La Cucina Manifesto

In 1891, after being rejected by countless publishers, a retired 71 year-old merchant and banker named Pellegrino Artusi decided to self-publish a cookbook. Weighing in at 790 recipes long, devoid of things like useful measurements and purposefully written in a Tuscan dialect at time when there was no singular Italian language, the book with the clumsy title Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well has never gone out of print. 111 editions, translated into 25 languages – the book so common, referred to only as L’Artusi, still shapes, defines and inspires Italian cuisine.

How is this so? Improbable doesn’t begin to describe the odds of a man who was born before his country - let alone an Italian identity - existed; lived at a station in life that did not require him to ever lift a cooking utensil would write the formative book on Italian cookery.

Italy, as it exists today, happened only after World War II. For the people now known as Italians, it took close to 60 years in the 19^th Century to form a nation out of disparate provinces overseen by the Bourbons, Hapsburgs, the pontiff and Napoleonic heirs. Artusi grew up and lived under the idea of unification and was himself an ardent supporter of Italian nationalism. As an intellectual, not a radical, Artusi looked to arts and letters as a way to forge the new Italian National identity.

Born in Romagna, which despite the sound of its name is not the home state of Rome and the Vatican, but a region stretching east from the Adriatic over the north borders of Tuscany.  In his 40s, he relocated to Tuscany to better learn the nuances of the dialect already considered to be the language of Italian literature. As book collector, Artusi had a fascination with cookbooks, owning works from pre-renaissance papal chefs. In l’Artusi, AKA scienza, the author often despairingly comments on the fussiness of these high dishes. In Artusi’s correspondence, he is rankled by the fact that cookbooks are either written in French or translated from French into high Italian. 

There is no polemic, no 19th century la cucina manifesto – laying out the importance of a national cuisine, instead a sole man collecting recipes from all parts of the Italian peninsula who regards the rice and fowl dishes of Venice with the same reverence as vegetables like the eggplant and tomato from the south – the first cookbook to call for what are now considered Italian staples but a 120 years ago, not so much – food indelicately thought to be of and for Turks, Jews and Spaniards (more on how Italian food became Italian in a future post).

While forward-looking writing explains how the book became popular, it does little to account for the book’s popularity over 120 years, considering food fashions change as quickly as couture and political ideas do. In the 1930’s one of Mussolini’s lieutenants, believing pasta made the Italians weak, once shot a plate of carbonara in contempt, yet L’Artusi remained in print through Fascist-modernist period.

When I pick up l’Artusi, I find an encouraging witty voice to cheer me on, gently challenging me to try new things in a strange way like Emeril Lagasse only more avuncular, less immediate. I find a man who approaches food like I do, not about calories and carbs but more as an occasion to tell a story to share ideas as much as food. Artusi uses ‘Il mangiare come metaphora del pensare’ – eating as a metaphor for thinking – some speak of a thirst for knowledge, Scienza has an appetite for life and I love to read it.

  

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