By Francesco Belli
When I was asked to review Tasting Italy – A Culinary Journey by Alice Vollenweider, Haus Publishing, I felt curious and happy. Happy because the culinary and travelling arts – well, they are proper arts indeed! – are among my deepest passions; and curious, because if on one hand I am convinced that a foreigner will never be able to deeply understand Italy, on the other – as a good prophet of doubt as I am – I hope to be disproved… and also because the authoress has translated into German, among the others, Leopardi and Montale, two mythical figures of Italian poetry. And many dishes of the Italian cuisine can well be defined as poetry to the palate…
“It takes a long time to get to know Italy well. You need to travel around, visit cities, and experience everyday life in town and country; go to museums, talk to people; make friends, go to the theatre and the cinema, even read the paper and watch television...”. Thus the foreword starts, and it is a very true affirmation stressed by the fact that, as reported afterwards, we Italians are more attached to our native towns than to our national flag and therefore each region, and even more each village, has its own dialect and cuisine. And in fact it is to be said that the “Italian” cuisine does not exist: there are regional cuisines with their endless and delightful local variations.
Our authoress highlights that in the Italian restaurants food is better, on average, than in other countries; but rightly her culinary journey is mainly walked through trattorias, taverns and Italian private homes, because it is there that the true culinary tradition resides.
And the journey, that the reader will find to be not only culinary but also literary since the very first pages, starts in Como, better, in “The southern arm of lake Como which lies between two unbroken chains of mountains…” of Manzonian remembrance, with recipes running through the northern regions, such as “Pizzocheri” from Valtellina, the classic “Risotto alla milanese” and the “Pesto alla genovese”, before getting to Parma, homeland of the King of Cheeses: the Parmigiano Reggiano.
And here I have to open an aside: would anybody ever think about translating Stilton or Cheddar in Italian? Obviously not! But the good Tim Beech – who translated the book from German to English – “dared” to translate Parmigiano Reggiano in parmesan… to be pilloried and held up to public mockery! Other mistakes, or perhaps just typo errors, are scattered throughout the book, as well as inadequate translations: the delicious “Pappardelle sulla lepre” of Arezzo are here reported with an improbable Tuscan noodle dish: what a horror! If you do not know pappardelle, and the same is for any other foreign specialty dish, it does not make any sense to translate it: you have to eat it…
The journey goes on through Tuscany, the passion for which seems to be equally shared by the English and the Germans, so that Alice Vollenweider dwells on it for many pages; so how not to mention the renowned “Bistecca alla fiorentina”? Passing through Umbria we make a stop in Rome, where the authoress is a bit too confident in saying that the housewives buy fresh vegetables from the local markets or from the two big markets in Campo de’ Fiori – not Campo dei Fiori – and Piazza Vittorio Emanuele – not Vittorio Emmanuele: with the big traffic in Rome who would ever go to the city centre to buy vegetables? 50 years ago, maybe.
This and other anachronisms, but we have to keep in mind that the book was published for the first time in Germany in 1990 as a collection of recipes already published previously, and running through its pages nowadays is almost like looking at a long gone post-war Italy, or even of the nineteenth century.
Of Sicily are rightly praised, among the others, the “Arancine” and “Cassata alla siciliana”, while standard-bearer for Sardinia, the last stop of this journey, is the “Pecorino sardo”, a traditional cheese, to grate on the maloredus with “Sugo di pomodoro con salsiccia”.
It has to be noted that many recipes that the authoress attributes as original of a region or city actually are not, because for many so-called “Italian” recipes is often hard to find an origin but it is sure to have very many different local variations, perhaps one per village, like in the case of “Bruschetta” or “Melanzane alla parmigiana”.
Despite some inaccuracies and anachronisms, I would say that Tasting Italy is a book that helps to discover the many traditional tastes of the Italian cuisine – a unique reality in the culinary world – perhaps not only to non-Italians: because beyond being a book to read, it is moreover a book that can be a “fellow traveller” for a culinary journey to the Bel Paese to run through our kitchens.
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