Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well by Pellegrino Artusi, Murtha Baca, Luigi Ballerini Read Free Book Online Page B

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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 ofthe 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 ofmany 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