Snippets from the Italian Scene
On The Italian Diet, Then
I’ve been thinking a lot about eating lately, perhaps because I’ve decided it’s time to go on a diet, and this leads to some thoughts on diet in general. If you look at photographs of well-to-do Italians from the turn of the century, they look quite fit -- trim, vigorous, and very much like modern Italians, albeit in old clothes.
The poor were thin too, but for a very different reason, as I discovered when I researched “Through the Kitchen Window,” an article I wrote for the Journal of Gastronomy on the picture of 1900s Italy that emerges from Pellegrino Artusi’s Scienza in Cucina (which I subsequently translated as The Art of Eating Well, Random House). Put simply, they didn’t have much of anything to eat.
Armida Ferri, a friend who grew up in the country south of Siena during the teens, really didn’t want to answer when I asked her what she ate as a child. When prodded she finally replied, “Not much.” Further questioning revealed that her family subsisted mostly on greens. Mr. Cherubini, a retired country-born baker whose eyes would light up at the memory gathering with friends to eat plain boiled potatoes, told me his family (7 people) ate two pounds of soup meat per week, on Sunday. Other than that they ate beans, potatoes, and greens; they had chickens, but sold both the eggs and the birds. And he says they were well off. Compared to city poor they probably were, since they had access to a vegetable garden. Elisabetta’s grandfather was born in 1903 on our street in San Frediano, one of the working class neighborhoods of Florence. At that time the storefronts across the street from us hosted a tripe boiler, and every day people came to fill their flasks with tripe broth, which they used to flavor bread or rice. Those who couldn't afford to buy the finished product could at least enjoy its flavor.
Tuscany was, according to Pasquale Villari (a senator from Naples who championed agrarian reform in the late 1800s), relatively well off, because the farmers leased their farms and could afford to grow vegetable plots that then went to feed the general population as well. To the north and south, however, the system was based on sharecropping, with the farmers producing what best suited the landowner, and buying whatever was cheapest with their meager wages (corn for polenta in the north, and breads and legumes in the south). What this all means is that before World War Two a large segment of the Italian population rarely if ever saw meat, while many more ate it once a week if that.
Artusi himself touches upon this problem a couple of times, once mentioning a dish can only be made in a “great house, that is to say one where meat is served every day…”, and again in discussing bean soup, which he begins with, “People say, and it's true, that beans are the meat of the poor man. Indeed, if, in feeling around in his pocket, a worker unhappily realizes he doesn't have enough to buy a piece of meat sufficient to make a soup for his family, he will find in beans a healthy, nutritious, and inexpensive alternative. And there's more: beans stay with you for a long time, stifling the pangs of hunger...”
Given all this, one suddenly understands why the upper class ideal of physical beauty in 1900 pretty much matches the modern Italian ideal, whereas the poor valued weight, finding joy in Rubensesque proportions, until well into the 1950s -- simply being overweight was a statement of wealth, because one could afford to buy enough food to get that way. Fortunately (or perhaps in my case alas) the economic boom of the 1960s improved the general diet to the point that nobody sees the need to cultivate weight. Quite the contrary; Italians are tremendously figure conscious, and gyms fill up in the spring as people of both sexes work to shed the winter poundage so they’ll look their best when they hit the beaches in summer. I should have been born a century ago…
A presto,
Kyle Phillips
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