#29 – True Historical Italian Food with Karima Moyer Nocchi, Author of Chewing the Fat

“Traditions are always things that are selected and dusted off from the past and embellished and sort of made into a collage of who we are and what represents us. What I wanted to capture with this book was the difference between that collage and the very important idea of tradition, with what people were actually eating.”

Karima Moyer-Nocchi, speaker, historian, professoressa and author of Chewing the Fat and The Eternal Table, discusses with us the sometimes shocking differences between the myths of Italian traditional foods and the true history. She also shares her heart about the vital importance of capturing the oral narratives of our elders before the generation of memory keepers from a unique time have left us.

“History has always been written as if no one ever ate.”

Time Stamps:

00:30 Welcome and thank you to our patrons!

01:43 Introducing Karima

03:22 What’s the last thing you ate?

05:24 Diving in to Chewing the Fat: why our traditional ideas of Italian historic foods are just wrong. Karima explains this and some sources of our misperceptions.

“If you want to look up the dates of wars and things like that, you need to go to another book. Because this is a book about truthfulness, which is the other side of the coin.”

11:57 Why are these false ideals we hold about historical Italian food and diet so prevalent?

12:55 Hot Mention: The development of the idea of the Mediterranean diet

15:27 What did people eat? The surprising myths that emerge about Italian food during the fascist era.

19:36 The biggest surprise for Alison in the book! Addressing the olive oil question and shocking revelations about lard

24:00 Hot Mention: Ancel Keys

26:10 The ideas of the Mediterranean diet

26:54 The Mediterranean Pyramid

34:09 UNESCO and making food an intangible heritage

37:09 When you started out on this project, did you know you would find all these myth-busting revelations?

39:57 What surprised you the most?

42:38 Karima’s interviewing and recording process; the concept of oral narrative in the historical record.

49:00 Learn about yourself as an interviewer

53:55 What do you want people to do with the information in the book? What do you want to happen because of it?

Resources Mentioned:

Five Cheapest Foods Episode

What is the fifth quarter?

The Columbian Exchange

“Using butter was an expression of wealth. If someone in your family was not well, you would try to procure some butter.  I’ve seen things like curatives to pick someone up and give them a little bit of energy, putting a little pat of butter in their coffee. That would be something you would give someone when they were not feeling well.”

Ancel Keys – a quick search for this biophysicist produces a number of polarizing articles

Narrative History mention on Instagram

The Art of Eating Well: An Italian Cookbook by Pellegrino Artusi

“The things that we do now that are going to be traditions in 25 years – because that’s how long it takes something to become a tradition according to the EU – we don’t realize it because it’s not a reenactment now. “

Project Gutenberg’s Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome, by Apicius

Le Ricette Regionale Italiane by Anna Gosetti della Salda

Magazine: La Cucina Italiana

The Silver Spoon (Traditional Italian Home Cooking Recipes)

Karima on Instagram

The Eternal Table, by Karima Moyer-Nocchi. This is a more scholarly worked, covering 2,500 years of Roman culinary history.

TheEternalTable.com

On April 23rd, Moyer-Nocchi will be presenting on the History of Macaroni and Cheese at Monticello, as a part of the Heritage Harvest Festival. This ticketed event will be available both virtually and in person!

“I thought I was just going to go and talk about food. But you can’t just go and talk about food.”

 

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Transcript:

Speaker:
Welcome to the Ancestral Kitchen podcast with Alison, a European town dweller in central Italy, and Andrea, living on a newly created family farm in northwest Washington State, USA. Pull up a chair at the table and join us as we talk about eating, cooking and living with ancient ancestral food wisdom in a modern world kitchen.

Music:
Music

Speaker:
Welcome allison hello and hello to our very special guest today karima and how do i pronounce your last name karima so i get it right is it moyer or

Speaker:
Moyer um it’s actually it is a french name but it’s become uh anglicized and so i pronounce it moir moir and then and then and then nokie yeah.

Speaker:
Moir nokie awesome we’re so excited to have you here and i know everybody is eagerly anticipating this episode as are alison and i so this is a hugely special day alison i want to first shout out to the patrons who are bringing this podcast to everybody so So thank you guys for keeping us on the air and helping us keep learning about and recording amazing bits of food, knowledge, and history. And Alison, can you please introduce us all to our guest?

Speaker:
Yeah, most certainly I can. Thank you, Andrea, and thank you, patrons. So Karima Moyanoki is the author of a book that has completely changed the way that both Andrea and I view Italian food. And I think that basically we’ve mentioned this book on every episode since the beginning of the year and we filled up entire patron episodes talking about it. The book’s called Chewing the Fat and it’s a compilation of and commentary on first-hand narratives from Italian women who are in their s or who were at the time of talking to them in their s and they’re from all walks of life right from very very wealthy and aristocratic to very, very poor. And they talk about in these narratives their life and they concentrate heavily on the fascist era. So that’s the s and the s. And the narratives talk about what they ate, how they got their food, how they farmed, their lives at home and school and much, much more.

Speaker:
Andrew and I really have been shocked by the book. We’ve been educated greatly by the book. We’ve been inspired by the book. And both of us have been really moved by the women’s stories. And so we’re super delighted to have the collector and curator of the narratives and the writer of the book, Karima, on the podcast today. Thank you very much, Karima, for being here.

Speaker:
And thank you so much for having me.

