Italian Cooking and Religion: Part I — Why 'La Cucina' is like the Bible

In the beginning there was the word and the word was La Cucina. Our regional Italian cooking adventure began with this cookbook and I think now, after some six or seven months of cooking from its pages, we should pause and reflect on the cookbook and how well it has performed.

For my part, I have found the cookbook (so far) to be a mixture of the instructive, the enlightening, the quaint and the bizarre. For example, I now know that pizza di verdure is best served the day after it is made, reheated in a frying pan with a little oil. I have admired the many different uses to which bran can be put. I have enjoyed the effects of the mixture of Germanic and Italic cuisine in the border regions. I have been ever shocked at just how much butter, cream and lard appear in everything.

The cookbook has a special place in our hearts. Yet, from time to time, it lacks enough specificity to deal with real-world cooking problems, such as that vexed question, how big is a ‘large’ sweet potato? And so we have found ourselves dipping into other sources, looking at other recipes for instruction. It’s not that we have lost faith. It’s just that we have realised one book cannot hold the answer to everything.

And for those reasons, I have come to the realisation that La Cucina is like the Bible. We accept its central place in setting out the important foundations of the culinary traditions we are looking at; yet, at the same time, we realise that some of the recipes are, as it were, ‘out of touch’ with our modern views. Mammella di mucca (cow’s udders cured in brine) is as incongruous in twenty-first century Australia as is the biblical injunction not to wear clothes of mixed fabrics.*

I also hope, that, like the Bible, La Cucina gets better as it progresses and that the ‘new testament’ recipes from the central and southern regions are less austere and more lively than most of the northern regions’ offerings.

* Instructions on the preparation of mammella di mucca can be found on p 43 of La Cucina. The biblical injunction referred to comes from Leviticus (of course) 19:19—‘Ye shall keep my statutes. Thou shalt not let thy cattle gender with a diverse kind: thou shalt not sow thy field with mingled seed: neither shall a garment mingled of linen and woollen come upon thee.’