Around the Tuscan Table: Food, Family, and Gender in Twentieth Century Florence

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Summary: Why we love Florence and Tuscany
Review: Have you ever wandered through a Florentine neighborhood before lunch, smelling indescribably good scents wafting through open windows, hearing families talk to each other, and wondering what it is they are doing, and what they are eating? If you have, this book is for you. Around the Tuscan Table is an endlessly interesting and very readable saga of how modern Florentine families and Florentine food have changed in the last few decades, rendering the mysterious stone streets and people of Florence infinitely more real for the traveler and Italophile. And this ethnography also provides great recipes for simple, tasty Florentine food; the straccoto recipe has become a family favorite. Straccoto is Italian pot roast, with the sauce served over pasta as a first course. It is delicious.

This book is a marvelous antidote to the endless up-market mythologizing of Tuscany. It seems that we simply can't get away from `Tuscany as the promised land' - a place where rich Brits and Americans can buy a farmhouse and pretend, a la Marie Antoinette, to be earth-grimed farmers - of artisanal olive oils. Tuscany has become a kind of iconic play-land for the wealthy and bored cosmopolitan. But what of the Tuscan people? As a frequent traveler to Tuscany, I am thrilled that this book has been published. For too long the writing of all things Tuscan has been from the perspective of the expatriate - the émigré viewing a mythologized culture viewing the émigré, with the Tuscan landscape and people somehow magically preserved in a state of 19th century splendor, or squalor, depending on the purse of the observing expat and the state of the `villa' she or he has purchased. Dr. Counihan's book provides us with a welcome picture of how Florentines live and eat - as well as some of the best and simplest recipes for home cooked Tuscan meals available.

Rather than assuming an unchanging social and physical landscape, Dr. Counihan chronicles the changes in place, attitudes, habits, and social relations over decades among the family of her ex-husband. Her training is in anthropology, and she is a well-known and highly-respected scholar of food and identity, so it is inevitable that her book should focus on food as a metaphor for social change through time. However, this is no dry anthropological tome, it is readable, interesting, and highly informative. By relying on the many years that she lived in Italy, married to an Italian, she is able to give us a picture of Italian life not available to many Americans. She also teaches us about food change - how prosperity has altered Italian habits and attitudes, and how Italians feel about the many changes their country has undergone since World War II. We, as outsiders and traveling Americans, often view the Italian people as somehow unchanging, unmoving in culture and tradition. This book changes that perspective, allowing us to view the dynamism and modernity of Florentine families - and to have a much better understanding of why the streets of Florence smell so good at lunchtime... and why the mystique of Tuscan food and livelihoods is so compelling to Americans.