How Did Italian Food Conquer the World?

Doesn't that just make you think of Bavaria?

I’m not disputing the title of John F. Mariani’s How Italian Food Conquered the World, since like Mariani, I’ve seen Italian restaurants all over the world, with some particular hot spots. In a recent trip to Kolkata, India, I noticed there were several Italian restaurants. Even though some were recommended by the locals, I did not eat in them.[1]

Nor did I eat in Italian restaurants in Japan. Japanese restaurants typically display photos or models of the food. In a land where there’s a cuisine built around the artful arrangement of food (kaiseki), Italian food gets presented as something you might refuse to eat on a dare. Even the worst red sauce joint might look at it and say, “did you just hurl it on the plate?”[2]

Then there was the trip to a town in Germany where it seemed that Italian restaurants outnumbered the German ones (and if you got tired of wurst and sauerkraut, well, there was Italian), including one where Germans sang Italian songs while waiters served Italian dishes. Many of these Italian restaurants are staffed by Italians. To make it clear: I am not disputing Mariani’s contention, just wondering if he’s made his case.

A small error of geography.

His book gets off to a shaky start, since on pages 7 and 10, I found two errors of fact. First tells us that vomitoria were rooms were Romans would force themselves to vomit so they could go back to eating; these tales of bulimia in antiquity are fantasies based on a fourth-century word for “stadium exit.”

Nor is it the case that Vasco da Gama visited Calcutta (or Kolkata, founded 1690) in 1498. How could he? He sailed to Calikat (modern Kozhikokde). Kolkata is Northwest India, Kozhikode in Southwest India, and they’re only separated by about a thousand miles, so just a small sloppy mistake, likes those plates of pasta in Japan.

Another of Mariani’s problems is that as a food and travel writer for Esquire, his real expertise is in destination restaurants, not food history. Does he make the case that Italian fine dining is how Italian food conquered the world? No. Does he know a lot about Italian fine dining. Yes. Does he name drop like a status-hungry socialite? Absolutlely.

Take these two sentences from the end of a paragraph:

Living above the restaurant until she died at the age of 97, Bice was known for her egalitarian approach to her guests, rich or not, famous or from nowhere, and she got along with everyone. Once when Sophia Loren entered the room, everyone applauded.

Can we assume that those who were neither wealthy nor famous (like humble and obscure Sophia Loren) were applauded when they walked into Bice? The next paragraph tells that restaurant was always packed when the designers showed off their collections in Milan. On this one page, Mariani finds room to reference Gina Lollabrigida, Ingrid Berman, Franco Zeffirelli, Gianni Versace, before he gets to Sophia Loren, and the fashion houses Burberry and Gucci.

Was it through Italian food nudging French food aside as fashionable dining that Italian food conquered the world? Given that those restaurants in Japan and India and some in Germany were the more humble sort (red sauce joints, really), it’s tough to say that the success of the Bice Group (from that one restaurant in Milan to locations around the world) was conquest for anything other than one company specializing in upscale dining.

Not wholly trustworthy.

It’s not long after this that in his discussion of upscale dining that Mariani simply asserts that by this point Italian food had conquered the world, without any evidence of this sudden capitulation. When did that happen and how?

Although it’s a bit of a non-sequitur in his telling (though undoubtably important in how Italian food conquered the world), Mariani has a good chapter early in the book on the rise of the Mafia-themed pizza parlor, part of a broader context of Italian food wrapped in ethnic stereotypes and slurs, with sniggering suggestions that Italian-Americans can’t really master English and they all have connections to organized crime. Long after Italian immigrants stopped serving up low-grade Italian-American food, it’s been adopted by corporate restaurant concepts.