Speaker:
All right when Allison and I get together we always ask each other because we did this before anyways and so it was natural to continue on the podcast we ask each other what’s the last thing we ate and so we forgot to warn you that we were gonna ask you that but um we always like to ask our guest what’s the last thing you ate Before you hop on a little bit,

Speaker:
I’m a little bit embarrassed as a culinary historian that I do a lot of a lot of cooking. I do a lot of things from scratch to really to a fault and a lot of historical, interesting, fascinating things that I make that are not always good. But it’s something that I use food as a way of traveling back in time and getting acquainted with other periods of time. But today was the first day of the semester I teach at the University of Siena.

Speaker:
Wow.

Speaker:
And I finished teaching at, it was our first day of the semester I teach at, I finished teaching at noon. I ran to Essay Lunga because I teach in Arezzo at the University of Siena, and they have a supermarket there that I love because I don’t love the supermarkets in my area. And so I went there and I did my shopping, and it was one by the time I was done, and I was feeling peckish. And so I grabbed out of one of those heated cases a package of spicy chicken wings, and I ate them in my car. So I sat in my car and ate it because then it’s a minute drive home and I knew that I would be really hungry so that was the last thing I ate you know you.

Speaker:
Said in one of your interviews that our idea of authenticity doesn’t allow for evolution so we will acknowledge this as one of the evolutions of a

Speaker:
Diet. That’s right.

Speaker:
Nice one. Okay, so let’s dive into the book, Rima. Your book reveals that the traditional cozy idea we have of what Italians have historically eaten their food traditions is just wrong and it’s clear from your snapshot from to that what the families and individuals ate was very different to what most of the world view as Italian cuisine can you explain this idea to us more in your own words so we can be super clear on it and our listeners can

Speaker:
Um, yeah, it’s often said that Italian cuisine is a misnomer. It is something that doesn’t exist. And that the only thing that exists maybe is regional cuisine. And I would have to say from there, well, regional cuisines is as well something that has been created out of our desire to have this feeling of belonging and continuity with the past, because it gives us a sense of comfort and identity. Now, so the same thing that happened with Italian cuisine in the creation of Italian cuisine, which was actually, which was quite commercial.

Speaker:
But the same thing also happened then later with the creation of the concept of regional cuisine, where traditions are always things that are selected and dusted off from the past and embellished and sort of made into this collage of who we are and what represents us. And what I wanted to capture with this book was, is the difference between that collage and the very important idea of tradition and what people were actually eating, which then didn’t become something where you can buy a book on regional cuisine and sort of pick off a whole bunch of dishes or go into a rustic restaurant.

Speaker:
And eat things that are supposedly from the cucina povera, which translates into poor cuisine, which is very much hailed today. Okay, well, you’re talking about a cuisine, which is not a cuisine, but it’s just food that people eight. And there was something going on there that then became deified after World War II, because it was very economically salient to do so. When you have Italy in post-war reconstruction, tourism coming in, people looking for those foods, as well as food being a way that people reconstructed their own identity. Italy needed to not only reconstruct its buildings and its political system after the fall of fascism, but also a sense of pride. And that was very much done through food. But in the meantime, what happened in creating that and in this explosive, skyrocketing deification of an idea of Italian cuisine…

Speaker:
The, the, um, the lives of these people and how they lived and what came before that, okay, um.

Speaker:
Got a, got sort of swept away also because it was part of fascism. When you’re talking about a period of time that goes from to , that’s an entire generation. Now, when Nazi, the Nazism gets so much more airplay, which was actually a -year period, fascism was a -year period. And so it was possible to have done your entire formative years and more than that, um, within, within that mindset. Okay. Within a, um, a certain approach to, to, to perceiving eating and food and how it was changing in that moment. Okay. Um, and, um, so that’s the thing that I wanted to capture because fascism is such a hush hush thing still in Italy. And so those voices were going to fall into the shadows and simply be forgotten because it’s a period of time that people still want to forget. Mm-hmm.

Speaker:
OK, so but but in saying, though, that some people like to say about my book, oh, this is this is what Italian food really is. But I like to emphasize that it’s an evolution and the creation of Italian cuisine is part of an evolution, but that what it does, though, is it gives an idea of timelessness, then that part is not true. Because it’s part of the evolution of Italian food, I want to call it.

Speaker:
Why do you okay uh well i was i was just wondering i didn’t mean to cut you off um why you think the the idea is here now so prevalent where this information came from you know about the this i guess mythical italian diet that now you’re sort of debunking in a way as you’re talking now and in your book?

Speaker:
Well, because no one wants to look back on the fascist period, and it’s difficult to pull a sense of pride out of that. Um, and so in addition to what, what then comes in play is the development of the idea of the Mediterranean diet, which is also very, um, it’s very much about an ideal of an idea of what was available, but not necessarily reflecting what anyone was actually eating or what anyone could afford to eat, but what was available to eat. So for example, in the South, that sort of thing, then those are things that can get picked up with pride. And so constructing an idea of pride is why this whole chapter in Italian food was kind of swept under the rug.

Speaker:
Also because under the umbrella of, italian cuisine and the mediterranean diet which are not the same thing necessarily um you’re selling a lot of products it’s economically sound it’s very romantic yeah um, And a lot of people have a difficulty with, well, then they get into, but Italian food is good. Well, yes, Italian food is good. Then there’s no denying that. But the thing I was trying to capture was something else. So there are a lot of things that need to be balanced here of the idea of the nutritious, delicious idea of the Mediterranean diet. What Italian cuisine is, which is a lot of, you know, salumi, there is quite a lot of meat in it. If you go to a restaurant, you’re going to be very hard pressed to find the vegetables on the menu. It is a white flour, refined white flour cuisine with pasta and bread. And I emphasize that a lot in the book about that desire for white bread.

