The Cooking of Italy [antikvár]

Introduction: zA^Rskust Quisine ^ased on a Teoplei Qharacterpeople are, in a sense, what they eat. Food therefore could be one of the more revealing indexes to personal and national proclivities, provided one could draw stable conclusions from an index so subject to individual and collective preference. The food of one's own country is too familiar to evoke anything but shadowy sensations; other peoples' cuisine may be too startlingly different to be anything but confusing. Perhaps the best way to make a judgment about the matter is to taste one's own cuisine after a long abstention, in order to rediscover its real namre, much as jaded husbands sometimes are advised to do to rediscover their wives' charms.I tried the culinary experiment once. I was a correspondent for the Italian newspaper Corrkre della Sera at the time, assigned to cover the marriage of a former King to an American lady in a château near Tours. Most of the visiting journalists stayed at the Hőtel de l'Univers, in Tours, whose cuisine was above the average. We had time on our hands. The Anglo-Saxons dedicated it to drinking a great number of identical drinks; others, myself included, to eating. Every day we chose a different bistro or restaurant to taste the local specialties and the wines that went with them, following the advice of well-qualified local inhabitants.Later, when we could leave the château for a few hours at a time, we began favoring the little buffet of a nearby country railroad station. It belonged to a secondary line on which I never saw a train pass. The station-master's wife was the cook and waitress. The menu was so simple that I suspected that we were eating an extension of the family's normal luncheon. The local wine was excellent. The cheeses were unfamiliar and tasty.On the scheduled date the wedding took place, the former King married his sweetheart, and the assignment was over. Herein lay my opportunity to essay the culinary experiment. I went to Paris to rest for a few days and to see the international exhibition that had been organized that summer. All the principal nations had built sumptuous pavilions on the banks of the Seine, filling them with all the products they presumed would provoke the admiration and envy of other people. The Italians had tried a daring innovation. They produced a ristorante. It was good, better than any in Italy at the time. It had the best Italian cook, taken from one of the transatlantic liners; the headwaiter was as handsome, pliant and courteous as an ambassador; the waiters, like members of an Olympic team, were hand-picked; the wines were poured by pretty girls in provincial costumes.I tried the ristorante on my first night in Paris. This was, I knew, my chance to find out what my native food was really like, coming as I had