Xenophobe's Guide to the Italians

The Eat-alian Way

The Italians are foodcentric people. Much of Italian life revolves around the growing, buying, preparing and, above all, eating of food. Whenever possible, meals are shared and eaten in company. The very word ‘company’ comes from two Italian words, con (with) and pane (bread), implying breaking bread in friendship.

But the Italian meal in company is much more than breaking bread, for Italian enthusiasm knows no bounds when it comes to arranging a meal. First there must be the antipasti (starters), usually a minimum of five, then the first course (the primo), with a choice of different pasta or rice dishes; next the main course (the secondo), which will be meat or fish with the accompanying vegetables (the contorno); then cheese, and finally the dessert (the dolce) followed by coffee (espresso). The meal can happily take from two to five hours to consume. If it is lunch, you have a couple of hours to recover before supper time.

The Italians have always appreciated quality and keep the very best of foods for themselves. Italy is still an agricultural nation and its small farmers (i contadini), who wield enormous power in the community, are highly practical men. They pay little attention to E.U. directives and farm according to time-honoured ways, harvesting wonderful produce.

Many city-dwellers have relatives in the countryside who will keep them stocked up with home-grown and home-produced specialities. The salad and wine that are put on the table in honour of a guest will be very special, and every bite and drop will be truly memorable.

The Italians acknowledge the changing of the seasons and the different delicacies linked to each. The whole family will take part in preparing the passata di pomodoro (tomato purée) in the late summer, go mushrooming in September, grape-picking in October, and in March collect those exquisite young dandelion leaves that add a zest to salads.

The secret behind Italian cooking lies not only in the fact that the ingredients are fresh and of good quality, but also that most Italians, male and female, are excellent cooks. They learn how to cook when young, and a look at Italian cookbooks shows that the writers start from the premise that their readers already know how. Italian recipes are much less precise than British or American ones and don’t say, ‘carefully add 150 grams of this’ or ‘slowly pour in 4 fluid ounces of that’; they simply say, ‘take a pinch of this’, or ‘add a couple of drops of that’.

Despite their admiration for many things American, the Italians have been remarkably resistant to some American foodways. Coca-Cola and hamburgers have been accepted, but peanut butter and baked beans have not; breakfast cereals are advertised, but without much success. Italy is the only country in the world where the marketing strategies of McDonald’s have been hampered by the highly successful Slow Food Movement.

Italians are the world’s largest consumers of whisky, especially malt – an average bar in Italy will stock a greater selection than most pubs in Scotland – and beer is becoming fashionable with the young, especially if it is strong and imported. But what really runs in the nation’s veins is wine.

Italian wines range from purple-black table wines frothing in your glass to sparkling dry whites. They are generally drunk locally and young, and the fact that many of the best Italian wines are unknown outside Italy serves to keep their prices reasonable. Country wines vary from the regal to the robust, each with its own distinct character. As a village salami-maker remarked as he savoured a glass of his region’s vino nero: ‘A wine is like a man; it can have flaws and still be pleasing.’

On the whole, Italians drink only when they eat, but this does not mean that they stint themselves. The meal will be preceded by an aperitivo, and each course will be accompanied by a different wine, with a sparkling wine reserved for the dessert.

Unfortunately, the human stomach was not designed for such conspicuous over-indulgence, so the Italians have thought up a variety of ingenious ways to help their digestive system cope. They drink mineral waters throughout the meal, and after it can choose from a host of evil-tasting medicinal preparations called digestivi, or perhaps a fiery grappa, in the hope that it will spur their jaded innards into action.

Despite these precautionary measures, the hard work that Italian digestive systems are asked to perform often leads to their going on strike, and constipation is a common complaint. Other nations’ remedies are suspect, and Italians refuse to eat the German-style wholemeal breads and American-style high fibre cereals which might solve their problems, in much the same way as they refuse to change their eating habits, by eating, for example, a little less.