`When in Rome, do as the Romans do.” That’s good advice for someone who doesn’t want to be an ugly-American tourist. However, you first have to figure out what the Romans are doing.
When it comes to food, it took me a long time to become educated in Italian attitudes. Even now, given my bewildering experiences in this regard, I’m still not quite sure I can “eat as the Romans eat” with any degree of sophistication.
But for other novices, I offer this list of 10 “do’s and don’ts” for eating, cooking and talking about food like an Italian. I learned them while traveling in Italy with my family and my Genoese friend Cristina. Because Cristina was unfailingly kind and polite to her food-challenged amica, I learned most of it from the lift of an eyebrow or the shake of a head.
Rule No. 1: Don’t eat frozen vegetables.
This was Cristina’s first lesson and I only vaguely realized its significance when she gave it. At the time, I wasn’t even in Italy and I didn’t know Cristina very well. She was a colleague, come to America to study research science in our laboratory. In the interests of friendship and greater understanding between nations, I invited her to my house for a home-cooked American meal.
Everything seemed to be going well until I pulled a bag of peas out of the freezer. “What are those?” she asked. “Frozen peas,” said I, with a fleeting self-congratulatory nod to American ingenuity. “Why are they frozen?” she asked, with an odd expression on her face. Suddenly, I wasn’t so sure of myself as I tried to explain the value of convenience foods to a working mother. “Oh,” she replied, “Oh.” That was it. That was all. But it was my first hint that in Italy, freshness, in most all foods, is considered essential.
Rule No. 2: Don’t order at the counter and eat at a table.
Any American who has, on a million occasions, ordered Happy Meals at the checkout counter to consume with their children at a nearby table could never imagine the existence of such a rule–anywhere. I learned it only by embarrassing my friends.
It happened while Cristina and her husband, Giovanni, were introducing my family to the charms of Valle d’Aosta in the Italian Alps. Giovanni proposed a midmorning break at a local cafe and I paid no attention to his comment that we would drink at the counter. It was coffee for the adults and hot chocolate for the kids, but it took a long time for the chocolate–a regional specialty–to arrive. When it did, my children were thrilled to receive what looked like warm pudding in a mug. We were told it met local specifications because the spoon stood upright in the center of the “drink.”
Giovanni paid for our beverages. He and Cristina drank their coffees at the counter. We Americans, tired from the wait, moved six feet and sat at an empty table to consume our treats. When we looked up again, Cristina and Giovanni had disappeared. We found them lingering outside the cafe where Giovanni reluctantly offered another lesson in Italian eatery.
We learned that prices at the counter are much lower than those for table service. We had embarrassed our hosts by sitting down after they had paid the standup price for our drinks.
Rule No. 3: Eat well or don’t eat at all.
This must be the Golden Rule of Italian cuisine. It is the general rule for which most other rules are corollaries. My family and I were neophytes in the religion of Italian food. We longed to obey but “…the flesh was weak.” We were tempted often in strange streets where our hosts knew of no reliable food source.
I remember one particular occasion when we had been sightseeing for a long time and the children begged us to feed them. Cristina didn’t see the point of stopping for food. After all, she was not acquainted with the area’s restaurants. Finally, we succumbed to an unknown pizza shop. The pizza was awful.
Rule No. 4: Do get advice from local residents.
Giovanni had heard rumors of an excellent restaurant in the hills near Aosta where we were visiting. In the late afternoon, as we walked the stone streets of the city, Giovanni interrogated those of his countrymen who passed our way. The directions that he finally obtained included assurances that this was, indeed, a place worthy of our attention.
We came to the restaurant at the top of a narrow, twisting road that led upward to a hillside village. It looked, both outside and in, like a casual neighborhood bar. The owner/cook greeted us and seated us at a large vinyl-covered booth. I was not impressed. We were the only customers for the entire evening. There were no menus. I think Cristina and Giovanni just asked the owner to cook his best for us. So he did.
Three or four hours later, I left very full and very impressed. It was a meal of leisure and discussion. We waited between courses for the cook to cook. And, when he came with his offerings, we Americans listened on the periphery of conversations related to the nuances of the food before us. My husband recalls animated congratulations on the quality of the lardo in the antipasto (see Rule No. 5). I remember the cook’s masterpiece of polenta with local game. When we were finished, the cook named a price he considered appropriate for the meal. Our feast for four adults and two children came to about $110.
