Why Italians Love to Talk About Food Read Online Free PDF Page A

the Renaissance, the city still preserves the form of a perfect nine-point star, surrounded by three orders of bastions: two rows of walls erected by the Venetians, and a third added in the Napoleonic era.
    The Friulians were of interest to the Venetians mainly as manpower, to be employed in the construction of the capital and as potential recruits in Venice’s war against the Ottomans. The consequences were devastating. Without a government and without organization, the Friulians soon experienced desolation and neglect, hunger and poverty, with uncultivated fields and a declining population that would perhaps have been extinguished entirely had it not been saved by corn in that period (see “The Early Gifts from the Americas”). Imported from the New World, easily cultivated and nutritious, corn spread throughout Friuli Venezia Giulia during the last quarter of the sixteenth century.
    Polenta is still consumed daily in Gorizia, Udine, and Cortina d’Ampezzo, although there was a time when it had a very bad reputation. In the eighteenth century the population of northern Italy, which consumed polenta almost exclusively, fell ill with pellagra. Goethe, traveling in Italy between 1786 and 1788, diagnosed the cause of the peasants’ poor health with a clinical eye:
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    I believe that their unhealthy condition is due to their constant diet of maize and buckwheat, or, as they call them, yellow polenta and black polenta. These are ground fine, the flour is boiled in water to a thick mush and then eaten. In the German Tirol they separate the dough into small pieces and fry them in butter, but in the Italian Tirol the polenta is eaten just as it is or sometimes with a sprinkling of grated cheese. Meat they never see from one year’s end to the other. Such a diet makes the bowels costive, especially in children and women, and their cachectic complexion is evidence of the damage they do themselves. 1
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    Nowadays polenta is consumed more wisely, as if people were heeding Goethe’s warnings: once cooked, it is toasted and served with salami, cheese, fish, and meat, thereby preventing the risk of vitamin deficiency and consequently of pellagra.
    Frico
(fresh Montasio cheese fried in butter, with potatoes or onions) is a regional specialty known throughout Italy. In the morning, before leading the cattle out to pasture, farm wives would leave potatoes and cheese rinds from the day before on a heated shelf above the stove: thus the leftovers of yesterday’s supper were transformed into an excellent meal for today. Stoves in Friulian peasant homes are distinct: round, located in the center of the room, their perimeter surrounded by two copper shelves, one higher than the other. The shelves are heated by the central fire, but not intensely, just enough so that food on the lower shelf does not get cold and food on the upper shelf cooks very gradually, for many hours or sometimes for entire days.
    Climatic peculiarities naturally influenced the local temperament. Friuli Venezia Giulia has the longest, snowiest winters in Italy, so the inhabitants distracted themselves by taking advantage of the most accessible raw materials and specializing in woodworking, primarily the production of chairs. Nearly all the chairs exported from Italy are manufactured in the areas of Mariano and Manzano, in Friuli. Artisans busy making a chair are portrayed on the sarcophagus of the eighth-century Lombard king Ratchis in the cathedral of Cividale del Friuli, while several documents preserved in the archives of the Doge’s Palace in Venice attest to the fact that Friulian woodworkerswere invited to the lagoon city from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries to produce chairs and seats for chambers in which audiences were held. Today there are approximately two hundred chair factories in the area and a monument ten meters tall, dedicated to the chair, stands at the entry to Manzano, near Udine, bearing the inscription: