Food and Women in Italian Literature, Culture and Society

Eve's Sinful Bite

Claudia Bernardi, Francesca Calamita, Daniele De Feo, Claudia Bernardi, Francesca Calamita, Daniele De Feo

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781350189300
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350137806
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European Literary Collections
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book explores how women's relationship with food has been represented in Italian literature, cinema, scientific writings and other forms of cultural expression from the 19th century to the present.

Italian women have often been portrayed cooking and serving meals to others, while denying themselves the pleasure of the table. The collection presents a comprehensive understanding of the symbolic meanings associated with food and of the way these intersect with Italian women's socio-cultural history and the feminist movement.

From case studies on Sophia Loren and Elena Ferrante, to analyses of cookbooks by Italian chefs, each chapter examines the unique contribution Italian culture has made to perceiving and portraying women in a specific relation to food, addressing issues of gender, identity and politics of the body.

Part I

Gender and social norms in food writings

1

She is not selfish enough to analyse and favour these sensual pleasures

The role of women in nineteenth-century Italian taste

Daniele De Feo

Taste is evidently the first in rank [of the senses] . . . you can exist though deprived of the active use of each of the four senses, but you cannot live . . . without the active exercise of the sense of taste . . . . Gormandism . . . will be the magnetic needle of health and of wisdom . . . it will only lead man to work to satisfy the senses of others, at the same time he is satisfying his own, and securing health to all. It will constitute the science called Gastrosophy, which will place good cheer in strict alliance with honor and the love of glory.

(Fourier Vol. 1, 29, 33)

The aforementioned quote from the famed French utopian Charles Fourier (1772–1837) allows us to enter into the novel nineteenth-century philosophy of taste: one that was both science and art, both realism and utopia – a philosophy for the modern century. However, as the quote itself underscores (man; he), gastrosophy is a masculine arena, a philosophy of contemplating food as art that could only be enjoyed by men, practised by men and ultimately appraised by men. One need not look further in the Italian context than Pellegrino Artusi (1820–1911), dubbed the father of Italian gastronomy, who, with his Scienza in cucina e l’arte di mangiar bene (Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well, 1891), purportedly unified Italian culture through the promulgation of the nation’s regional cuisine.¹ Artusi, similarly, espoused the same philosophy of food in which taste reigns over the other senses, where food is indeed art and its consumption a cognitive process, where reason and the senses work in unison. All of this is articulated in his recipe book through the figure of Olindo Guerrini (1845–1916): friend, collaborator, famed poet, and the first Italian to look at cuisine as a historical and aesthetic subject matter for the new Italy.²

Yet another of Artusi’s friends and collaborators, Paolo Mantegazza (1831–1910) – pathologist, anthropologist and novelist, to name a few – also advocated for this newfound rhetoric of an aestheticized food for the bourgeoning Italy. In doing so, Mantegazza promulgated an analogue of music and food by dividing the pleasures of taste into two components – ‘harmony’ and ‘melody’ – therefore allowing the author to argue the ‘sublimity’ of gastronomy. It is this sublimity which finds its utmost expression in a meal that the author defines as ‘a concert of harmony and melody of taste . . . that is brought to maximum perfection by the genius of the artist’.³

The sublimity preached by Mantegazza has a very important precedent: one found in the pages of the most important etiquette manuals of the nineteenth century, L’arte di convitare spiegata al popolo (The Art of Banqueting Explained to the People, 1850, 1851). Giovanni Rajberti (1805–1861), the Medico-poeta, translator of Horace and author of humorous yet scathing satires, also rendered the table an arena for beauty: ‘of all the arts that are called beautiful, because they are understood to satisfy the intellect and emotions, this one should be called truly beautiful, because it aims to satiate the mind, the heart and even the belly’.⁴

With this new art, Italians could find a common denominator. If culturally, the regional, socio-economic and political differences were too difficult to overcome, Italy was to become Italy through the one art all could enjoy: its food. Italians were to become Italians by learning about each other’s culinary practices, versing themselves in the language of their cuisine; simultaneously, they were to educate themselves about the nutritional aspects of what they ate, which would provide, as Mantegazza states, ‘that much more strength in the veins of the entire Italian people’.⁵