Speaker:
Right.

Speaker:
So, yeah.

Speaker:
I think you called it in one of your interviews, the aspiration to eat the food of our betters has driven some of our modern cuisine. So if I were to ask you another thing you said that really piqued my curiosity, because actually when Allison and I got together, this was the fourth episode that we did on this podcast was we talked about how a lot of the foods that people subsisted on because it was kind of trash food or, you know, the fifth quarter or whatever, has now become so elite and expensive that people think of it as out of reach, you know, bone broth or, you know, these, you know, sauerkraut is just too expensive, you know? So if I was going to ask you, what did people eat? You’re telling me we didn’t, the Italians weren’t eating pizza and pasta every single day, you know, under fascism. So what were they eating? What would you say?

Speaker:
Um yeah the the myths that come out um that um.

Speaker:
Some of which were surprising to me because while I’ve been in Italy for years and I have watched for the time that I’ve been here the perception of what Italian food is and cuisine and the myth-making and the groupthink and the stories that go on. Um, but the olive oil, the availability of tomatoes, the idea of eating, um, of eating pasta every day and who was able to afford it. Uh, and, and these things are not consequences.

Speaker:
Now, while I’m writing about the, the fascist era, um, these ideas are not consequences of fascism. Okay. But something that, that was a, was a long time. I mean, when you get to fascism, you have people who, who start saying, well, the difference here is that no one is dying of hunger anymore. Okay. People may be hungry. They may be having a substandard, nutritionally substandard diet in many cases. Okay. But they’re not dying of hunger.

Speaker:
And that’s kind of the difference on this continuum of the history of Italian food. Okay. But you still, what we consider Italian food now you’ve got is the tomato sauce and all of the vegetables, the, um, the, the eggplant, peppers, zucchini, um.

Speaker:
Which are all with the exception, well, except eggplant took quite a while to really enter into the cuisine as part of Italian food for many reasons. That one’s a little bit different. And then you have the other foods that are part of the Colombian exchange, which even that term, it needs to be looked at again. And people are, culinary historians are now looking for another way of talking about that Colombian exchange. But those things had not happened yet either, or they were very new. The availability of tomatoes, for example, and tomato sauce. And even the idea of eating raw tomatoes came so much later. So I don’t know if I got sidetracked too far away from your question.

Speaker:
No, no.

Speaker:
Which, okay, okay.

Speaker:
I wanted, you talked about ideas that surprised you. And I wanted to ask about the biggest surprise for me in the book which was the busting of the idea that olive oil has been used throughout Italy as the main fact for like forever and the women’s interviews over and over again they talk about using lard and you comment on the pig and the lard quite often in the book and you’ve also got the section that you just referred to a little moment ago about the Mediterranean diet which you title the so-called Mediterranean diet I wonder if you could talk for a little while on olive oil lard and and the kind of the myth that we have around that regarding Italy

Speaker:
Yeah, it was very important for families. Most families were rural, and most families then had a pig.

Speaker:
Why didn’t, if they were so hungry, why didn’t they have more than one pig? Because a pig will eat a third of its weight in food every day, and you’ve got to be able to supply that. Um they they do forage and everything but but then a the pig was also going to supply cheap fat and they weren’t raised as they are now to to be lean and um to have and to provide a lot of lean meat you you opened your pig and the first thing that you wanted to see is how much fat was going to be there because it was not only for cooking, it was also considered that there was not refrigeration. And so you could cap things basically with a cap of lard that would then become solid. You could grease the leather on your shoes, machinery. It was used for all kinds of things. In addition to then being a pig was always then put into salumi, the cured meats. So those were things, again, without refrigeration, that your family was going to be able to, and we’re not talking about digging into, but pick at throughout the year and have this sort of um.

Speaker:
A representation of a, of a meat that is going to hold in throughout the winter when you don’t have a refrigerator. Okay. So, um, the idea of, of eating, of eating pork as meat was not very common. Um.

Speaker:
So lard was the cheapest fat. Olive oil was not available everywhere. There are certain areas that were olive oil areas, some of them in the South. Then Liguria was an important olive oil area. And other people simply didn’t have it. But your pig and the pork fat was generally what people used as their fat resource. Wealthier people or people also in the Emilia-Romagna area where their cuisine is very much based on first on butter. Okay. But that was for the wealthier table. Using butter was an expression of wealth as well. If someone in your family was not well, you would try to procure some butter. And I have seen things like curatives of having to pick someone up and then give them a little bit of energy, putting a little pat of butter in their coffee. And that would be something you would give someone when they were not feeling well. It was caloric and also that energy boost from coffee, which was also really difficult to procure.

Speaker:
But the idea of the Mediterranean diet, there are a lot of things that you need to hold on to in understanding that first, the idea of it coming about or the studies of it, because it wasn’t really named until much later, but the studies of it coming out in the s with Ansel Keys, who’s an American, doing the Seven Countries Study, some of which then involved Italy. Now, that’s going to be picked up again in the s when he rewrites his book. Eat Well, Stay Well, and he rewrites that book in the s. comes out, Eat Well, Stay Well the Mediterranean Way. In the meantime, he has purchased a home in Amalfi. This is still Ancel Keys. He’s purchased a home in Amalfi, and he’s creating this idea that puts together.

