundred people (two of them soldiers) lay dead in the streets. Four hundred and fifty people were wounded and eight hundred arrested. A month later King Umberto awarded Bava Beccaris the prestigious Cross of “Grande Ufficiale” for “the great service rendered to civilization and its institutions.” Two years later anarchist Gaetano Bresci assassinated the king.

There were other “solutions” to the problem of hunger: emigration and colonial expansion. Italy did not refrain from trying either. Between 1891 and 1911 millions of Italians resettled in North or South America, referred to respectively – on the basis of the time it took to get there – as
America corta
(Short America) and
America longa
(Long America). Central to the narrative of
Sull’oceano
, the theme of emigration, with depictions of the pains and lacerations caused by this massive uprooting, recurs in many other works by De Amicis, including
Cuore
. Significantly, one of the “monthly tales” punctuating
Cuore
bears the title “Dagli Appennini alle Ande” (From the Appennines to the Andes) and tells the story of a child who, all by himself, travels by sea and by land, searching for his mother (naturally!).

As for colonial expansion, Italy’s determination to find riches on the African continent proved to be costly both in term of human lives and international prestige. Not only did efforts to conquer Ethiopia,
for instance, bring nothing but pain to thousands of people in both nations, but the crushing defeat inflicted by the troops of Emperor Menelik upon the army of General Barattieri at the battle of Adwa (1896) caused the downfall of the Italian government and increasing political confusion while creating new economic difficulties for many Italian families. The only good to come of it was the myth it dispelled, that Africa was there for the taking by European powers. More important, it marked the entry of Ethiopia into the modern community of sovereign and independent nations.

A deplorable state of domestic affairs, no doubt. Yet we would have to look very hard to find any trace of it in Pellegrino Artusi’s book, which was first printed during a year that saw the official birth of the Italian Socialist Party and the publication of Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical
Rerum novarum
, a document of rare significance, focusing on the relation between capital and labor. While condemning socialism as a measure falling short of the mark and depriving humanity of some “indisputable” rights (such as a right to retain private property, no matter how achieved),
Rerum novarum
calls attention to the “spirit of revolutionary change, which has long been disturbing the nations of the world, [and which] should have passed beyond the sphere of politics and made its influence felt in the cognate sphere of practical economics.” It is quite explicit, about the “changed relations between masters and workmen” as well as “the enormous fortunes of some few individuals, and the utter poverty of the masses.” Its concluding words encourage the creation of representative bodies to mediate between the employers and the employed. When “either a master or a workman believes himself injured, nothing would be more desirable than that a committee should be appointed, composed of reliable and capable members of the association, whose duty would be, conformably with the rules of the association, to settle the dispute. Among the several purposes of a society, one should be to try to arrange for a continuous supply of work at all times and seasons; as well as to create a fund out of which the members may be effectually helped in their needs, not only in the cases of accident, but also in sickness, old age,
and distress.”
⁷¹
The document is a major step forward, if not in the history of social doctrines, then certainly in that of the Catholic Church, which for centuries had sided almost exclusively with the masters.

Rich as it is in historical and scientific information,
Scienza in cucina
scrupulously avoids any mention of strife and unrest. One could point to temporal and spatial circumstances to justify this avoidance. First, by the year 1897, when the book was undergoing revisions and enlargements, and its dissemination was getting under way, the increase in prices that would drive Milanese workers to despair as well as an increase in real estate values had begun to act as economic boosters as well. The following decade and a half turned out to be (surprisingly enough) a period of relative prosperity, which came to a halt with the unfortunate decision to enter the First World War. Second, Artusi conceived and wrote his book in Florence, a well-governed and fairly peaceful town, especially when compared to Forlimpopoli and the continuous troubles caused there and throughout Emilia-Romagna by the combined presence of a reactionary Vatican administration and Austrian troops charged with the task of making sure that the equilibrium between church privileges and popular ignorance would not be disturbed.

