On The Naming Of Italian Recipes

A number of years ago I was watching TV and saw the mayor of a Ligurian town show how to prepare Panissa, an extraordinarily frugal chickpea farinata. It looked good, so I dug out my Ligurian cookbooks and wrote up a recipe; a couple of Ligurian residents commented upon it, and Maria sent me a recipe for Calentita, A Gibraltarian fried version of Panissa, which came by way of Genoese sailors.

Today, however, I got a note from Marla, who says Panissa is a northern Piemontese rice dish -- not the farinata made in Liguria. I dug out my Piemontese cookbooks, and By God, she's right: In the Vercellese Panissa is a rich rice-and-beans-with-pork dish, and in the nearby Novarese there's Paniscia, which is made with fewer beans, pork, and more vegetables.

So which is the real McCoy? Both.

The areas where the two versions of Panissa are made are several hundred miles apart, and while this might not see important today, in the past the peasants who made these dishes wouldn't have traveled that far, and even if they had chanced to meet, would have been unable to communicate because their dialects would have been so different as to be unintelligible (until the middle of the last century, outside of Tuscany only the wealthy and educated could speak Standard Italian, which derives from Tuscan). Put simply, the names arose independently.

I've run across this sort of thing before: The word Migliaccio can refer, among other things, to a rich, sweet pig's blood pudding or a sweet or savory fritter made with flour and pig's blood (these kinds of migliaccio are now rare because fresh pig's blood is difficult to find), or to a flat chestnut flour dessert made in Tuscany, or to a delicate Neapolitan Easter cake. Again, very different dishes from different places share a name.

Artusi touches upon the problem too, in La Scienza in Cucina E L'Arte di Mangiar Bene, the most influential turn of the (last) century Italian cookbook:

"Cacciucco! Let me say something about this word, which is probably understood only in Tuscany and along the Tyrrhenian coast, since the word brodetto takes its place in the towns along the Adriatic Sea. In Florence, on the other hand, brodetto is an egg soup served at Easter, made by crumbling bread in broth and thickening the mixture with beaten eggs and lemon juice. The confusion between these and other similar sounding words from province to province in Italy is so bad that it wouldn't take much to make a second Babel.

"Now that our country is unified, the unification of spoken Italian, which few promote and many hinder, perhaps because of misplaced pride, or perhaps because they are comfortable with their dialects, seems to me a logical consequence."

Unfortunately, uniformity still hasn't come, more than a century after Artusi's request.

But we can enjoy Panissa, and given the uncommonly cool wet weather we're having any of the three versions I know of would be appropriate today in Italy:

• Panissa alla Ligure, a frugal chickpea farinata.
• Panissa alla Vercellese, rich pork, rice, and beans.
• Paniscia alla Novarese, pork, rice, and beans with lots of vegetables.