In a way, it’s not far from the upscale dining, often just a different sort of restaurant packaging. Mariani doesn’t cover how Italian restaurants on every level aren’t family trattorias, but packaged by corporations (from Bice and Il Fornaio with roots in Italy to Buca da Beppo founded in the Midwest and owned by Planet Hollywood). That Italian food can be readily marketed on a global scale is part of this story. (The only type of food more relentlessly churned out by corporate America is, of course, the burger joint, though that’s only one segment of dining, while Italian restaurants can be found in several.[3] The number Dunkin’ Donuts locations in Germany indicate that the next level down is open for conquest.[4])

In Mariani’s telling, Italian food had yet to conquer the world when any supermarket in the United States already had extensive quantities of Italian food in their aisles. Again, this is Mariani focusing on the sort of dining he writes about in Esquire and completely failing to look supermarket shelves which have been home to Italian foods for decades. Ragú, now owned by a Japanese company, was founded in New York in 1937. I grew up with ads that told Massachusetts residents that “Wednesday is Prince Spaghetti day.”[5] Mariani doesn’t mention how the Italian food on supermarket shelves is increasingly the product of global food conglomerates. Maximizing the profits of companies with no connection to Italy or people of Italian descent is part of that story. When someone in the Midwest pours a jar of sauce from a company headquartered in Japan on pasta from a company headquartered in Spain and tells themself that they’re eating Italian, Italian food has conquered the world (without any actual involvement by Italians).

At turns inaccurate, gossipy, and too focused on Mariani’s experience going to nice restaurants for Esquire, How Italian Food Conquered the World never actually answers how. Yet, Italian food really did conquer the world. Great title. The book, not so.

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1. I ate Indian food in India, mostly Bengali food, since I was in West Bengal. I didn’t actually trust the Bengali cooks to turn out Italian food I wanted to eat. Besides, there was so much good, authentic Indian food to have.  ↩
2. Again, why eat ugly, poorly-made Italian when there was so much good local food to eat? Eating in Japan was an experience of almost no two restaurants alike (I had sushi more than once), since there’s such specialization in Japanese food. There was no overlap between the place the served only eel, the place served only crab, and the place that served only fugu. That’s a different blog post.  ↩
3. Throwing this in a footnote. Burger and pizza: fast food. Pasta places are typically family dining. Things slide from there to casual dining to fine dining. These are best typified by the beverage choices: no wine, house red or house Chianti (glasses and carafes only), a wine list, an expensive wine list.  ↩
4. As much as I like their Bavarian cream donuts, I just don’t see myself having one in Bavaria.  ↩
5. Founded on Prince St. in Boston in 1912 (just blocks from the site of the 1919 molasses flood). It is now owned by the US subsidiary of a Spanish corporation.  ↩

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Pride

We are proud to be a
community!

Pride, Celebrating Diversity and Community, by Robin Stevenson (Orca Books) is geared to middle readers (8-12). I would suppose it would be perfect for a teen who is becoming aware of LGBT relatives or even teens who becoming aware that they are lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender. I would be remiss in my review if I didn’t note that I, who was seven when the Stonewall Riots happened, actually learned something from this book.

No fooling. It wasn’t something that happened in the last year or two that had slipped my attention, but the origins of gay-straight alliances, which Stevenson notes started at George Washington High School in New York City in 1972. She further cites a 1976 pamphlet from the Youth Liberation Front (her research and scope is impeccable) which exhorted gay teens to come out, a message that still needs to be heard today by people who have left their high school days behind.

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“Speak Now” — Well Spoken

Read now!

I’d like to start with belated congratulations to Professor Kenji Yoshino for his marriage (truly belated; he married in 2009). The day Speak Now arrived at my door, my husband and I were watching Professor Yoshino on the The Rachel Maddow Show, where he was discussing the (then) upcoming Supreme Court hearing on same-sex marriage with Steve Kornacki (who was subbing). I made a comment about two gay men watching two gay men talk about same-sex marriage.

“Is Yoshino gay?” I noted that he was. “Is he married?” That I didn’t know, although I opened my copy of Speak Now and read as far as the dedication to Ron Stoneham. Perhaps? I didn’t need to read further than page 1 to find out the answer. Yoshino and Stoneham married in 2009. They have two children. In of themselves, they embody the sort of people that lawyers for marriage equality might want to have as plaintiffs, a point that he brings up in his book.

Speak Now has the longer title of Speak Now; Marriage Equality on Trial; The Story of Hollingsworth v. Perry (shades of the eighteenth-century long title, because that is a long title), but in addition to being the story of Hollingsworth v. Perry, it contains a lot of biographical information about Kenji Yoshino, bringing to mind the old adage, “the personal is political.” That Yoshino made Speak Now personal, even though he was not personally involved in the Perry trial in any way is something that gives the book much of its power.

