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| The Anna Tasca Lanza Cooking School, Case Vecchie, Regaleali, Sicily |
Introduction: the €50,000,000 peasant food
The estimated Mafia revenue alone in the Italian food chain is over €50,000,000 per year, according to a 2011 article in Venerdì magazine.[1] At stake is the high revenue of the global marketplace for Italian cuisine, whose international consumers are visible on practically every street corner in New York, in every market that has a box of pasta and every café that offers a cappuccino.[2]
At the same time, historians say that many of the most commercially successful forms of Italian cuisine in our time are derived from peasant traditions.[3] In other words, our pasta today is in large part €50,000,000 peasant food.
I am interested in projects that would make today’s highly lucrative Sicilian “peasant cuisine” into a source of income and opportunity for the least economically wealthy, some of them the direct inheritors of peasant customs.
As cuisine travelers come in search of local food traditions, there is a possibility for community development in Sicily. In this sense, I am interested in characteristically Sicilian examples of the phenomenon that local food is good for local communities.[4]
At the same time, historians say that many of the most commercially successful forms of Italian cuisine in our time are derived from peasant traditions.[3] In other words, our pasta today is in large part €50,000,000 peasant food.
I am interested in projects that would make today’s highly lucrative Sicilian “peasant cuisine” into a source of income and opportunity for the least economically wealthy, some of them the direct inheritors of peasant customs.
As cuisine travelers come in search of local food traditions, there is a possibility for community development in Sicily. In this sense, I am interested in characteristically Sicilian examples of the phenomenon that local food is good for local communities.[4]
Sacred Flavors of Sicily
Fabrizia
Lanza is a chef and author who runs a cooking school with the organic harvests
of her family aristocratic estate in Sicily (http://www.annatascalanza.com). Starting in the fall of 2013, she will produce a film documentary about
ritual cuisine in religious festivals in the nearby Aeolian Islands, with some
residents among the most economically challenged
(http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sacredsicily/sacred-flavors-of-sicily-religious-festivals-and-s). For example, a regional ritual for the Festival
of San Giuseppe on March 19 is to create elaborate altars with breads in
fanciful symbolic shapes, which, in turn, are meant to feed the poorest in some
communities.
Lanza’s
project is spearheaded not by a non-government organization or a local civic
tourist office, but rather by her own cooking school enterprise, whose
commitment to cultural history and ecological biodiversity is an attractive
calling card to her clients, such as the lovely British couple I met there in
July 2013, each with a job in public service and an interest in entering into
the culture of the places they visit on vacation.[5] Before returning to Sicily to run the cooking
school, Fabrizia Lanza was a published art historian, and she means for her
documentary on ritual culinary practices in the Aeolian Islands to serve as a
record of traditional artifacts and their social production. My hope is that another consequence of her
work will be to increase the off-season tourists who will improve the economic
lives of the island’s permanent residents.
Lanza’s project could bring to the Aeolian Islands a wider recognition among cuisine travelers. With the growth of the industry, the potential audience for Fabrizia Lanza’s film today is so much greater than that for the past discussions of the ritual festivals in the cookbook published by her mother, Anna Tasca Lanza (1993)[6], or the volume on historical cuisine of Sicily by Mary Taylor Simeti (1989).[7] The communications reach of Fabrizia Lanza’s school is extensive. Just recently she made a colorful cassata sweet on Bobby Chinn’s Planet Food.[8] If the American Food Network can make a star of an unknown chef or small business, then my hope is that the forthcoming documentary could be a factor in developing the island economies for the benefit of permanent residents of modest means, as the film is screened in venues like large urban food festivals.
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| Fabrizia Lanza's garden at the Case Vecchie, Regaleali, Sicily |
What I
love about the book by the culinary author, Mary Taylor Simeti, called Bitter Almonds (1994), is that it has
contributed to the international success of a Sicilian business run by a woman
who grew up in abject poverty. The book
records interviews with Maria Grammatico, whose sweet shop and restaurant today
are in Erice, a supernaturally beautiful intact medieval city with 360-degree
aerial views and a thirteenth-century castle built atop an ancient temple of
Venus.
When Maria
Grammatico’s father died during her childhood, she and her sister were placed in
an orphanage, where they were forced to work interminable hours at pounding
almonds by hand to make sweets sold to fund the institution. While the young charges of the orphanage were
put to the intensive forced labor of making sweets for others, they were fed a
subsistence diet so dreadful that that they poured much of it down the
toilet. When she finally left as a young
adult, Maria Grammatico had a physical breakdown.
Through
observation in the orphanage, Grammatico had learned the traditional recipes
for the almond sweets and marzipan, and, when she recovered her strength, she
opened her own business, now visited by tourists from all over the world. A catalyst of this success is not only Simeti’s
book but also its afterlife in travel literature. Simeti’s book is currently mentioned by name
in both the Lonely Planet and the Rough Guide series books for Sicily.
