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.

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.’