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Princess Strikes Blow for Freedom of Writers

The Infanta Eulalia
in her writing tiara

It’s unusual for a member of a royal family to be supporting the independence of artists, but that’s what happened. In December 1911, the Infanta Eulalia defied the wishes of her nephew and went ahead with publishing a book. If you’re king, you get to boss your aunt around, whereas for the rest us, your father’s sister somewhat outranks you. Alfonso XIII was somewhat limited in what he could do about his aunt, according to the pair of articles in the December 6, 1911 Washington Herald, but he did hold the strings to the royal purse, and could cut off her allowance.

The king was fairly young, he was only twenty-five years old and had been king his entire life (his father died at the age of only twenty-seven)[1] His aunt, the Infanta Eulalia, was only forty-seven herself. The Wikipedia article on her uses the word “controversial” three times, twice in relationship to her books, one of which got her in the bad graces of her nephew in 1911.

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Some Thoughts On Genre

Some books. American 20th
century writers.

A friend once asked me if I shelf my science fiction books apart from “literature.” I don’t actually recognize a separate category called “literature,” and my books are shelved in Library of Congress order. This means that writers are grouped by historical period, not their names, or the intent of their fiction. It would get muddy otherwise. Should you lump Charles Dickens, a writer for the masses, in with the popular fiction, despite that his work is taught as literature today.[1] I shelve Dickens in with the other Victorians.

I read something today that I think got genre a bit wrong.[2] In his view, genre fiction puts character subordinate to plot. I could doubtless fill his home with genre works that gratify that opinion. He noted that (and I will quote here) that “people are good or bad (sometimes evil)” (I"m quoting, but not naming. I have my reasons.) And I could fill his home with genre works that refute that claim.

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The Broader Battle of the WCTU

Diana by Augustus
Saint-Gaudens. Thirteen
feet of smut!

If the Women’s Christian Temperance Union got everything they wanted, the United States would be a different place today.[1] A much more repressive place. We have the Women’s Christian Temperance Union to thank for Prohibition (thanks a lot, ladies), but it looks like we got off easy. An article in the September 30, 1894, New York Sun makes it clear that their ambitions went far beyond just alcohol. There doesn’t seem to be anything that they wouldn’t complain about.

It’s a long article, but in the end, I decided to include the whole thing, mainly to get the smug statements of Mrs. Martin. Mrs. Martin seems (by her own statements, at least) to have been quite involved in the late nineteenth century reform movements. The WTCU was active in the suffrage moment, and found that the United States Brewers Association was funding the anti-suffrage side.[0] [0]: As noted in the Wikipedia article on the WCTU.

As the article shows, politics (even the politics of temperance) can make strange bedfellows, particularly when there’s mission creep involved.

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A Charming Flirt

Are you just going to flirt,
or do you plan to get serious?

William Alexander’s Flirting with French is a charming book, though perhaps in the spirit of things, one should say, “ce livre, il a beaucoup de charme”[1] In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that while my flirting has not been as hardcore as Mr. Alexander’s, it seems to be of more faithful duration.

Like Mr. Alexander, I am a man in his 50s (I’m a little younger), I have worked in IT, and I took French in high school. Unlike Mr. Alexander, I didn’t struggle with French then or at any subsequent point.[2] Although my French is sufficiently unpracticed to fall shy of where I’d like it to be (a subject I’ll return to later),[3] my command of French is beyond that which Mr. Alexander claims in his book. Did I mention that the book is charming?

There are two narratives operating in this book. One clearly deserves the title Flirting with French. In it a middle-aged man embarks on a year-long quest to conquer the French language. Honestly, whether he learns a word of French or not is irrelevant: we’re there for the journey, not the destination. The parallel text might be called Dancing with Disaster, as Mr. Alexander wrote this while being treated for a serious heart condition, nevertheless doing things that took him far from his cardiologist. In one section of the book, he’s off for an intensive study course in Provence while under treatment for a potentially fatal problem. I think that would leave me too frightened to cope with irregular verbs.