Speaker:
The romantic idea of the Mediterranean and food, because what you’ve got coming out at the same time are competitors. He became very competitive about this idea of the fat and heart diet association, okay? That fat was bad and that we needed to lower fat. Meanwhile, you have uticine coming out and Atkins coming out with the carbohydrate idea, uticine coming out with the sugar idea, and they were competitors for him. And so he countered that with the Mediterranean diet, which then Italy and Greece. Now, there are countries in the Mediterranean. All of them have a different??now we’re going to use the cuisine. They have a different cuisine. And they don’t have the same diet. They don’t have the same availability of vegetables. There is a zone that is called a hardiness zone where olive trees grow. That’s also been used to define what the Mediterranean is.

Speaker:
But the ideas of the Mediterranean diet are very easy to boil down into, eat your vegetables, don’t eat too much meat, exercise, don’t smoke. Now, those are all no-brainers, and they needn’t have been Mediterraneanized and excluding other ideas like the Baltic Sea diet. The um the the then other people came in with their you’ve got instead of the then you had the mediterranean diet pyramid which came out in the uh s that came out in okay so these ideas are very late um and then they get they get applied to italian cuisine Okay. Now, if we go through the ideal lunch of a Sunday lunch, and we think about the Mediterranean diet and Italian cuisine…

Speaker:
The ideal lunch starts with crostini. You’ve got your little pieces of white bread with cheese or some sort of pate or salumi. So you’ve got your pork and those are coming out in big trays. Let’s move on then to the primo piatto, which is a let’s just do the basic thing, which is going to be pasta, refined white flour with maybe a little tomato sauce or some sort of sauce on it. Um move into your second course now typical second course in tuscany is going to be a the centerpiece is a roast um or some sort of piece of meat and then side dish commonly, uh peas cooked with pancetta and some potatoes you might then after that have a um an insalata verde, just a green salad, if you even have that, followed by your dessert and then the fruit course, okay? So that cuisine and that lunch, which is an ideal traditional lunch, and the Mediterranean diet really have nothing to do with each other.

Speaker:
It’s amazing that it seems like, you know, you said earlier, the creation of a concept, the creation of the concept. And it seems that so many times over, there’s been creation of a concept here, a concept of olive oil and what it was, a concept of the Mediterranean diet, a concept of how Italians eating and have eaten for a market, I presume, to market something. Would you agree?

Speaker:
Well, right. I mean, looking at the Mediterranean diet pyramid, okay, it is a very easily communicated symbol. It came out in . In the United States, there was a big conference in which that was basically created at this conference, sponsored by the California olive growers and the Greek import, the United States Greek food import companies, okay? At which, now the Mediterranean then has basically been boiled, when you think about the Mediterranean diet and the countries that are on the Mediterranean, we’re basically talking about parts of Italy, Greece, and maybe parts of Spain.

Speaker:
But the Mediterranean is basically that when you’re talking about the Mediterranean diet. But then the cuisine is something else. So, again, it’s the Mediterraneanization of eat more fruits and vegetables, get some exercise, which, frankly, the studies of juvenile obesity, juvenile obesity in Italy, in the actually in Italy and Greece. Um juvenile obesity in italy and greece are the same percentages as they are in the united states which is used used as the example of um you know of of overweight and obese whereas it’s it’s the same there’s the same ratio um the mediterranean there was an article in the uh in the guardian not too long ago. Spain, Italy, and Greece, again, are the three countries in the EU where people get less exercise than any of the other European countries. Okay? So there’s this idealization of this idea. I mean, it’s sort of like.

Speaker:
I sometimes say that it’s sort of like the South Beach diet, which has nothing to do with South Beach. It’s just called that. And then it’s a diet. The Mediterranean diet is the same thing.

Speaker:
A couple kilometers down the way from where I live is the Giuntini Dog Food Company. Okay. Now, they put out a ?? just talking about ?? to give the extreme example of the big business that the Mediterranean diet is, they put out a dog food called Italian whey. Okay. That includes that, you know, and, and the language of the advertisement for this is about how you want to take care of your pets in the same way that you did it up by including these things, you know, that are part of the, the tradition of the Italian cuisine, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Okay. And it does include, I don’t know, I don’t know in what ratio, but, you know, a little bit of rosemary, a little bit of garlic and, you know, just what my cats crave. So, they also make cat food. So, it’s called the Italian way. Cosmetics that include kind of um you know the oils and things from the mediterranean and you know all of these timeless kinds of products i imagine that there are also household cleaners that are mediterranean kind of cleaners i don’t know yeah.

Speaker:
No one’s marketing lard as a mediterranean kind of

Speaker:
Skin cream additive.

Speaker:
Or frying things with lard. No one’s marketing that that way, are they?

Speaker:
Absolutely not. Absolutely not. So, and what is the thing that I talk about in the book then the other aspect, you’ve got Ansel Keys and very ambitious doctor wanting to, solve the problem of what was becoming the cardiac alarm that was going off in Western countries, wanting to resolve that. Then you have the Mediterranean diet pyramid, but then you also have UNESCO and making the Mediterranean diet an intangible, and I like to say that word again, an intangible heritage. Now, how a food that you need to ingest can actually be intangible? Well, because of the wording that they use, it’s about traditions, it’s about being together. It’s about neighborliness. It’s about inclusivity. Um.

Speaker:
Now, if you take out the word in the way that the whole thing is worded for the way it’s been inscribed by UNESCO, all you need to do is take out the word Mediterranean diet and put in traditional Chinese food, and it will read exactly the same. Wow. Food festivals. It’s about husbandry and fishing and plates and women passing down traditions. Well, how is it that that’s different from anyone else’s? It’s very navel-gazing about the Mediterranean and exclusive about others, as if everyone else was dropping dead from whatever their awful cuisine has been for the last few hundred years.

