“Where the sea is clean, two or three spongy stones impregnated with aquatic plants and molluscs are fished out of a bucket. You take them home soaking them and making sure they never come into contact with the air and you put them to boil in a pot with the classic broth smells. After an hour of boiling, the broth is filtered and brought back to the boil. and pasta stelline or tempestina is cooked in it and served with a drizzle of oil, pepper and grated pecorino cheese, it is not possible to say whether poverty or fantasy wins”. There is a scent of ancient warm atmospheres of times gone by a book by Alberto Capatti, historian of Italian gastronomy, first rector of the University of Gastronomic Sciences of Pollenzo, where he taught the history of cooking and gastronomy for years.
With its "Little atlas of lost foods (Slow Food Editore) is like tiptoeing into the homes of old grandmothers and reliving the nostalgia of a lost time, of recipes from yesteryear, such as the "Budino d'Irene" discovered by Capatti in a leaflet inside a notebook of handwritten recipes, jealously guarded by some housewife with an intriguing inscription “Italy” on the cover which suggests that it was a precious handbook of home-made specialties perhaps put together by an emigrant who kept the pleasure of her family's flavours.
Capatti's research also manages to unearth gems in some publications from a few decades ago. Like the "Snow with mud" taken from "Grandma's recipes" by Fiora palazzini published in 1973 and here we learn that this original title is the translation of a meteorological effect particularly felt by Trieste and Istria which takes the form of dishes with gnocchi and cream and possibly chocolate, a dessert "that allows you to accept what is visible from the windows, avoiding a seasonal event at any time of the year, or rather smiling with the sweet taste that ends up in your mouth from the cup".
You can then continue with the "Scarpaza" a simple and cheap bread cake, a specialty of the grandmothers of the Blenio valley prescribed so that it is not forgotten in Ticino. “A cake – writes Capatti – can spread or rarefy or disappear especially if it has domestic origin and if it has breadcrumbs as an ingredient, and therefore takes the place of pasta and soups. The Ticino grandmother watches over her own uniqueness and that of others regarding local food cultures”.
Grandma's remedies in the kitchen when food supplements didn't exist
But there are not only cooking recipes in this open window on lost foods there are also many grandmother's remedies, the result of popular wisdom, who have raised generations of humanity when the supplement industry was not yet born and when resorting to natural medicine before resorting to the pharmacist.
In short, this Little Atlas of Lost Foods is a continuous discovery, from abalon to yogurt as a hangover remedy.
Capatti tells 80 ingredients, recipes and cooking practices, a story that brings twentieth-century foods and recipes back to life, apparently disappeared, drawn as if from an antique shop, a room of gastronomic wonders.
The sources are the most varied: iconic cookbooks of Italian cuisine, contemporary essays, but also Guccini's songs are the starting point for recovering forgotten foods ranging from water (and the way it is weighed in recipes) to recipes meteors and bizarre preparations such as iron sole, dating back only to 2005.
The cards follow one another in alphabetical order, collecting unpredictable foods today, with infinite variations, with unusual ingredients or bizarrely seductive names, which attract attention such as bighelloni, broccioli and brustulli, or because they are overly imaginative such as lapwing eggs, suggested for a gallant dinner in an aphrodisiac recipe book from 1910.
The forgotten kitchen of grandmothers, with cookbooks that had their publishing fortune over time, is concentrated in the second part of the volume, analyzing the books that mention them in the title and which, in fact, have consecrated them to the authentic soul of traditional Italian cuisine "and imperishable guardians of dishes otherwise never consigned to memory" a message addressed to the reader to "understand not only what we have been but what we are and above all what we will be, in the name of historical continuity guaranteed by constant evolution".
