It wasn’t until 1861 that Italy became a united nation. It would be another 30 years before Pellegrino Artusi got people thinking about the country’s culinary identity.
In 1891, Artusi published La scienza in cucina e l’arte di mangiar bene — Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well, a cookbook compiling 475 recipes from the diverse culinary traditions across Italy. Over the next 20 years, he published another 15 editions, updating as he went until the final recipe count reached 790, just before his death.
These additional recipes largely came from Artusi’s women readers who read his earlier versions and decided he must include their original recipes.
La scienza in cucina e l’arte di mangiar bene would go on to become a mainstay of kitchens both in Italy and abroad; today, it’s sold over a million copies worldwide. And though it was Artusi who had the initial idea, it was the female home cooks behind the scenes who helped build the book’s staying power. With Festa della Donna (International Women’s Day) around the corner on March 8, here’s a closer look at the crowdsourced, co-authored nature of this culinary classic.
A common language for a hundred cuisines
In the late 19th century, Italy was a budding nation; it hardly had a unified identity, let alone a unified cuisine. Still today, culinary traditions across the country resist unification, but back then, there was an enormous patchwork of hyper-local cuisines.
At the time, cookbooks weren’t so much for home cooks but more like technical manuals for professional cooks, with considerable French influence. And let’s not forget the linguistic challenges, as Italian was a second language for many people around the country. A single ingredient could have had dozens of different names depending on the reader.
These were the challenges Artusi faced when wanting to create a manual of straightforward yet rigorously tested recipes for home cooks.
Carlo Petrini, founder of the Slow Food movement, once put Artusi on par with the fathers of Italian unification: “Artusi succeeded in unifying Italy in ways that were very different from those in which Garibaldi, Cavour and Mazzini had ventured,” he wrote in La Repubblica.
A key component of Artusi’s success, Petrini argued, was his “constant dialogue with Italian women (in other words, with those who have always preserved the culinary art of the Italian peninsula). [These were] his main readers and at the same time co-authors.”
The origins of an iconic Italian cookbook
Artusi was born into a wealthy family in Forlimpopoli before they moved to Florence, where he briefly worked as a travelling merchant in the family business. After his parents died, Artusi lived off his inheritance and dedicated himself to his true passions: writing and food.
With the help of his two household cooks, Francesco Ruffilli and Maria Sabatini, Artusi experimented with recipes he had collected from around the country, compiling them in his book.
The two cooks were bequeathed Artusi’s copyright when he died, and Maria, who went by Marietta, had a recipe dedicated to her: 604. Panettone Marietta.
“Marietta is a good cook and so kind and honest that I would like to name this dessert after her, since I learned it from her,” Artusi wrote.
Although she worked for him, Artusi treated “Marietta” like a daughter and helped her get a real education, which is evident in their correspondence and the fact that she read great works of literature to him in his old age.
A little help from his (female) friends
Despite the fact that Artusi was writing as a well-traveled, wealthy bachelor in his 60s with two cooks aiding him, he was deferential in a way to his female readers, who would go on to try out his recipes in their humble kitchens.
When, after the first few editions were published, Artusi started receiving letters from women across the country — along with other requests, suggestions and anecdotes — he decided to include them in future editions of the book.
In one recipe, Artusi refers to the woman who sent it to him with a quote from her letter: “I want to teach you how to make a delicious and elegant deep-fried pizza. But don’t you dare call it a stiacciata (flatbread), because it should be something completely different. Call it a pizza a libretti (booklet pizza) and you’ll be on the right track.”
In another recipe for cornmeal cookies — 592. Gialletti I. — he warns mothers of the treats’ tempting flavor: “Dear mothers, treat your children to these gialletti. But beware you should not taste them if you don’t want to hear them crying, as it is very likely they will get the smallest piece.”
The cookbook as a whole reads more like a personal encyclopedia of meals, filled with travel anecdotes and amusing asides: “We’ll leave it to the English to enjoy boiled legumes with no seasoning, or at most with a little butter,” Artusi quipped in recipe 426. Piselli col prosciutto. “We southern Europeans need our food to have a bit of flavor. Nowhere else have I found peas as good as in the trattorias of Rome.”
Between Artusi’s clear respect for his female readers’ knowledge and his good-natured humor, it’s no wonder women enjoyed the correspondence. Today there are 1,800 letters preserved in the Casa Artusi Foundation archive in Forlimpopoli.
These women and correspondents whose simple home recipes became part of one of the most famous cookbooks in Italy were all active participants in the construction of Italian culinary identity as we know it.
