Italian Cooking and Religion: Part II — It’s just not kosher

I thought I would share a realisation that has only dawned on me as we cooked our ragù alla Bolognese: Italian food, at least as it has so far emerged in our regional meals, is surprisingly treif (that is, ‘not kosher’).

Cured pork products — such as prosciutto, pancetta, culatello — abound in Italian cuisine and are obvious examples of treif ingredients in Italian cooking. However, there are many other ingredients and culinary practices that render many traditional Italian dishes trief. These ingredients are likely to be less-obvious to the gentile eye. For example consider some of the marine ingredients that are out-of-bounds: eel, clam, crab, lobster, which together feature as the principal ingredient of almost fifty dishes in La Cucina. Each of these sea critters is treif.

Also, the wine we have been cooking with and drinking during these months of Italian regional cooking is also likely to have been treif. So too, much of the beef we’ve used has been treif (because only certain cuts of beef are kosher).

Furthermore, some cooking practices that are favoured in traditional Italian cooking also fall afoul of kashrut, the dietary laws by which kosher food is identified. Most notable, I think, is the Italian technique of cooking meat with butter and milk. Very treif.

Consider the way we prepared the ragù alla Bolognese. We used mince drawn from a mixture of round and sirloin — both of which cuts are treif. The mince was added to the already sautéed pancetta (another treif ingredient). We then added treif wine and cooked the lot with a large dose of milk. The result was a lovely, but very much un-kosher, pasta sauce.

What inferences might we draw from this (very) short survey of the relationship between kashrut and Italian cuisine? This survey indicates that, to a great extent, the gentile and Jewish Italian communities have been and are culinarily distinct. Why is this? I imagine the religio-politics of Italian cultural history feature in the answer somewhere. The question, though, is too substantial a query to be answered on this blog. We should just make a mental note: if ever we invite observant guests to join in our regional Italian meals, stick to vegetarian options.