Claudia Roden's the Food of Italy: Region by Region

Rating:
Summary: La Cuchina de Italia from top to bottom
Review: Claudia Roden is one of the distaff aristocracy of Mediterranean culinary journalism with Elizabeth David and Paula Wolfert. This book, 'The Food of Italy Region by Region' is an adaptation of a series of newspaper articles written for the Sunday Times of London. Each of the 19 larger regions has a chapter devoted to the traditional dishes and wines of the region. The cuisine of two very small regions, Valle D'Aosta and Molise are grouped together larger neighbors, Piedmont and Abruzzi respectively. Each chapter begins with an essay on the food of that region followed by several recipes. Emilia-Romagna, for example gets 21 example recipes.

Each essay includes a section on the wines of the region. This was one of the most interesting aspects of the work to someone who knows very little of wines. Before reading this, I was under the impression that Italian vintage wine culture was hundreds of years old. Wine was certainly produced in Italy since before the Roman Empire, yet up to World War II, it was largely the production of everyday wine with few quality exports. Only in the last 50 years has Italy developed the same kind of quality labels to rival those of France. I must say they have done a very good job of it.

I was also surprised by the relatively recent awareness of regional cuisine in Italy, as it never really codified its culinary traditions in the same way France did so well. I am delighted, however that there is a book, which ties together all the material in my five (5) foot shelf of books on regional Italian cuisine. It is especially interesting to see the split in Italian cuisine below Rome into the very Mediterranean cooking of Campania, Calabria, Apulia, and Sicily versus the more European cooking of, for example, Tuscany, Emilia Romagna, Piedmont, and Friuli. In the north, for example, you have soft pastas and gnocchi with family resemblances to Germanic dumplings. In the south, for example, you have abundant olive oil and dried tomatoes linked closely to the cuisines of Greece and North Africa.

The author presents close to 300 recipes by region, but also gives a list of recipes by these food types:
Appetizers
Stuffed Vegetables
Fried Foods
Cheese and Eggs
Seafood Antipasti
Pizzas, Breads, and Pies
Soups
Pasta
Dumplings
Risottos
Polentas
Fish and Shellfish
Meat, Poultry, and Game
Side Dishes, Salads, and Vegetables
Desserts

This is excellent Sunday Supplement journalism and very good culinary reporting. I found very few differences of opinion between the author and Mario Batali, my gold standard for Italian regional cuisine. In the case of any disagreements and any other evidence, I would give Mario the nod simply because he is a professional chef in addition to being an interpreter of Italian cuisine and the author is not a professional chef. That means that in spite of how expert Ms. Roden's reporting may be, she has not prepared this food in the restaurant environments on which she reports.

One disagreement I detected is in pasta making technique. Ms. Roden cites the 'well' or 'volcano' method for incorporating liquid into flour to make pasta which Mario demonstrates often. Ms. Roden deviates from this practice by saying that the operation may be easier if done in a bowl instead of on a flat surface, yet, there is an obviously good reason for doing it on a flat surface. It allows one to use 'just enough' of the flour for the liquid, and no more, depending on the humidity of the air and the nature of the flour. I suspect Mario's doctrine is closer to how Noni actually does it in Parma.

Another disagreement is in the 'lipid of choice' where a location may have both olive oil and rape seed oil or other neutral oil available. Mario always uses extra virgin olive oil and claims that where olive oil was available, it was always used in preference to other oils. I am willing to give Ms. Roden the benefit of the doubt here, as I suspect that rape seed oil was probably less expensive than olive oil when the rape seed was produced locally.

A third disagreement is in the use of canned versus whole tomatoes in cooking. Mario always uses canned tomatoes for sauces while Ms. Roden specifies fresh whole tomatoes in several of her recipes. I have a hunch that Noni in Campania used both, depending on whether tomatoes were in season or not, especially since Noni was doing the canning anyway.

The most exciting conclusion I draw from this book is the refutation of John Thorne's theory that the greatness of Italian cuisine stems from the emulation, in poverty of the glories of the cuisine of the Roman Empire. Roden specifically states that except for a brief period in the Renaissance and in very recent scholarship, there is little Italian reference to the cuisine of the empire. Rather, it is much more likely that the huge diversity in Italian cuisine comes from the interaction of a fabulous variety of produce, greatly enriched by new world products like tomatoes, corn, and chilis, with the cultural overlays from Islam, Spain, Norman Europe, France, and Austria-Hungary. The most dismal message I get is the abandonment of traditional rural agriculture; similar to a trend reported in rural France.

This is not your typical Time-Life or Williams-Sonoma glossy photo treatment. This is the read deal with hundreds of relatively easy recipes based on very accessible ingredients using easy techniques, all for a very reasonable price. Unfortunately, Ms. Roden did not have the answer to why Thursday is gnocchi day in Rome.