Artusi’s descriptions of Florence are not incongruous with those typically found in the literature of the Grand Tour; nor is his criticism much different from the words of annoyance we occasionally find in E.M. Forster’s
A Room with a View
and, earlier, in the letters, diaries, and recollections of proven admirers such as William Wetmore Story
⁷²
and his fellow Anglo-American expatriates such as Elizabeth and Robert Browning and Margaret Fuller, to mention but a few. “Surrounded by a smiling, picturesque sky … and magnificent promenades,” writes Artusi, “its citizens are born with artistic genius. Here there are museums, galleries, institutes for divulgement of the sciences, letters, and art, a beautiful language – the cradle of the Italian language – all things to make your sojourn exquisite, were it not for the continuous nightmare of being preyed upon by degenerate plebs …,”
⁷³
plebs towards whom Artusi – and here he parts with at least some of
the foreign visitors and expatriates – felt not at all attracted, even unconsciously. All in all, however, the gastronome and the city, at that particular point in time, were made for each other.

There is a third and possibly more profound explanation for the absence of Italy’s immediate and bloodstained history from the pages of
Scienza in cucina
. It lies within the boundaries of Artusi’s psychological persona, within his ability to smooth away any obstacle, to avoid contradictions and aporias. It is a “perverse” disposition and it makes an absolute winner of the person who can endure it (or to whom it comes naturally). As Artusi’s life clearly exemplifies, many advantages result from a deposition that represses even the slightest temptation to admit defeat. In a city with a great (and well-sedimented) past such as Florence, a
laudator temporis acti
like Artusi could easily ward off the dangers of a curiosity aimed at the radically new. His principal project was the enjoyment of results that could be achieved by exploiting rationally what was already known or foreseeable, given the “scientific” premises of the materialistic culture he subscribed to. “You can be sure,” he writes, “that the moral world is made up of combinations and fortuitous cases; the supernatural has no part whatsoever in human events.”
⁷⁴

Accustomed as we are to frowning upon bourgeois values, identifying them with hypocrisy and double standards, we forget that liberalism and lay thinking are part of the same package. In a country where culture had too often been confused with the dogmatic voice of Catholic clericalism, the convictions of a moderate “free-thinker” such as Artusi had a chance, if not to win, at least to place or show. In 1870, the Piedmontese,
manu militari
, took over the eternal city, and for fifty years afterward the reigning popes considered themselves prisoners of the Italian state.
⁷⁵
To get a sense of the tension that ravaged the Catholic world, caught between the devil of its nascent allegiance to a sovereign nation and the deep blue sea of mighty papal condemnation, let us resuscitate the old anecdote of a priest who, for the benefit of some ignoramus
(un mangiapreti?)
,
⁷⁶
translates the acronym D.O.M.
(Deo Optimo Maximo)
carved above the façade of
many churches, as
Demanio Omnia Manducavit
(Crown property office gobbled up everything), with
omnia
standing for the recently confiscated church possessions. Against this kind of background, consider how bold the following statement by Artusi must have sounded: “Indissoluble vows [such as the marital vows towards which he feels nothing but aversion and repugnance] are Medieval dogmas, obligations
contra natura
which have no more reason to be in the world of rationality and progress in which we live, therefore … for the good of humanity I call for a well-elaborated divorce law, a law that the most civilized nations of the world have implemented a long time ago.”
⁷⁷

Prior to the annexation to Italy,
⁷⁸
and after the relatively short but quite intense Napoleonic intermezzo, Florence and the whole of Tuscany had been ruled by members of the Hapsburg-Lorena dynasty. Under their “englighted despotism,” tolerated, if not loved, by Florentines, the city had become a refuge for the Romagnoli who had managed to escape the oppressive clerical rule under which they were born. Artusi had moved to Florence in 1852, together with his mother and father, “to deal in fabrics and silk and make himself a Florentine … who knew how to appreciate the services of the banks and the advantages of the first railroads.”
⁷⁹
A well-to-do member of society from birth, he confesses in his surprisingly dull
Autobiografia
to having nourished feelings of gratitude for his parents, “not for giving birth to me, which I consider a misfortune, but for leaving me the legacy of a good name and the means to lead a comfortable life.”
⁸⁰