Speaker:
Sorry about that. Thank you. I want to say, I want to emphasize, I live in Italy. I love Italy. I love Italian food. My life is dedicated to the study of Italian food history. That is my life. That is what I get up and do every day and read about every day. So I am down on… Commercial ploys, group thinks, that kind of thing. I am not against Italy, Italian traditions, recognizing the importance of Italian traditions, too, as a social binder. It is very important that we feel, particularly, you know, in these times that we’re in right now, that we, not in a way that excludes other people, but that we feel closer to each other, that we appreciate being alive and all of the wonderful things that there are. You know, I don’t want to get too new agey, but yeah. So I just wanted to make that sort of caveat there that I don’t mean to be a wet blanket on it. So, yeah.

Speaker:
It’s so, so interesting to me because, and I know you’ve talked about this too, a lot of our elders and women from this generation, for instance, are being looked at for their longevity, but then the result we’re being given is a falsification like the Mediterranean diet myth or the olive oil myth, you know, where in reality, those women were raised on lard. When you started this project, did you know this was what you’re going to find? A lot of these huge revelations and myth-busting things?

Speaker:
I would say… I would say in half, because what was very interesting for me was while I was there to do this myth-busting mission with these older women, because it couldn’t come from me. I’ve lived here for years, but I am American. My life is in Italy. I don’t have a home elsewhere. where I live and work and am married and everything here. So this is my life, but I am still, you know, American.

Speaker:
And so it needed to come from someone else’s mouth, from someone else’s experience. And that’s why I approached this book in that way. Also, the way that I’ve written it in narratives, whereas an oral history book is often written, a person is writing about their research and their findings, and then it’s interspersed with things that people actually said. Now, I do the opposite where I have narratives where I intersperse information that might be missing to the person who is outside of an Italian culture and needing to have some filler information. Because I really want this information to come from this other voice that is a voice of experience that I don’t have. So what I discovered is how much of the myth-making, even though I was there to do the myth-busting, how much of it I had also bought into myself.

Speaker:
So what surprised you the most? What surprised you the most out of all of them? Because there’s so much in the book.

Speaker:
Of course, the lard and coffee. Um, uh, tomatoes, how, um, a, how I’m going to be careful when I say this, how infrequently people ate pasta, uh, the, the.

Speaker:
And it was more of a treat most places, if you could afford it. So, for example, in the first narrative with Julia, she’s from Milan, she’s in the city. I mean, they didn’t eat pasta. If you could afford flour, she says. But that was just too much for them. Her father worked as a, not even as a florist, he worked selling flowers at a stand on the street for a florist selling it. And so that was her economic situation. And for them, even though we think of, again, going back to this idea of poor cuisine and the cucina povera, I mean, cucina povera is povera. It’s really poor. Like, for example, Judita, who was in, she’s an extreme example, working, making charcoal in the mountains. And she and her family went up there eight months a year, eight, nine months out of the year, and they were just up there. And they had polenta every single day, every single meal. Right, right.

Speaker:
You know, they weren’t picking off rustic favorites off of a, you know, a trattoria menu. It was, yeah, it was a monophagous diet. Monophagous meaning the same food every single day. So that was surprising to me. Yes.

Speaker:
It’s just so fascinating. And the introductions that you give to each woman that you spoke with, I think I read them all repeatedly because they’re so gripping. And how you said in another interview I listened to, you said that one woman couldn’t remember how to write the L for her name. You know, this is just a kind of childhood that is hard to imagine for a lot of us.

Speaker:
So I’m going to try and cram two questions into one here and just take and do what you will with it. So I want to ask what it was like interviewing the women, because I want to know what you would say to those of us who desire to sit down with our elders and help record some of these memories wherever we are in the world. And somebody might be listening to this and think, okay, I’m going to start doing this and visit with my neighbors and just sit down and record their narrative. But then you also alluded to on Instagram, on that post, you made a comment about the importance of and the style of oral narrative. And you did just touch on that where you said you actually kept it in the form of the way they said it. And you even had slang and things in there, the way that they were speaking, which was really amazing. So could you talk to us about sitting down and recording and what it was like for you to do that?

Speaker:
Okay. So the process that I went through was, at the time, I was really into my iPad. I have.

Speaker:
Moved away from it. But at the time, I would go to the interview with an iPad. It was an object that none of them recognized. So I would record the interview on this thing that was just sitting on the table that was not a microphone to them. It was an object that, okay, as again, I said, they didn’t recognize it was not going to be intimidating to them. Okay. And we would sit down and I started off with an idea. Now, I interviewed a lot more women than ended up in the book because I wanted to have representative types in the book of different kinds of people from north to south. Both the different kinds of people on the farm ladder, from people who own the farm to people who are farmhands, and then small towns, big cities, the territories as well, because Italy used to have Libya and it used to have Istria. Um, so I wanted to get this, this, a broad spectrum picture and, um.

Speaker:
And again, I went in with my ideas thinking that, um, Things like they were cooking out of the Artuzzi cookbook, which was absolutely ridiculous, and which I learned very quickly that that was just, that that is such a myth that was created in the s when that book was sort of resuscitated extremely authoritatively by Pietro Camporese. I don’t want to put that down because it’s an amazing work that he did and that it ended up on the bookshelves of every cultured Italian home as culinary heritage that no one cooks out of, frankly. But everyone’s got it on their bookshelf. And I’m thinking that, you know, as well, that these women were acquainted with that book. I mean, are you kidding? Most of the women that I interviewed had four years of school. Some of them didn’t really go on to, you know, they learned how to read, but reading wasn’t a thing. Being able to buy a book, you needed to have a certain amount of money.

