Eat This Podcast

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I’m on what the real professionals call a mission, or, failing that, duty travel. And once again I’ve bitten off more than I can chew. So, rather than admit defeat and just leave well enough alone, I decide to record a little reflection on the food of Indonesia, at least, the food I’ve eaten so far, halfway into the trip.

I forgot to mention durian. I guess that tells you all you need to know about how little of an impression it made. Yes, it smells. Yes, the taste and texture are odd. It wasn’t that bad, but I certainly won’t be packing one in coffee grounds and triple-wrapping it to bring it back with me, as one colleague advised.

   Huffduff it

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Karima Moyer-Nocchi is an American woman who teaches at the University of Siena. When she had been here almost 25 years she developed something of an obsession. On the one hand, she watched “a bewildering decline in the quality and craftsmanship of Italian food together with a skyrocketing deification of it”. On the other, “in a vicious circle, the decline stimulated the explosion of the gastronomic nostaliga industry, which in turn, hastened the very process it claimed to quell”.

This is not something you would notice. The modern idea is that Italian cuisine has always been more-or-less what it is, and that if there were a difference between social classes, it was more about how often they ate certain dishes, or the quality of the ingredients, than about what they actually ate. As Karima Moyer-Nocchi discovered, that rose-tinted view is at odds with what actually went on.

In an attempt to make sense of the changes, Moyer-Nocchi turned to women, now aged 90 and more, who had grown up under fascism and who, perhaps, could shed light on the recent history of Italian food. She gently coaxed their memories of food from them, and created a book that is part oral history, part academic history, and that puts the current mania for Italian cuisine in perspective. There’s no way we could cover it all in one interview, but I think you can get some idea of how things have changed, mostly for the better, and also how little one knows about the real history of food in Italy.

Notes

1. The book is Chewing the Fat: An Oral History of Italian Foodways from Fascism to Dolce Vita, and in the interests of full disclosure, I should mention that if you follow that link straight to Amazon and buy it, I get a teeny reward.
2. The banner image, from a photograph by Henri Roger-Viollet (I think), shows Mussolini taking part in the first wheat threshing in Latina in 1932, a temporary victory in the Battle for Wheat. The podcast cover image is from a photograph by Mario Giacomelli.
3. In another episode about food in Fascist Italy, I talked to Ruth Lo about the festa dell’uva

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This year’s Amsterdam Symposium on the History of Food was dedicated to The material culture of cooking tools and techniques and was full of fascinating stuff. I especially enjoyed a talk on the hay box, the original slow cooker. The principle is simplicity itself. Bring a pot full of food to the boil and then insulate it really well so that it cools down very slowly. The food continues to cook as it cools down and if your insulation is good enough you can come back hours later to find a hot, properly cooked meal.

The haybox actually has quite a long history, with three Gold Medals awarded to a Mr Johan Sörensen at the Paris Exhibition in 1867. Various patents were granted to Sörensen and others, and the idea was promoted for “fishermen, pilots, and others whose small vessels are not generally so constructed as to enable them to procure hot food while at sea” and, eventually, domestic cooks.

In his talk, Jon Verriet traced the ups and downs of the haybox from around 1895 to the present day. It was most popular in times of war, but always with a moral element to it, even if the moral lesson shifted slightly.

Notes

1. There’s a terrific account of The Self-acting Norwegian Cooking Apparatus in the New York Medical Journal, vol 10 (1870). Do not be distracted by either the preceding item (The Effects of Hashish) or the one after (When to Trephine). Thanks to Hedon for the link.
2. The most recent incarnation of the haybox is the Wonderbag, created by a development worker after a restless night and now offering to save the planet and pull people out of poverty.
3. Aside from that, most of the online writing about the haybox is survivalist stuff. I’m not linking to that.
4. The banner image is from Ford Madox Brown’s The Hayfield. I’d like to think that his supper is under one of the little haystacks. The cover illustration is from The Fireless Cook Book, by Margaret J. Mitchell.