Just two words can sum up a huge chunk of the reason why Italian food conquered the world: Italian mamma.
Sure, the food is just downright delicious. And there are all sorts of geographical and cultural reasons why this particular Mediterranean cuisine spread across the world and claimed the hearts of so many. But the female cooks of Italy can certainly claim some credit. Even those of us with not a drop of Italian blood love the idea of mammas and nonnas nurturing their families with wonderful homecooked meals.
In this week’s episode of , host John Dickie explores why Italian food is good and why the whole world loves it too. “That contains my great hero, and the nicest character in the history of Italian food, Pellegrino Artusi,” Dickie says when SBS Food chats to him about this last episode of the series.
“He’s the great father of Italian food, in that in the 19th century - he was actually a retired businessman – he put together the great recipe book, Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well, which was really the foundation of modern Italian cuisine.”
But this is also the episode, Dickie says, where the women of Italian food came into their own.
“I’m a historian and for most of the history of Italian food you’re obviously relying on documents, you can’t rely on testimonies, and the documents are overwhelmingly written by men. The recipe books are by the great chefs of the great houses, that kind of thing. And it’s really only with the 19th and particularly the early 20th century that women move to the forefront and in fact take over very quickly, in terms of the Italian popular culture of food.
“One of the nice things about this episode is that we were able to give them their place at the heart of Italian food culture.”
In Italy, even models and movie-stars embrace food – per esempio, Sophia Loren.
As Dickie writes in his book ,
Italian actress Sophia Loren prepares pizza, circa 1965. Source: Getty Images
“La Loren’s 1971 recipe collection, published in English as Eat with Me, says a great deal about the distinctive relationship between women and food in contemporary Italy. Sophia Loren set the pattern for a series of opulently proportioned beauties who have sought to incarnate some of the virtues of Italian cuisine. ‘Everything you see, I owe to spaghetti,’ she once quipped. Loren became a star by exemplifying a spunky and spontaneous version of Italian womanhood, and food was integral to the image. She first became famous in Italy by playing what she herself describes as ‘an explosive, sexy, blowsy Neapolitan pizza girl’ in Vittorio De Sica’s The Gold Of Naples."
In the sixth and final episode of , Dickie explains that before Artusi, there were no cookbooks written by women, but in the decades that followed, that changed. Women, he says, picked up where Artusi left off and "burnished their country's reputation for great eating".
In Delizia, he explains how oral traditions become recorded and shared:
"The culinary knowledge of middle-class women and their domestic cooks was a sunken treasure, a secret transmitted orally down the generations or shared in private letters because it was not considered worth discussing in public. After Artusi, that sunken treasure became available to all: female cookery writers took an increasing share of the market until they reached a dominant position in the 1920s and 1930s."
From Sophia Loren to the Italian-born Marcella Hazan, and all the thousands upon thousands of everyday Italian cooks, they've given the rest of us a gift. Grazie!
See Eating History: Italy at 8.30pm tonight August 25 on SBS. Find out more in our . Missed the other episodes? Catch up at .
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