Speaker:
Speaking Italian well enough, again, this is a very small group of people who are going to be reading that book. So every time I did an interview, I would go home immediately and listen to it and translate it so that I would remember the tone because I’m translating into another language and I wanted to capture the way that that interview felt to me. And I tried, made an attempt to make everyone’s voice different. Now, the book was reviewed by a couple of high-end newspapers, neither of which were American. I’m American. I know the American linguistic palette, and that’s the resource that was available to me linguistically. Whereas I had a, you know, a British critic critique the book well, but said that I was condescending in the way that I translated it and that everyone sounded like they were from the South.

Speaker:
So, because that’s maybe he’s never been to Maine. I don’t know. But so anyway, so there was there that wasn’t. But, you know, another British man said to me, well, why don’t you just translate it all? Now, this is a well-respected man that I highly respect. A mentor to me. He said, why don’t you just translate them all in the Queen’s English? And I said to, actually, he said the King’s English. And I said, well, because they didn’t all speak the King’s English. I mean, these were all individual people. So I tried to render that individuality for each narrative, okay? And learn also about, this is my advice, to listen to them after you do each one, learn about yourself as an interviewer. I interrupted too much. They were saying just these precious nugget things. And I would just, I would break in and say something and I needed to learn to pull back and to get them to speak in as long as stretches as, as, as possible. Okay. Where I wasn’t in oral history, it would be called contaminating it. Okay.

Speaker:
Another thing that is considered contaminating in doing oral history interviews, which I am absolutely against, is they say, don’t have anyone else in the room. And I thought, well, I’m just going to try and have me and the woman here, and it’s just going to be us. And families did not want their elderly person to just be in a room with me. Okay. And so the family would be around. Or they suddenly got very impressed that a researcher was coming into the home and wanting to speak to their grandmother, whereas they had never listened to her before. And so now seemed to be the time that they wanted to all sit around and listen. And I watched those women absolutely bloom when the family was around. And so anytime I went to an interview, I would say, you know, if the family wants to be around or whatever, that’s fine with me. And they generally did. And, and it was such, I can’t, I don’t, I really don’t have the words to describe the feeling that I have of watching that happen and, and making that transpire because it.

Speaker:
Um, you can just feel that this was the first time that these families were actually paying attention to what they had to say, to what the older.

Speaker:
You know, it’s amazing to hear that. And, you know, I really enjoyed the interviews that had other people in the room when they spoke as well. You know, to hear the one with the mother and the daughter who ran the Osteria and the one with the husband who talked about his experience of the war. It brought much more, the women came to life with that kind of around them. As a reader, it gave me more to hear those things as well. and the thought that someone was actually listening to the women when they have such rich and amazing history to share. And yet no one would have listened to them. No one was listening to them. It just, it feels wonderful to me that you enabled that to happen with those women that you talked to.

Speaker:
Yeah, so I do want to encourage women. Now is the time because there’s a thing that happened with World War II that everywhere changed food, changed culinary, if you want to use the word traditions, customs, habits, what was classically eaten, whatever words you want to use there, there was a change that happened. And that generation is going. It needs to be done now. And, Uh, food is such a way to enter into, into history. I, I really didn’t realize how much that whole historical thing was going to open up to me as well, because that, that wasn’t my objective when I, when I started off with the book, I thought I was going to go and just talk about food, but you can’t just go and talk about food. Um it the whole thing comes out around it of of everything that they lived around food um and and, and this can be done just in in so many places so many places who have that we’re the same thing is going on if we could um and i would i would like to encourage people to do that yes.

Speaker:
And i i I think that’s a huge part of what I want to take away from this is that momentousness that I felt from you in the book. Alison, if we could get together and just talk about food, our episodes would be a lot shorter, wouldn’t they?

Speaker:
It’s not possible, I agree.

Speaker:
It’s just warming into everything.

Speaker:
I’ve got another question, which is the book is just, I mean, it’s been momentous for me in changing my appreciation of the country that I live in changing my idea of history just changing so many things it you know it looks so innocent just sitting on my shelf and yet it it’s full of such information and I wanted to ask what do you want people to do with that information what you’ve put in that book what do you want to happen because of it?

Speaker:
Well, with the information that I have in the book, one, as you said, and I would like to encourage people to be gathering this oral history. It will, as it did for me. I had lived in Italy for years, years, about when ?? no, at that point it was years ?? when I started researching this. Now, I thought I knew Italy. I thought I knew food. I thought I knew ?? Um, I, there was a, however, I did not have a relationship with older people in this country. Um, and they were like, it was this, this thing that I, and, and I needed to get over that. And I got over that, and that opened up a world, but I’m struggling for words here. Doing this book, and anyone who goes into the??it completely changed the way that I experience Italy now. It completely changed the way I experience food.

Speaker:
The way I experience food in general, the way I experience Italian food. Um, all of the, the, the stories that I hear. I know that April th is going to be coming up soon with, with, with carbonara and, and that’s going to make me absolutely crazy. Um, seeing that explode on, on Instagram. But, um, so a, that’s one thing. Um, the other thing is, um.