It is of great import to understand how the Italian woman was to play a part within these burgeoning taste ideals. In what capacity were the new nation’s women to partake? Probing these author’s texts, in particular those by Rajberti and Mantegazza, two medics who delved into matters of the kitchen and who went to great lengths to define the Italian woman’s role in both preparation and consumption, we can better comprehend (a) the propagated role of women within the praxis of bourgeois gustus and (b) how this role was limited due to the preached physiological ‘inferiority’ of her organs of taste. The dialogue between these Milanese men from different generations, brought together by their respective relationships with an extraordinary woman (Laura Solera Mantegazza),⁶ ironically unearths the Risorgimento and the post-unificatory period’s chauvinism in culinary customs, etiquette and the science of eating.

From chef to ‘the woman of the house’

Guerrini and Artusi shared a vivid correspondence in which they discussed a plethora of gastronomic and philosophical topics, and from which Artusi drew inspiration. Guerrini’s influence is evident by the numerous references and citations found in La scienza in cucina: one that is of note was from a conference held at the Exposition of Turin on 21 June 1884 in which Guerrini lamented society’s prejudice against cuisine as a vulgarity. The poet alternatively contended that la cucina is elegant and intelligent, and exhorted its rehabilitation.⁷ With this in mind, Artusi advanced the premise for the future of la gastronomia, with which he intended to ‘train young female cooks, who are naturally more economical than men and less wasteful, they would easily be employed and would possess an art, which when brought to the middle-class households, would be a medicine to the many frustrations that often occur in families because of poor dining’.⁸ Within this context, we see woman’s role as key to the gastronomic cause. Unlike the experience in France, where a bourgeois taste was forwarded through the figure of the chef and the proliferation of the restaurant, in Italy, the caretaker of the household (i.e., la donna di casa) was to be the disseminator of taste. Her culinary education was fundamental to the construction of a new Italian society, as it was considered the most effective way of influencing the middle-class household. It is, however, clear that the ideal conveyed by Artusi and Guerrini is of a woman who is preparer, not gastronome.

On the one hand, with this declaration, we see the culmination of a shift that occurred historically. The most celebrated cookbooks written by the likes of Bartolomeo Scacchi (1421–1481), better known as Platina; Bartolomeo Scappi (1500–1577), the legendary ‘secret chef of the popes’;⁹ and Domenico Romoli, known as Panunto, were geared, for the most part, towards male aristocratic chefs. Texts addressed to the bourgeoisie did not begin to appear until the eighteenth century, and many were mere assemblages and translations of French counterparts.¹⁰ Others laid the foundations for what would become known as regional cuisines.¹¹ However, it was not until the nineteenth century that the male chef was superseded by the female cook as the primary intended audience. This shift coincided with the growth of the middle classes as well as with the prominence of the household cook and the figure of the bourgeois mother. Therefore, it is clear that there was a keener focus on how the Italian woman was to manage the household’s gastronomic matters. Ultimately, she was to be the eminent purveyor of this new Italian art.

On the other hand, this role of prominence was equivocal. Despite this newly founded stature, a further examination into the way she was to behave is revelatory of a trend that ostracizes, or at the very least demonstrates, her as ancillary to the gastrosophic cause. For all the progressive and democratic elements that authors such as Rajberti and Mantegazza represent (e.g. education, political and cultural unification), they were reflective of a conservatism that could be found in contemporaries such as Antonio Rosmini (1797–1855).¹² In his Filosofia del diritto (Philosophy of Law) from 1845, a seminal text in the construction of the roles of men and women during the Risorgimento, the philosopher defined the natural qualities of the Italian woman: she is ‘timid sweetness, gracious weakness, attentive docility: [she] is delicate, tranquil, homely, patient’.¹³ Man, conversely, has qualities that ‘render him fit to command, courage, strength, authority, a firm mind or certainly a more developed one’.¹⁴

If women were viewed as intellectually and physically inferior to men, as is evident with Rosmini, then for the aforementioned taste authors, she was also inferior in matters of gustus. Her role is clearly delineated: she was to endure the difficulties of preparation in addition to the duties of hostess, all the while carving out a space for herself in the background. She was expected to artfully divest herself from her function as housewife to become, for all intents and purposes, a Signora: that is, a figure of perfect decorum. It is precisely with this oscillation between preparer and hostess that she was condemned to convivial, and, of course, taste subordination.

