Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well Read Online Free PDF

constantly going through, and emerging from, unscathed.
    Sitting atop this double patrimony of classical Italian gastronomy and its regional diversity – which for centuries had been the exclusive domain of technicians, and the singular privilege of the upper classes who employed them – and faced with the task of redeeming it from French dominance and disseminating it among bourgeois readers whose economic values and ethical expectations he fully shared, Artusi may seem more like a pop orchestra conductor than an avant-garde musician. In fact, he is an inspired synthesizer: while the substance of traditional recipes is only minimally altered (a few wrinkles are merely smoothed away), the idea of turning loose so many anecdotes, historical references, scientific condensations, cameos profiling Italian everyday life, and so much more, upon pages earmarked for measurements and cooking times, proved to be a major step forward in the evolution of the cookbook as a literary genre.
    Typically, his recipe for
spaghetti alia rustica
(country-style spaghetti) opens with two cases of aversion to garlic: the ancient Romanaristocracy and Alfonso King of Castile, who “hated it so much he would punish anyone who appeared at his court with even a hint of it in his breath.” Artusi then switches to the esteem in which it was held by ancient Egyptians, who “worshipped garlic as a divinity, perhaps because they had experienced its medicinal properties.” Next he describes these healthful properties, ranging from the beneficial effects on hysteria to garlic’s immunizing power “against epidemic and pestilential diseases.” Finally he warns against banning garlic from cooking on account of its problematic smell (when poorly cooked) and encourages his readers not to deprive themselves “of healthy, tasty dishes,” such as the one he is presenting, “which has often comforted my stomach when upset.” 42 Alfredo Roncuzzi, who first drew my attention to the unsurpassable quality of this small but exemplary jewel, has counted the lines and remarked on the perfect balance of the whole: “19 lines in the preface [17 of them in translation], “ lines of instruction, but the text in its entirety is simply flawless.” 43
    To introduce
tartufi alia bolognese
(truffles Bolognese style), 44 Artusi does not hesitate to compare the colors of truffles to the Whites and the Blacks, political factions that, during their struggle for power, caused the citizens of medieval Florence great suffering. When calling attention to a particularly inappropriate usage of gastronomic terminology, he goes so far as to lift an example from the most sacred of texts: “The Holy Scriptures say that Joshua stopped the sun and not the earth.
Well, we do the same when we talk about chickens
, because the hip should be called the thigh, the thigh should be called the leg, and the leg should be called the tarsus.” 45
    Stunned by the preposterous quality of the display, we might not even stop to ask what kind of subliminal connection could possibly justify the linkage of such distant realities. Indeed, Artusi’s blasé attitude results in some extraordinary detours: Focusing on peacocks, whose meat, Artusi assures us, is “excellent for young people,” the opportunity to impress his readers with the marvels of this bird’s history engrosses him to such a degree that he ends up retaining the secret of how to prepare them for a meal. 46 Southeast Asia is theirnative home, he informs us, and Alexander the Great introduced them to Greece. Struck by their loveliness, the great military leader issued an edict protecting peacocks from the appetites of less sensitive souls. In Rome, things were dramatically different. A rival of Cicero in the Forum, Quintus Ortensius, found them rather delicious and dined on them with no pangs of conscience. In the end the peacock lore in Artusi’s pages may whet our curiosity, but hardly our appetite. These days it may be hard to