Before he paid the bill, my husband asked Cristina how much he should tip. She told us that it was not necessary. That was for tourists. Now there was a rule worth knowing! Trouble was, we never really dared try it on our own.
Rule No. 5: Don’t be afraid to eat the lardo.
Yes, lardo is lard…more specifically, something akin to the white part of bacon. We were introduced to lardo for the first time when Cristina opened the picnic lunch she had brought on our mountain hike. She was pleased to offer us this delicacy and I must admit it had a sweet flavor and lovely texture.
Rule No. 6: Do eat granita or gelato but not the prehistoric slushies.
In Italy, we fed our children granita (Italian ices) or gelato (ice cream) for the same reason you put gas in the car–to keep them going. And, nearly everywhere we went, there were stands offering the frozen desserts made from a variety of fresh fruits. When we got desperate, we sometimes had to settle for the slushy, neon-colored stuff that comes out of glass bowl dispensers equipped with churning paddles.
Rule No. 7: Don’t look for franchise food.
The watershed between Italian and American attitudes toward food is belief in the value of diversity. Most Americans, when traveling, seek name-brand restaurants. Even our regional distinctions are diffused. Tex-Mex and Southern Home Cookin’ restaurants, Chicago-style pizza and the New York-style deli can be found far from their original locales.
In contrast, the Italians of my acquaintance cherish the distinctive rather than the uniform; the unique, not the predictable. They treasure the signature dishes and produce of each region, city and neighborhood.
When Cristina directed our afternoon boat ride to the beach and monastery at San Fruttuoso on the Ligurian coast, her choice for picnic provisions was specific. Only the focaccia from a well-known bakery would do. And, when she included a visit to the harbor in Genoa on our itinerary, it was not just for the view, but to sample the best gelato in the city.
With time, I learned a little of the pleasures of the singular. It is enough that my evocation of Italian place is often linked to special foods: “serpente,” the sweet, hard, snake-shaped pastry that we purchased in old Perugia and ate outside the Basilica of St. Francis in Assisi; the wild boar meats from the walled city of San Gimignano in Tuscany; and the chocolate and whipped cream tartufo at Tre Scalini in Rome’s Piazza Navona.
Rule No. 8: Do respect your food.
The Italian family table has been called il sacro desco. There is no sacred aspect to food for Americans who observe lunch as an accompaniment to a business meeting, a drive down the highway or a good read.
Thus, when Cristina and I attended a scientific meeting together in Florence, I expected the programmed luncheons to approximate the Styrofoam-laden affairs that typify American scientific seminars. But Florentine science took time for a meal worthy of respect. We dined, full-course, at the grand Palazzo Borghese with china, cut glass, linen and liveried attendants.
Rule No. 9: Don’t ignore the small pleasures.
I figured this out for myself in Venice. My husband and I were on a tight budget when we stopped to rest at a small cafe near the Piazza San Marco. Because this was the center of tourism in Venice, we had no illusions of eating cheaply. We dutifully purchased our sandwiches at the counter (see Rule No. 2), but could not resist the white tables in the cool interior of the restaurant. We sat down and ordered two Cokes.
They were delivered on a silver tray by a black-jacketed waiter with a linen cloth on his arm. He opened and poured the sodas with such a flourish and friendly manner that we did not mind spending $4 for each tiny bottle. Thus we learned that the pleasures of palate and place are intertwined.
Rule No. 10: Don’t mix food courses on your plate.
This lesson came from Cristina, her mother-in-law and probably an entire neighborhood in the small town of Calice on the Mediterranean coast. Our family committed a cardinal sin at dinner one evening in Calice. It is an event that my children still relate with relish.
The pasta course was finished but the dishes remained. Because I had helped to plan and serve our potluck meal, I felt no compunction in placing a serving of corn on each plate. In fact, I had carefully remembered to wait until the pasta course was eaten before serving the vegetable. That was not good enough. I had, de facto, mixed a vegetable course with a pasta course.
Cristina could not contain herself. She spread the word in the neighborhood and our transgression apparently provided some joyous local gossip. We heard the conclusion the next day. Cristina laughed and joked with us as she passed it along, but her mother-in-law’s comments said it all: “Those Americans. They are such barbarians!”