Speaker:
Respecting Italian cuisine as something that has always evolved, okay? Now, I don’t want to take wind out of the sails of France, but France is very much about a codified, the glory of French food is that it is a codified cuisine. And Italy is trying to do that now so that they, in an effort to, Slow Food is About That, about saving traditions, okay? As soon as you’re talking about saving traditions, that means that who is it that actually knows what those traditions are? Who are the authorities that can say that this is a tradition? And that they are actually not part of daily life anymore, okay? When you become a tradition, you become something that has been resuscitated or that needs resuscitating, that becomes a reenactment. You don’t, we don’t reenact what are going to be traditions in years. The things that we do now that are going to be traditions in years or years, because it takes years to officially become a tradition, according to the EU.

Speaker:
We don’t realize that because it’s not a reenactment now. Right. Okay.

Speaker:
So just an understanding of… Of what traditions are, why they’re important, and that they were created.

Speaker:
And to be really careful if you sign up for a tour someplace and go to an agriturismo. So, and, yeah, there’s just so much, there’s so much money being made off of it, which one would say, you know, good for the Italian economy, but I wish it were a little bit more truthful. Yeah, good for the economy. Yeah, on the continuum of, that’s the thing about why oral histories have become important now. Because before, first of all, history has always been written, I like to say this, history has always been written as if no one ever ate. Right. Now suddenly food history has become a field and we’re, we’re writing all kinds of history that, and to be very careful about what you read about history and food history and how much of it is affectively motivated.

Speaker:
So, and saying that and talking about oral history then is, These are people who, on a continuum between truth and falsehood, are giving you a truthful account of what they lived. And the value of oral history lies in that. If you want to go and look up the dates of wars and things like that, then you can go to a different kind of book. Because this is about truthfulness. which is the other side of the coin.

Speaker:
Right so so uh i have one more question if i may um is there okay so one of the women you interviewed and i don’t remember which one i apologize for that she said something that really struck me as as funny and true and she said, so this is what we had. So that’s what we made. See there tradition. And it might’ve been the same woman. And she said, everybody asks us what we ate, but we just ate food. You know, I don’t know what we ate.

Speaker:
Yeah. Yeah. We didn’t have, right. We didn’t have recipes and they’re We’re talking about, well, there weren’t recipes. You had a recipe for those couple of days during the year when you had a certain kind of, particularly a harvest festival. Luigina talks about that. We didn’t use recipes except for that dish that we had once a year. And then maybe we also made the cake from Mantova. Uh, it’s brisolona, etc. Um, there, but there, you know, they just, there was food and you ate it.

Speaker:
Right.

Speaker:
And, and yeah, and that really comes out, you know, where, and, and the different concept of what, this is the other thing, another thing, another takeaway, this is definitely a takeaway, the concept of enough. So many of them felt like what they had was enough. When you’ve got potatoes and beans in the barn, you’ve got food and that was enough.

Speaker:
Right.

Speaker:
They had, you know, So, Ida, they had a mule and they were rich.

Speaker:
Right.

Speaker:
So, and how much our concept of what enough is has changed.

Speaker:
Mm-hmm.

Speaker:
That’s a takeaway that I’d like to. I have thought that.

Speaker:
I remember thinking that as I was reading through, I thought, so for the Mediterranean diet, you could eat like once a day and sometimes not at all. There you go.

Speaker:
Right. That’s right.

Speaker:
That’s right. You’ll lose weight.

Speaker:
Yeah.

Speaker:
I think it was Vera who made the crostini neri. Is that what it was called? The crostini neri. You probably, yeah, she said, you probably think this is like really poor food, but this is like high, high table for us, you know?

Speaker:
Oh, yeah. She made that because, you know, there wasn’t anything in her past that she wanted to make for me. And so she made something that was really special. And I’ll tell you, that’s a recipe that I make often because those are really the best crostini I’ve ever had. But, you know, there just wasn’t anything that she felt not embarrassed by. Wow. Of the way that she ate at home. I mean, so, yeah. Sorry, I interrupted you. We’re there with Vera.

Speaker:
No, this is what we want to hear. These amazing nuggets that you are passing on to us. I don’t want to interrupt you. There there is then you you referred to multiple times in there the women all refer to it at some point it’s not like there was a recipe book they were just kind of putting together what they had and you also speak all the time to the idea of you know what is authentic what is regional what has changed you know but for somebody on the outside me i’m an american i read and speak English. I suppose I can, I can cobble my way through some Italian, but is there, you, you did refer, refer to Artuzzi. And of course, I suppose Epicius is also there for us, but is there a book that you would suggest or some books or places where we could look and find some, maybe some of these traditions that came out of Italy, the way they preserved meat and things like that, that we You could read or try to recreate over here.

Speaker:
That’s translated into English. There’s a book that is called Lerice dei Regionali Italiani. You can tell by the way that I’m saying that, that it’s not in English.

Speaker:
I’ll take an Italian title. That’s okay.

Speaker:
Okay. It is what it is. Okay. Now, this is… She started… There’s the magazine La Cucina Italiana, okay, that is also now owned by Conde Nast that began in and then ended and then was bought up again in or . And then carried on by a woman called Anna Gossetti della Salda. And she also started in traveling around Italy for five years to write a cookbook about regional cuisine. Because what happened after, because this is when the concept of regional cuisine is coming out. Now imagine fascism, which is trying to create an idea of a national Italian identity, okay? Whereas that was just something that was not happening in Italy, which had always been so fragmented. Um, even, even the, the regions themselves had not, the lines weren’t drawn until, until very much later. But, um, uh.

