While the Italians are sparing in their use of meat, it must not be
supposed that they do not know how to make the most of it when they
do indulge in it. They are born cooks--it's a great pity none of them
are ever to be found in our "intelligence offices"--and their experts
know as well as the great French chefs how to prepare a savory roast,
stew, broil, entrée, or dessert. In the making of sauces, the blending
of meat and vegetable flavors, the cooking of fish and shellfish, one
also finds much variety and local Flavor on the peninsula. Details
as to those points may be found in abundance in the forty pages Col.
Newham-Davis devotes to this country in his "Gourmet's Guide to
Europe."
To enjoy the national and particularly the local varieties of Flavor,
it is well to take only a room in an Italian hotel and eat in the
restaurants. I always do this, paying a little more for the room, which
is only fair to the host. The trouble with these hotels is that the
table d'hôte, though usually good, is not Italian but French, and in
Italy you want something different, to get an idea of the variations
in flavor of the spaghettis, the minestrone soups, the gnocchis, the
risottos, and so on. Sometimes the hotel has attached to it a locally
conducted restaurant, in which case it is needless to hunt for another.
For one of their gastronomic habits the Italians are justly denounced
by other Europeans--their slaughter of millions of birds, largely
blackbirds, siskins, green-finches, and other song birds, that yearly
seek a refuge among them on their flight to or from the north. All
efforts to curb this slaughter have so far proved unavailing. The
difficulty is double: the birds are very good to eat and the common
people cannot understand our point of view. Lina Duff Gordon, in her
book, "Home Life in Italy" (which takes the reader right into the
kitchens and the market places), tells about one of the hunters:
"Once, when he offered us a bunch of blackbirds strung together by
the neck, which he said made an excellent roast, we seized upon the
opportunity to deliver a lecture on the shooting of singing birds. He
listened so attentively that we rejoiced at having made an impression
on an important convert, until looking up with eyes very wide open,
he exclaimed: 'Ah! Sangue della Madonna! Then you have no sport in
England!'"
It is hardly fair to chide the Italians for making too much use of
garlic, unless we include in our censure the French--particularly those
of the Southern provinces--and the Spaniards, who not only put it in
their food but eat it raw in chunks. On this point I may be permitted
to cite from my "Spain and Morocco" some remarks on a peasant who drove
me from Baza to Lorca: "At noon he took his lunch, composed of ten raw
tomatoes, half a loaf of bread, a piece of raw ham, and a large bulb of
garlic consisting of a score of bulblets, which he took one at a time
to flavor his portions. It is doubtful if he expected another meal that
day, and in watching him a brilliant theory came to my mind:--perhaps
the poorer classes in Spain are so fond of garlic for the reason that
they have so little to eat; for, as it takes several days to digest
a bulb of it, they always feel as if they had something in their
stomachs."
In the best Italian restaurants, as in those of Paris, it is
understood that garlic, while delicious for flavoring, is so only in
homœopathic doses. Moreover one can always dine without garlic by
simply saying to the waiter, when ordering a dish, _senz' aglio_.
Whether Italian peasants eat raw ham, as that Spanish teamster did,
I do not know. Ham is not an Italian specialty. At Naples one may
get the genuine smoked article, but it is so expensive that only the
wealthy folk can afford it. But in his enthusiastic addiction to
tomatoes that Spaniard was akin to the Italians. How they do love
them--raw or cooked--more even than we do, if that be possible. Next
to cheese, nothing is so frequently added to the macaronis as tomato
sauce, either as we make it, or in the form of the paste which is one
of the unique Italian products that ought to be better known in other
countries.
The best tomato paste comes from the Province of Naples, where it is
made of a small variety of the fruit which has a special Flavor that is
much relished. This, to be sure, they do not waste on foreigners. What
is exported is, as we read in the "Daily Consular and Trade Reports"
(Dec., 1910), usually not even second rate, but "of the third quality,"
which is "of course, very inferior, because it contains little tomato
extract and is almost entirely liquid. There is no demand for it in
the Italian market, and it is prepared exclusively for exportation to
America, where it meets the requirements of the immigrant peasants from
Sicily. The latter, when at home, either do not use any tomato paste or
consume a certain kind of hard tomato paste (_conserva di pomidoro_)
which is made by the peasant women."
Consul Hernando de Soto further informs us that "tomato paste of the
first and second quality also is exported, though in much smaller
quantity, from Palermo to the United States, where it is patronized by
a more prosperous class of Italians and also, it is stated, by some
Americans."
Many more Americans would buy tomato paste were they sure of not
getting the third-class article after paying for the best, as happens
with so many things we eat.
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