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Knish — A Delicious Book

Yum!

Knish, by Laura Silver, Brandeis University Press.

Full disclosure: I have never eaten a knish.

“Does it mention Mrs. Stahl’s’?” was my mother-in-law’s first question when I told my her that I had read Laura Silver’s Knish. Yes, it’s a major topic of the book. “What about Yonah Schimmel?” That too. As with Ms. Silver, knishes evoke memories for my mother-in-law.

I certainly understand the nostalgia that can connect to certain foods. There are foods that bring me back to my childhood, it’s just that the knish isn’t one of theme. Thanks to Laura Silver, I can understand my mother-in-law’s reaction.

As a huge coincidence, this book arrived at my door while I was off in New York City. My steps took me on several occasions within an easy walk to Schimmel’s. Had I read this book before this trip to New York, I undoubtably would have made it a stop on my travels. Next time.

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Beowulf: A Long-Expected Translation

It’s been known for years that J.R.R. Tolkien had prepared a prose translation of Beowulf, but this was not among his published works until now. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is calling this a “new” translation, though considering that the author has been dead for forty-one years, and bulk of the translation dates from 1926, this would seem to stretch the meaning of the word “new.” Many of the earlier published translations of Beowulf were begun significantly later.

Beowulf is, of course, a much-translated work. Fourteen years ago, when Seamus Heany’s verse translation of Beowulf was published, I called my local Barnes & Noble to see if they had it in stock. The clerk asked me for the book title. “The book is Beowulf, but you’ll want to look under the translator’s name, Seamus Heaney.” He insisted on looking it up by title.

There was a long pause. “There are a lot of books with that title.”

“Yes there are. You’ll want to look under Heaney. That’s H-E-A-N-E-Y.”

“I don’t see anything by a ‘Shay-muss’ Heaney, but we do have a ‘See-Am-Us’ Heaney. Is that the same guy.” Happily, they had the book.

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Captain’s Soulé’s Book

Lyman Soulé's Book

A neighbor came over with a book question. She was sorting through her library and came across an old Latin textbook with a publication date of 1844. “Was that right,” she asked? Yes. Gail was also curious if the markings an earlier owner had made in it could be made more easy to read.

What she could tell was that the book was once owned by Lyman Soulé, who also wrote that he lived in Newton Falls, Ohio. That was an easy bit of genealogy work. Lyman T. Soulé was born in Massachusetts in 1832, and he died in Newton Falls, Ohio in 1897. He would have been twelve when the book was published, which means it was probably the latest thing in Latin for students at the time.

The "Captain" comes from the Civil War. He was an druggest with no previous military experience. He enlisted as a First Sergeant on with the Ohio 171st Infantry on May 5, 1864, but less than a month later he was promoted to Captain (June 3, just over 150 years ago). He mustered out that August, with less than four months in the military.

She let me flip through the book. I noticed that he had dates in the margins. You could tell when he studied various lessons. (When she offered to loan me the book, I was tempted, as it would be interesting to see what other marginalia he made, but I’ve had too many distractions today as it is.)

I showed her that the marginalia could be made more readable by scanning the page. Looking at the page, I could barely make out the words. Scanned and enlarged, they were clearer. Enhanced, I could read more of what Lyman had written in his book. \

Now single—but—will soon have the “Matrimonial heart” so that it ever [unclear word] He [unclear]
Ah Love!!!
One of the Black republicans

Gail had wondered about one phrase, since Soulé had signed himself “one of the Black republicans.” I pointed out that this was a term that the Democrats had applied to the Republicans for their abolitionist principles. Once meant as a term of derision, Soulé was probably adopting it as a term of honor.

I’ve read some of the claims that Democrats made about abolition in the era before the Civil War. They made a lot of claims that probably even seemed ridiculous then (such as that the Republicans would be marrying the daughters of former slave owners to former slaves). In a way, these almost absurd apocalyptic claims remind me of some of the wild-eyed claims made by opponents of same-sex marriage (ranging from removing the tax exemptions of churches that won’t perform same-sex weddings to arresting clergy who won’t officiate). But just like the claims of those opposed to abolition, the claims of those opposed to same-sex marriage have shown to lack any merit.

 

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