Speaker:
So that is when it, what happens after fascism is you have a recoil away from nationalism back into your own local kind of thing. And a valorization of the regional, of what’s going on more locally. Region is already really big as a culinary concept. So that’s developing as well as the loss of those traditions because of the industrialization, a just wildfire industrialization of Italy after , okay? And food is just becoming industrialized. People are leaving the farms in droves, moving up north to work in factories where you’re going to have a better life, okay? And that’s what makes food change so drastically. So books like this are, first of all, that she was older and going around, but collecting already at that date regional cuisine. Now, some people would like to say, oh, but there’s the silver spoon, that…

Speaker:
Who was the publisher of that? Begins with a P, I don’t remember.

Speaker:
The Silver Spoon, which actually began earlier than that. But that was about, that is not a regional cuisine cookbook. Okay. It does have regional dishes, but it’s about that new Martha Stewart trying to get Italians into a Martha Stewart entertaining middle class kind of mood. That’s what The Silver Spoon is about. In fact, you can hear that in the title, whereas Le Ricette Regionale Italiane is about Italian regional recipes, is the translation. And that’s beginning and end what it is. Um, it’s an enormous book that I have tried, tried, tried and failed, failed, failed to, um, to get a sponsorship to, to translate. Um, so that is an absolute treasure that I even had, had the, um, the, the owner of it on board for a while. And then she got really scared because she’s afraid of losing the rights to it or whatever. But unfortunately, that book remains unpublished. Wow. So, yeah. But if you do read a little bit of Italian, that.

Speaker:
Unpublished in English or?

Speaker:
Unpublished in English. Yeah. Published in Italian. Yes, yes.

Speaker:
And what’s the author’s name again? What’s the author’s name again?

Speaker:
Anna Gossetti della Salda.

Speaker:
Thank you.

Speaker:
Anna Gossetti della Salda, le ricette regionali italiane.

Speaker:
Thank you. Wow. Thank you ever so much for your time, Karima. Both of us are completely enamored with the book.

Speaker:
Thank you.

Speaker:
I know that a lot of people who follow us are already reading the book halfway through because they’re contacting me and saying, oh, wow, I just read this bit. It’s just amazing. And people are telling me that it’s moved them to tears, which it did to me as well. For anyone listening, the book is called, again, Chewing the Fat, An Oral History of Italian Foodways from Fascism to Dolcevita. And it’s by our guest, Karima Moyanaki. Could you tell us, Karima, where people can find you outside of the book if they want to connect with what you’re doing more?

Speaker:
Yes, I have. I’m very active on Instagram. I publish, I do, I put up a post about my, my posts are almost exclusively about, um, I don’t, I ever, I like every now and then there’s a picture of my cat. Um, but it’s mostly about, uh, historical, historical Italian food or food history that then I relate it somehow to, um, Italian cuisine. So I managed to put out some posts for Black History Month that related back to Italian food history. So that is Instagram, and it is historicalitalianfood is my handle. I also have a website, which is a little bit neglected, but it’s got a lot of things where I have longer articles that all have recipes attached to them. But they go into more depth about Italian food history, and that is called The Eternal Table. So theeternaltable.com.

Speaker:
And I also have another book out that’s called The Eternal Table, so not to confuse that book, which is A Culinary History of Rome, which is quite a different tone from Chewing the Fat because it’s aimed at being more scholarly. It’s , years of Roman culinary history, so that’s quite a different kind of read.

Speaker:
Oh, wonderful.

Speaker:
And so that’s that.

Speaker:
Yeah, I really enjoy your Instagram feed. You take beautiful photographs as well as having something interesting to read. And so, yeah, I’d recommend that if anyone’s on Instagram, go and find Karima. And also your website. You say it’s neglected, but it’s got some good information on there. I enjoyed browsing it.

Speaker:
No, I haven’t put up a post in a long time. And I have a newsletter attached to it that I used to put out monthly. And then when COVID happened, it turned into quarterly, and then I haven’t put out a newsletter in the last six months. So I’m going to need to do that. I would also like to mention, I don’t know when this is coming out, but… April rd. Is this going to come out before April rd?

Speaker:
Yes.

Speaker:
Okay. April rd, I am going to be in the U.S. At the Jefferson Foundation, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation in Monticello, giving a lecture on the history of macaroni and cheese with an emphasis on the Jefferson era. But I start in ancient Rome and I go through to craft and soul food, how macaroni and cheese became then absorbed into the canon of soul food. But it’s also going to be streamed online and I will be advertising that on my Instagram feed or you can also look it up on the Monticello site. So that’s going to be the history of macaroni and cheese from ancient Rome through soul food at the Thomas Jefferson Foundation. April rd. That sounds like.

Speaker:
So many things that I love in one sentence.

Speaker:
Yeah.

Speaker:
Awesome. Okay. Thank you ever so much. Andrea, do you have anything else you want to add before we let Karima go off and prepare her supper?

Speaker:
I need another episode for my next stack. I’ll stop. Yeah.

Speaker:
Okay. Wonderful. Karima, do you have anything else you want to add before we say goodbye?

Speaker:
No, no. Thank you very much for having me.

Speaker:
Thank you for joining us. Thank you very much. And yeah, if you’re listening and you’ve enjoyed the interview, go ahead and dive into the book because you won’t be disappointed. Thank you, Karima.

Speaker:
Thank you. Thank you. Bye. Bye. Bye-bye. Bye.

Speaker:
Thank you so much for listening we’d love to continue the conversation come find us on instagram andrea’s at farm and hearth and allison’s at ancestral underscore

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