Newsletter Intimate Weddings Future Destinations Pairings Packing Short Articles Contact AHA! FAQs Mailing List / Application Friends & Acquaintances Pricing Accommodations Meet The Director Upcoming Trips Our Style Of Travel Home
ART HISTORY ALIVE
 
The Italian Art of Eating From The Classic Italian Cookbook by Marcella Hazan Preface Not everyone in Italy may know how to cook, but nearly everyone knows how to eat. Eating in Italy is one more manifestation of Italian's age-old gift of making art out of life. The Italian art of eating is sustained by a life measured in nature's rhythms, a life that falls in with the slow wheelings of the seasons, a life in which, until very recently, produce and fish reached the table not many hours after having been taken from the soil or the sea. It is an art that has also been abetted by the custom of shutting down the whole country at midday for two hours or more. Fathers come home from work and children from school, and there is sufficient time for the whole family to celebrate, not just the most important meal, but more likely also the most important event of the day. There probably has been no influence, not even religion, so effective in creating a rich family life, in maintaining a civilized link between the generations, as this daily sharing of a common joy. Eating in Italy is essentially a family art, practiced for and by the family. The finest accomplishments of the home cook are not impressing guests, but are offered daily for the pleasure and happiness of the family group. The best cooking in Italy is not, as in France,to be found in restaurants, but in the home. One of the reasons that Italian restaurants here (in the United States) are generally so poor is that they do not have Italian home cooking with which to compete. The finest restaurants in Italy are not those glittering establishments known to every traveler, but the very small, family-run trattorie of ten or twelve tables that offer home cooking only slightly revised by commercial adaptations. Here the menus are unnecessary, sometimes nonexistent, and almost always illegible. Patrons know exactly what they want, and in ordering a meal they are evoking patterns established countless times at home. Italian food may be a midnight spaghetti snack after the theater, a pizza and a glass of wine, a cool salad on a sultry summer noon. But an Italian meal is something else entirely; is is a many layered experience far richer and more complete than this. Out of the potentially infinite combinations of first and second courses, of side dishes, of sauces and seasonings, and Italian meal, whether it is set out at home for the entire family or consumed in solitary communion in a restaurant, emerges as a complex composition free of discordant notes. Its elements may vary according to the season and the unique desires of the moment, but their relationships are governed by a harmonious and nearly invariable arrangement. There is no main course to an Italian meal. With some very rare exceptions, such as ossobuco with risotto, the concept of a single dominant course is entirely foreign to the Italian way of eating. There are, at a minimum, two principal courses, which are never, never brought to the table at the same time. The first course may be pasta either in broth or with sauce, or it can be risotto or a soup. Minestra, which is the Italian for soup, is also used to mean the first course whether it is a soup or not. This is because, to the Italian mind, the first course even when it is sauced pasta or risotto, is still a soup in the sense that it is served in a deep dish and that it always precedes and never accompanies the meat, fowl, or fish. After there has been sufficient time to relish and consume the first course, to salute its passing with some wine, and to regroup the taste buds for the next encounter, the second course comes to the table. The choice of the second course is usually a development of the theme established by the first. The reverse may also be true, when the first course is chosen in anticipation of what the second will be. If the second course is going to be beef braised in wine, you will not preface it with spaghetti in clam sauce or with a dish of lasagna heavily laced with meat. You might prefer a risotto with asparagus, with zucchini, or with plain Parmesan cheese. Or a dish of green gnocchi. Or a light potato soup. If you are going to start with tagliatelle alla bolognese (homemade noodles with meat sauce), you might want to give your palate some relief by following with a simple roast of veal or chicken. On the other hand you would not choose a second course so bland, such as steamed fish, that it could not stand up to the impact of the first. The second course is often attended by one or two vegetable side dishes, which sometimes may develop into a full course of their own. The special pleasures of the Italian table are never keener or more apparent than in this moment when the vegetables appear. In Italian menus the word for a vegetable side dish is contorno, which can be translated literally as contour.This reveals exactly what role vegetables play, because it is the choice of vegetables that defines the meal, that gives it shape, that encircles it with the flavors, textures, and colors of the season. The sober winter taste, the austere whites and gray-greens of artichokes, cardoons, celery, cauliflower; the sweetness and the tender hues of spring in the first asparagus, the earliest peas, baby carrots, young fava beans; the voluptuous gifts of summer: the luscious eggplant, the glossy green pepper, the sun-reddened tomato, the succulent zucchini; the tart and scented taste of autumn in leeks, finocchio, fresh spinach, red cabbage; these do more than quiet our hunger. Through their presence the act of eating becomes a way of sharing our life with nature. And this is precisely what is at the heart of the Italian art of eating. An Italian meal is a story told from nature, taking its rhythms, its humors, its bounty and turning them into episodes for the senses. As nature is not a one-act play, so an Italian meal cannot rest on a single dish. It is instead a lively sequence of events alternating the variable with the staple, the elaborate with the simple. . . . In the relationships of its varied parts an Italian meal develops something very close to the essence of civilized life itself. No dish overwhelms another, either in quantity or flavor, each leaves room for new appeals to the eye and palate, each fresh sensation of taste, color, and texture interlaces a lingering recollection of the last. Of course, no one expects that the Italian way of eating can be wholly absorbed into everyday American life. Even in Italy it is succumbing to the onrushing uniformity of an industrial society. In Blake's phrase, man's brain is making the world unlivable for man's spirit. Yet, it is possible even from the tumultuous center of the busiest city life to summon up the life-enhancing magic of the Italian art of eating. What it requires is generosity. You must give liberally of time, of patience, of the best raw materials. What it returns is worth all you have to give.