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| Maria Grammatico's Store, Erice, Trapani, Sicily |
Meanwhile,
Mary Taylor Simeti’s own family terroir,
Bosco Falconeria, produces organic wine, now imported in the United States, and
it bears the mark of Addiopizzo, the growing Sicilian movement to refuse to pay
the pervasive Mafia extortion money.[9] Simeti is a longtime friend and frequent
visitor at Fabrizia Lanza’s Regaleali.
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| The Castle of Venus, Erice, Trapani, Sicily |
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| Fabrizia Lanza's gazpacho and olive oil, plus lemon custard for dessert |
Herbivores abound
Fabrizia
Lanza’s own family culinary history is a kind of paradigm of cosmopolitan
Sicilian cuisine in the twentieth century, an illustration of the transition by
which peasant food became big business.
The cooking school was founded by her mother, Anna Mastrogiovanni Tasca,
just as the widespread taste for the carnivorous baronial French menu that was
served at aristocratic tables was giving way to the international interest in
the traditional cuisine of the Italian peasant, with a basis of vegetables and
olive oil.
While
Anna’s husband, Venceslao Lanza, was often away in running his agrarian concern
on the family estate on east side of the island, and their daughter Fabrizia
attended college in the South of France and established her career as an art
historian in northern Italy, Anna found herself with time on her hands and the
inclination to take her talent for cooking to the next level.
Anna’s
grandfather, Lucio Tasca Bordonaro, Count of Almerita (1880-1957), and father,
Giuseppe, had developed the Tasca d’Almerita international winery at the family
country estate, Regaleali, whose name is derived from the Arabic, Rahal-Ali, or
village of Ali, a remembrance of Arabic rule, starting in the ninth century.[10] While Anna was growing up in the family’s main
residence in Palermo, the family spent no more than lingering holidays in the
country at Regaleali, where the year-around agrarian work was entrusted to
local laborers, many of whose families still cultivate the land today.
When Anna Tasca Lanza arrived in 1989 to found her cooking school at Regaleali, she knew only in glimpses its complex harvest cycles and traditions, such as the particular methods for drying and stirring a smooth tomato mixture on long tables in the sun to form the indigenous estratto, a highly concentrated and flavorful paste. She set about to learn the peasant culinary conventions, to make the place her own, and to do so she had to study.
In her
book, The Flavors of Sicily (1996),
Anna Tasca Lanza described the differences between the cuisine of the poor and
the baronial food that was most familiar to her when she first decided to
transform her Case Vecchie (literally, “the old houses”) at Regaleali into a
cooking school. At aristocratic tables,
the standard was French cuisine, influential since the start of Bourbon rule in
Sicily in the eighteenth century – a diet rich with meat and heavy sauces. In addition to the French influence, Anna
identifies “touches of Sicilian fancy.”
For Fabrizia’s wedding, for example, the menu featured medallions of
chicken with truffles, served in lattice baskets woven of perciatelli pasta, and decorated with fresh flowers dipped in
translucent paraffin wax – a dish derived from a historical family recipe.[11] Aristocratic kitchens were dominated by chefs
addressed by the honorific title, monsieur,
expressed in Sicilian, monzù.
It was the
traditional cuisine of the “common people” that resembled what we today
consider the Italian “Mediterranean diet” – in the words of Anna Tasca Lanza,
it is: “based mainly on foods they could cultivate: durum wheat flour for bread
and pasta, fresh vegetables, and dried peas and beans,” with relatively little
meat.[12] Pasta appeared on the tables of rich and
poor, but it seems that its consumption in the form we know it today was more
limited among aristocrats: Fabrizia Lanza’s recollection is that the only
Italian food craved by her paternal grandfather was spaghetti alla Bolognese.[13]
In their
cookbooks, both Anna and Fabrizia describe the apprenticeship involved in
converting from the carnivorous reign of the aristocratic monzù to the vegetable-based diet of the common person. Anna describes the reaction of the monzù when she started to make salad a
staple on her table: “when he saw me, he started shaking his head and gesturing
in that special way Sicilians have. ‘Who
do you think is going to eat this?’ he asked.
The look on his face would have discouraged anyone else, but I washed
the salad and made the dressing just the same."[14]
Fabrizia
says of her mother’s culinary transformation: “I remember my father’s face when
she presented him with a platter of spaghetti simply covered with wild greens
and no sauce or seasoning except a spoonful of olive oil.” When served with the antithesis of his
accustomed aristocratic cuisine of “béchamel, butter and cream,” “he looked
quite desperate!”[15] In 2007, Fabrizia returned to Sicily to help
her mother in the cooking school just as she began to face the first evident
challenges of Parkinson’s. She passed
away in 2010.
