“Dear Signor Polpettone, please step forward. Do not be shy. I want to introduce you to my readers.”
This is the opening sentence of the recipe for meatloaf (recipe #315) in Pellegrino Artusi’s 19th century masterwork of Italian cooking, Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well. Contrast this with a similar entry from Fannie Farmer’s Boston Cooking School Cookbook published five years later: “Begin by separating a knuckle of veal by sawing through the bone.” This sounds less like cooking and more like an autopsy.
Artusi’s project did not immediately impress potential editors, or even his friends. The original 475 recipes were self-published in 1891 when he was seventy-one. It was dedicated to his two cats, Biancani and Sibillone, who he described as his two best white-haired friends. The last edition of appeared in 1911, the year he died at the age of ninety-one. After more than 50,000 copies and 15 editions, it contained 790 recipes and almost as many stories, digressions and arcana covering everything from Italian politics, to the habits of eels and sturgeon, to his wide-ranging and often contradictory opinions about life and how to live it.
Artusi’s playful, story-telling voice is what makes La Scienza not just a cookbook, but a companion. He speaks directly to the reader and invites them to talk back. “Is there anyone who has not made an omelette” (#145). “Do not think for a moment that I would be so pretentious as to try to tell you how to make meatballs” (#314). “As common folk know, to make a good broth …” (#1). His goal was to create a manual of Italian cooking that would be “practical and usable by anyone who knows how to hold a spoon.” This tone of complicity is why Artusi’s book became known only as “L’Artusi,” just as The Joy of Cooking would become “The Joy” or Mastering the Art of French Cooking simply “Julia Child.” These cookbooks all convey a sense of joint adventure in which the writer is just a few steps ahead of the reader, pulling us along by the hand and congratulating us for our efforts.
The essence of Artusi is not the recipe, but the story. Not the instructions, but the path from flour to pasta, or beans to soup. He watches hungrily as the irritable host of a rural inn makes chicken cacciatore with rice (#43). He praises his servant Marietta’s honesty and good nature, before giving us her version of panettone that is better than any made in Milan (#604). He insists that peas are best in Rome, flavoured with prosciutto and green onion (#426), finishing up with the opinion that unlike the English, “we Mediterraneans want our food to provide a bit of excitement.”
“And to think I had blamed the minestrone!”
In an incredible lapse of taste and judgement, recipe #47 begins with Artusi overcome by diarrhea and rage, cursing the minestrone he ate the day before. To his great relief, he realizes it was cholera, which was sweeping the country. “And to think I had blamed the minestrone!” In what other cookbook would the author announce, “Many lovely dishes come out of the sauté pan, but fried salt cod is not one of them” (#510). He starts the directions, but can’t hold back, “Feel free to try it, but better yet, let both the cook and the recipe be damned.” After finally making it to the end, he finishes with the malediction, “If you don’t like, it is your own fault for wanting to try it.” I told you so. Artusi tells tales at his own expense, recounting that he earned the nickname “macaroni eater” for ignoring the passionate nationalist tirade of a fellow student and eating his pasta instead (#235). The hothead later tried to assassinate Napoleon III and was executed. So much for politics.
Pellegrino Artusi was born in 1820 in the town of Forlimpopoli in the province of Romagna, 150 kilometres northeast of Florence. He was an only son, with nine sisters, likely making him both beleaguered and spoiled. He went to study in Bologna and then Florence, but never got a degree, and returned home to work in his father’s pharmacy. There is a charming aside to the recipe for cappelletti (#7) describing a young man sent off by his father to study in the city. Lured by the taste of his mother’s cooking, he returns home just in time to eat his favorite dish. Perhaps this was Artusi himself. His life changed, however, in 1851 after his family’s home was ransacked and one of his sisters raped by a notorious band of brigands who roamed the countryside preying on the well-to-do. He convinced his family to move to Florence where he and his father traded in silk and ran a successful banking business. After the death of his parents, he took charge of marrying off his sisters, and in 1865 at age fourty-five he retired, turning his attention to writing, travelling, entertaining and cooking. He remained a bachelor, living with his cook Francesco Ruffilli, his housemaid Marietta Sabatini and his two cats. Before La Scienza, he wrote two books about Italian nationalist poets. Both were self-published and neither was successful.
Artusi does not tell us he how went about compiling his tome. To complete the manuscript in ten years, he would have had to write fifty entries per year; if he wrote it in five, that would mean one hundred per year or two per week. Each dish was tested, as he repeatedly insists in the text. He laughs that the reader will think that he is as stubborn as a donkey for trying the recipe for capon poached in a bladder (#367) five times before finally succeeding (well worth the effort, he assures us). It is widely assumed that Artusi did no cooking himself, but oversaw the work of Francesco and Marietta. But the detailed descriptions of techniques, ingredients, variations and failures suggest that he must have worked with them closely. As for putting together the manuscript, did he rewrite each draft himself, or did he have an assistant? How did he organize the hundreds of pages? It must have been a prodigious project. This may be why the recipes are numbered. As the collection was assembled the individual items could be reordered and only the numbers changed.
So why does a successful banker retire and write a cookbook? Why does a man in love with poetry decide to write a cookbook? Why does a man with no particular education write a cookbook filled with references to literature, history, biology and linguistics?
“loquacity is not satisfied as one ages, it increases as we grow older, as does the desire for good food, sole comfort of the aged”
Why? Because he can indulge his curiosity for everything. It’s the ideal retirement project: idiosyncratic, obsessive and time-consuming (I should know, I’ve thought a lot about it). La Scienza is a scholarly compendium, without the scholarly discipline. Artusi becomes a biologist when describing the life-cycle of the frog (#64), or a linguist enthusiastically enumerating the names of dishes and ingredients in different regional dialects (caccuccio vs brodetto in recipe #455). He is an Italian patriot who detests the idea of foreign names, except, as for “Gateau à la Noisette” when he thinks the dessert deserves it (#564). He delves into history to give us the orgins of “àrista,” the Tuscan term for roast saddle of pork (#369), or “cuscussù” (couscous) whose recipe he learned from Jewish friends (#46). Threaded through everything he is a philosopher. Instructions for pickling tongue begin with this meditation: “loquacity is not satisfied as one ages, it increases as we grow older, as does the desire for good food, sole comfort of the aged” (#360). In the final words of the preface, Artusi begs us to understand that that his love of cooking does not make him a glutton or a precious epicure. Instead, he is a man who loves the bounty of the earth and wants to see none of it go to waste. His stories are what convince us to take him at his word. Like his pilgrim namesake, he takes us on a journey filled with candour and generosity to see all the promise of the land of Italy.
For more Artusiana see the following sites:
- Pellegrino Artusi museum in Forlimpopoli: http://www.casartusi.it/en/
- Artusi family official site: http://www.artusi.net/
- Exhibition created with Professor Grazia Menechella, Artusi expert: https://www.library.wisc.edu/news/2019/03/01/pellegrino-artusi-and-the-culinary-unification-of-italy/
- Post on Artusi from Memorie de Angelina, Italian cooking blog: https://memoriediangelina.com/2009/07/25/pellegrino-artusi-la-scienza-in-cucina-e-larte-di-mangiar-bene/