Why Italians Love to Talk About Food by Elena Kostioukovitch Read Free Book Online

fusing—first in the kitchen and then at the level of the collective unconscious, in the unplumbed recesses of popular consciousness—that heterogenous, motley group of people that only formally declared themselves Italians. * 2
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    Thus, in his scholarly disquisition on dried cod, the great Artusi insists on the distinction between
baccalà
(soaked cod) and
stoccafisso
(dried fish): “The genus
Gadus morrhua
is the cod from the Arctic and Antarctic regions which, depending upon how it is prepared, is called either ‘baccalà’ (salt cod) or ‘stoccafisso’ (stockfish).” Among the
baccalari
, the erudite Artusi indicates two varieties of cod, Gaspé and Labrador: “The former comes from the Gaspé Peninsula, that is, the Banks of Newfoundland,” namely from America. 3 Naturally this species of cod was unknown in Europe before the discovery of the New World, whereas the Labrador variety is exported by Europe, from Iceland, where it is found in the Labrador Sea. The taste of this fish is more familiar to Italians. It was this specific product that authors of ancient recipe books were alluding to when they wrote of ways to cook
baccalà
. And it is this cod, caught along the coasts of Labrador, that the specialized, periodic publications of the Ligurian Accademia dello Stoccafisso e del Baccalà (Academy of Stockfish and Baccalà) refer to. 4
    Whatever it’s called, cod is in any case imported to Venice already sun-dried. Itthen undergoes complex processing. Before being cooked, it must be properly pounded (“
El bacalà xe come la dona, più la se bastona più la diventa bona
”—
baccalà
is like a woman, the more you beat her, the better she gets), and then soaked in water for two or three days, during which the entire surrounding area becomes saturated by a powerful odor. According to laws in medieval cities, you were not allowed to change the water of the soaking cod and throw it out more than once a day, since otherwise an uninterrupted deluge and stench would come from all the houses. City authorities in the Middle Ages allowed this water to be thrown into the drainage canal only at nighttime, in order to avoid traumatic consequences to the sense of smell and psyche of the more sensitive passersby.
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    Venice is quite different from the rest of the Veneto. In the lagoon city the eye is enchanted by the flaking walls of houses dating from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, by the aristocratic air of decadence, by princely salons whose Palladian floors are warped by time. In the Veneto, on the other hand, neat, tidy towns are set amid green hills, and the green of the countryside is dotted by the white of regal neoclassical villas, built by Palladio in the sixteenth century. It’s an idyllic landscape that Goethe exalted:
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    The magnificence of the new landscape which comes into view as one descends is indescribable. For miles in every direction, there stretches a level, well-ordered garden surrounded by high mountains and precipices.
    . . . We drove on a wide, straight and well-kept road through fertile fields. There trees are planted in long rows upon which the vines are trained to their tops. Their gently swaying tendrils hung down under the weight of the grapes . . . The soil between the vine rows is used for the cultivation of all kinds of grain, especially maize and millet. 5
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    The atmosphere in the bucolic Veneto is harmonious, industrious, cheerful, and folksy, and the cuisine is primarily that of the mainland, while in Venice, as one can easily intuit, it is entirely fish-based. In Venetian kitchens, and nowadays particularly in trattorias, little-known local fish and shellfish are generally served, such as sardines, sea snails (
caragoi
), clams (
caparossoli
), razor clams (
cape longhe
and
cape de deo
), 6 and mussels (
peoci
). They also serve clams known as
pevarasse
, mantis shrimp (
canoce
),and