Fabrizia Lanza has become a curator of flavors whose pleasures are so intense that they pose a kind of semantic problem, since her olives, capers, tomatoes and eggplants are categorically different from anything in America that is signified by the words, “olive,” “caper,” “tomato,” or “eggplant.”
When Mary
Taylor Simeti published her memoir, On
Persephone’s Island, in 1986, she predicted that the future of agriculture
would include only large agribusiness and small vegetable gardens, not
middle-class farms, and she believed her children would face a difficult decision
when they inherited Bosco Falconeria.[16] In fact, today Simeti’s daughter has returned
to run the winery there.[17]
The world
demand for organic and artisanal food is changing the economy, and I hope it
brings development opportunities for the most economically challenged keepers
of agricultural and culinary traditions in Sicily.
[1] A. Corbo, “Perché, facendo la spesa, senza saperlo paghiamo la Mafia,” Il venerdì 1205 (April 22, 2011), 24-30. See also, from the same issue of Il venerdì, entitled La Mafia a tavola, C. Petrini, “Proviamo a saltarli e andare dritti ai produttori,” 28-9.
[2] See, U. Thoms, “From Migrant Food to Lifestyle Cooking: The Career of Italian Cuisine in Europe” (2011): http://www.ieg-ego.eu/en/threads/europe-on-the-road/economic-migration/ulrike-thoms-from-migrant-food-to-lifestyle-cooking-the-career-of-italian-cuisine-in-europe.
[3] Fabrizia Lanza speaks
of the new interest in the 1980s in the “light, healthy, ‘peasant’ cooking” of
Sicily. Coming Home to Sicily: Seasonal Harvests and Cooking from Case Vecchie
(New York: Sterling, 2012), p. xv.
Massimo Montanari traces the presence of poor people’s food in cuisine
books of the elite: “If the centrality of vegetables is one of the dominant
characteristics of the people’s cuisine (and for this reason it is important to
verify their importance in the recipe collections of the court), poor people’s
foods par excellence are polentas and soups made of the cheaper grains, greens,
and chestnuts—all key elements of a cuisine distinguished above all by the need
to fill one’s belly to ward off the specter of hunger, and to ensure daily
survival. Be that as it may, this
cuisine of the poor left important traces in the cookbooks used by the upper
classes.” M. Montanari, Food is Culture, trans. A. Sonnenfeld
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 39, 40. On “high” and “low” in popular Italian
cuisine after the 1960s, John F. Mariani says: “[American tourists in Italy
post-1960s] had…come to realize that the best cooking in Italy was not in the grand hotels or the posh ristoranti, where elaboration of the
Continental style was still stringently followed, but in the trattorias, or,
even better, at Italians’ homes, where simplicity had always been the rule.” How Italian Food Conquered the World
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 144 et seq.
[4] See, for example, J. Black, “Can local food jump-start the economy?” The Washington Post (December 9, 2009) http://voices.washingtonpost.com/all-we-can-eat/sustainable-food/can-local-food-jumpstart-the-economy.html ; The Slow Money Alliance (http://www.slowmoney.org); and The Slow Food Foundation, particularly its project to restore culinary diversity by saving local food practices (http://www.slowfoodfoundation.com/ark).
[6] A. Tasca Lanza, The Heart
of Sicily: Recipes and Reminiscences of Regaleali, A Country Estate (New
York: Clarkson Potter, 1993), 60-1.
[7] M.T. Simeti, Pomp and
Sustenance: Twenty-five Centuries of Sicilian Food (New York: Knopf, 1989).
[9] B. Barnett, “Mary Taylor Simeti Brings Her Wines To America,” Zester Daily (Dec. 19, 2012): http://zesterdaily.com/drinking/mary-taylor-simeti-brings-wines-to-america/ Katrina Onstad, “A New Way to See Sicily,” The New York Times, May 8, 2011: http://travel.nytimes.com/2011/05/08/travel/08sicily.html?pagewanted=1
[10] A. Tasca Lanza,The Heart of Sicily, 15, 17.
[11] Ibid., 16-17, 163.
[12] Ibid., 16-17.
[13] F. Lanza, Coming Home to Sicily: Seasonal Harvests and
Cooking from Case Vecchie (New York: Sterling, 2012), xii.
[14] A. Tasca Lanza, Heart
of Sicily, 56-7.
[15] F. Lanza, Coming Home to Sicily, xv.
[16] M. T. Simeti, On Persephone’s Island: A Sicilian Journal
(New York: Knopf, 1986), 30.
[17] B. Barnett:
http://zesterdaily.com/drinking/mary-taylor-simeti-brings-wines-to-america/