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

appreciate the bravery it took to disregard Alexander’s decree, as peacock-meat fanciers are likely to find their favorite fowl (plucked, of course) frustratingly elusive in supermarket poultry departments. Thus we might be better off leaving the stuff such culinary dreams (nightmares?) are made of to the estimable Petronius Arbiter or to Federico Fellini’s visual repagination of his
Satyricon
. Artusi alternately teases and flaunts in
Science in the Kitchen
.
    Whatever else they may be, his pages read like a humorous collection of practical, naive, and sometimes blasphemous, remarks. They are a meticulous compilation of culinary rules, means, and advice, tickled and bedazzled by a panoply of anecdotes and commentaries drawn from history and myth as well as mildly encyclopedic samples of zoological and botanical information. If not a perfect admixture, they form a decidedly irresistible cocktail.
    Failing all else, significant episodes from the author’s life, or the lives of his friends, are conjured up and elevated to the rank of indispensable digressions. In the early 1840s, 47 some seventy years before
Scienza in cucina
reached its apotheosis, the gastronome, as he himself recounts, met with a law student from the University of Bologna, whose name would soon become notorious for reasons unrelated to food history. The meeting, actually no more than a casual encounter, took place at the Trattoria Tre Re (The Three Kings), one of the oldest eating and sleeping establishments in town. 48
    Felice Orsini, whom Artusi describes as a “congenial young man, of middling height, lean build, pale and round face, refined features, the blackest eyes, crinkly locks, who lisped slightly when he spoke,” attempted to assassinate Emperor Napoleon III in Paris in 1858. To noone’s surprise, the student was subsequently executed. Artusi acknowledges the tragic nature of the event, but goes on to suggest that the assassination attempt may have played a significant role in the French monarch’s decision to aid the Piedmontese in their war with the Austrians. These and other details can be gleaned from the recipe for
maccheroni col pangrattato
(macaroni with bread crumbs). 49
    Somewhat longer (though some are longer still) 50 and a great deal more political than the average Artusian digression, such a rambling introduction to the preparation of a dish is, as we have indicated, not unusual. It is nontheless astonishing to encounter Artusi’s highly inappropriate adoption of an expression commonly used to return to a primary subject after a digression: “Ritorniamo a bomba” (literally, “And now, let’s go back to the bomb”). Given that Orsini’s was the first known act of terrorism to be carried out by means of an explosive, would it not have been advisable, on the part of Artusi, to avoid that expression altogether?
    Although Artusi is sometimes inadvertently outrageous in his choice of metaphors and more than slightly irreverent in his similes and historical anecdotes, his syntax and lexicon seem to conform to the widespread notion that the Florentine dialect was ideally suited to become the national linguistic standard. This opinion, which still holds sway in some remote North American colleges and even among a select group of Florentine loafers, fueled many a heated discussion, especially during the post-unification era. In fact, it had received the endorsement of none other than the Milanese Alessandro Manzoni, who made a point of taking up residence in Florence in order to “Tuscanize” his otherwise “Lombardian” novel. Tuscans were generally pleased, though some snobs among them suggested that Count Manzoni’s newly acquired language was as good as his French, 51 too good, that is, to be in harmony with the content of a seventeenth-century story having as its background Milan and the lesser branch of Lake Como.
    Artusi was not a Florentine either, and had moved to that city for reasons that were not at all