Food in Italy

In Italy, food is more than just something to nourish us and keep us alive. It is about passion and honor. There is nothing like it in America, but Geertz had a similar finding about cockfighting in Bali, about which he says, “where the amount of money are great, much more is at stake than material gain: namely esteem, honor, dignity, respect – in a word, though in Bali a profoundly freighted word, status” (Geertz, 71). In Bali, as Geertz describes it, the cockfighting is about much more than the money, it is a source of pride for these people. In a similar way, food is about more than the money for Italians. They must charge for it to stay in business and so they can support themselves, but it is not the main reason they do it. The main reason they do it is because they love it. This passion was so obvious when listening to the pizziolo, even though he only spoke Italian. I didn’t understand the words he was saying but I could understand the emotions he felt, and that is why he has been doing what he loves for decades.

Fast food in America is a quick experience, an escape from cooking every day. But in Italy even eating out is a personal experience. The people who work in restaurants want to get to know you, and each dish is so hand crafted to the individual. I ate the pizza I made myself, but even when it’s not made by me, it’s made by someone who clearly cares so much about his craft. When we were watching handmade pasta being made, the pasta maker told us that he prefers not using machines because that smooths the pasta, and you can’t feel the individual bumps that hold the sauce better. When we later ate that homemade pizza I could feel the texture, and that texture made it so obvious that it was made by a person. In America they try and standardize the meals so they all look exactly the same, trying to take away the human behind it. But in Italy every part of the experience is extremely personal, and you know a person made the dish. I think this connects to the idea in the Renaissance of individuality. They began to think that the individual had valuable contributions and to celebrate the differences. In America it feels like we are moving away from that somewhat in our postmodern world, but in Italy they continue to hold onto their traditions.

These traditions are another important aspect of Italian food. The important aspect to holding onto these traditions is that they don’t have to. To compare to the Balinese cockfighting once again, Geertz says “the fight displays a characteristic that does not seem so remarkable until one realizes that it does not have to be there” (Geertz 80). Food does not have to be made by hand anymore; we have machines that can mix and cut pasta to perfection. But the fact that they don’t have to stick to the old traditions is what makes them particularly significant. Could they use store-bought pasta? Absolutely, but that takes away from the personality and passion that is put into food here in Italy that is so rarely found in the US. Making things by hand and spending a long time at dinner, enjoying the company shows how the perception of time from the medieval through the Renaissance and to the present, and how Italy is holding onto that medieval perception of time.

But I would say the main thing I noticed about cooking in Italy is how important experience is. It was particularly noticeable when watching pizza and pasta being made, because these men had been doing their respective crafts for so long that they knew every intricacy of their work. The pizzaiolo knew how to adjust the amount of yeast and the temperature of water for the weather and how to tell the temperature of the oven based on looking at it and how fast the first pizza cooks. This comes from 25 years of making pizzas and learning the subtle differences in the texture of the dough. Even in cases where tradition is not followed exactly, it was evident how experience is crucial in making the food. When we made Tiramisu, Michela used a hand mixer instead of two forks or an eggbeater to mix the eggs and sugar, because she said it saved time that she could be doing something else. But even though she did break away from doing everything by hand, she still used her years of making tiramisu to determine the amounts of ingredients to add. She told us the basic proportions—1 egg to 1 tablespoon of sugar—but after we added the amount of sugar that we were supposed to, Michela added a bit more because she knew that would make the texture better. In all of these cases, rather than just following a strict recipe and putting in the right numbers of each ingredient, they know the general proportions but then adjusting based on their experience of knowing how the dough reacts to certain conditions. In many cases this is because the recipe has been passed down through generations, with each generation teaching the next. Because of this, the passion, personality, and traditions are passed down through experiences of each generation.

works cited:

Geertz, Clifford. “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight.” Deadalus, American Academy of Arts & Sciences, 2005, pp. 56–86.