Rajberti’s hostess: Dissimulation as poetry and the indecency of eating

As Gabriella Turnaturi has indicated, the table was the arena for the greatest dangers dreaded by the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie, or, in other words, naturalness, spontaneity and sensuality.¹⁵ Therefore, as consequence, the manuals on etiquette preach moderation, restraint and equilibrium for the convivial setting, with a particular focus on the continence needed by women in the context of a meal. With this in mind, Ida Baccini, who wrote over fifty years after Rajberti’s L’arte di convitare, declared that the first duty of a hostess is to hide ‘the behind the scenes of the domestic theater’ (108).¹⁶ If the table was envisioned to be the venue of performance, then, as with all actors, the hostess was to hide the rules and tricks of her trade: ‘it is necessary to make it seem as one is not adhering to rules or faking’.¹⁷ Therefore, the difficulty of the mise en scéne of the convivial performance, no matter how arduous, need not transpire.

Rajberti’s text was indeed the first etiquette manual for the table written exclusively for la classe di mezzana fortuna (the class of average fortunes),¹⁸ and as such the Medico-poeta was the first to promulgate this ideal of a theatricalized meal to the middle classes. The medic wrote that ‘in a woman there is not only the poetry and beauty of her quirks and of her spirit, but there is the hostess who we guests want to imagine seated in the room busy with gentle work, and not working on the burners’.¹⁹ The woman of the household portrayed here needed to maintain a level of propriety that concealed all workings underlying the preparation, arrangement and organization of a meal. The author goes so far as to state: ‘Let her be in the kitchen the whole day if need be: let her prepare lunch with her own hands; but do not tell us, because these are things that we should not know.’²⁰ Details of any sort should not be revealed, particularly when it comes to dishes: ‘Praise of dishes easily leads to the description on how to cook them; and it is not rare that the hostess disillusions enumerating the ingredients of a sauce or pasta.’²¹

What is thus evident within Rajberti’s work is the need for the hostess to become a creature of dissimulation, or, rather, an expert in secreting all phases of her art. The author made it clear that ‘dissimulation is poetry, and truth a horrible prose’.²² However, Rajberti’s diffused etiquette did not stop with this form of sprezzatura,²³ as the gastronomic space he constructed was predominantly a masculine one. Th e woman’s role was considered fundamental, as its primary responsibility was to ensure the happiness of the others at the table, in particular, her male counterparts. For example, the medic recommended: ‘Advise your women that if they need to absent themselves, that these absences be brief and rare: and that in the end they do not demonstrate engaged in anything but us.’²⁴

The hostess needs to render herself available and willing to serve, as well as display another, more complex, behaviour: the necessity of publicly demonstrating a disinterest in food. The notion of restraining oneself from eating during a meal connoted that one was at the complete disposal of others. If good propriety, therefore, entailed limited consumption (at least publicly), then the notion was easily brought to extremes: Rajberti speaks of a woman who stated that ‘it always seemed a strange and inconceivable thing, how in this world one needs to open their mouth for that mundane vulgarity of eating and drinking’.²⁵ This notion of an ‘indecency of food’, as Meldini called it (451), and of a healthy appetite being a vulgar quality for women, became widespread in the nineteenth century. Studies such as those conducted by Anna K. Silver assert that the idea of self-starvation developed and was central to Victorian England’s notions of femininity.²⁶ She made the case that Victorian gender ideology can be read through an ‘anorexic lens’ (3). It was precisely in th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Gender and social norms in food writings
• Part II Food, womanhood and the Italian south
• Part III Food, gender and Italian identity
• Part IV Food, family and politics
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright