Category Archives: de rebus italicis

A visit to the “new” 2nd Ave.

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2nd Avenue Deli
162 E 33rd St
(btwn 3rd and Lex)
New York, NY 10016
(212) 689-9000

The bottom line: the “new” 2nd Avenue Deli (on 33rd st) is nearly identical to the original (it’s just not on 2nd Avenue anymore). If you liked it then, you’ll like it now. It’s the same schmaltzy trip down memory lane (photo by Winnie; check out her awesome photos here).

Some years ago, I included the 2nd Avenue Deli in a piece I wrote about culinary anamorphism for Gastronomica (as I defined it, culinary anamorphism is a refashioning of food to make it resemble something else; in this case, towers — in pre-9/11 New York and fifteenth-century Cremona). Here’s the relevant passage (for the full text, click here):

    One of the most unforgettable instances of culinary anamorphism in recent memory must be attributed to restaurateur Abe Lebewohl, the late owner of the celebrated Second Avenue Deli in Manhattan, who was famous for his chop liver sculptures (he was also known for his Mock Chop Liver, a faux version of the old-world classic that wasn’t even vegetarian because it included schmaltz, i.e., chicken fat; it was just faux for the sake of being so). According to the deli’s eponymous cook book:

    “In 1976, Abe donated 350 pounds of chopped liver—not for the bar mitzvah of an indigent thirteen-year-old, but to New York magazine designer Milton Glaser’s graphic-design studio, Pushpin. Working feverishly in their highly perishable medium (by its second day, the exhibit was deemed ‘ripe’ for destruction), nineteen of the studio’s artists put together a show at Manhattan’s Greengrass Media Art Gallery called ‘Man and Liver’… The winning entry was James Grashow’s monumental six-and-a-half-foot-high rendering of King Kong straddling the World Trade Center’s twin towers.” (p. 4)

    Food in the form of buildings has been popular since the Renaissance. One of the most noted examples in the Italian Renaissance involved Torrone, the famous nougat of Cremona. On the occasion of the wedding of Bianca Maria Visconti to Francesco Sforza, October 25, 1441, the bride and groom were presented with a nougat replica of the city’s church bell tower, the so-called Torrione (today known as the Torrazzo) from which the sweet derived its name. Towers were a sign of power and wealth in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, and it was not uncommon for gastronomic effigies to be erected in their likeness. The towers depicted by James Grashow were also a symbol of power, and like the tower of Cremona, they were a synecdoche for the city of New York. That the artist and restaurateur undertook such a labor-intensive rendering of the famous site from the New York skyline was testimony to the irresistible allure of culinary anamorphism.

I had fun the other night at the “new” 2nd Avenue Deli…

Ptcha is jellied calves’ feet. It was good with a little horse radish on rye. Mario Batali, eat your heart out.

Some prefer the matzoh ball fluffy and light, others firmer and denser. This one tended toward light, just like the old days when the 2nd Ave. Deli was on 2nd Ave.

One of my earliest memories is wondering why people in gray suits ate tongue at funerals. Tip or center? We had center.

The pastrami was well sliced but a little dry. Once I asked a Hungarian woman, a family friend and a wonderful lady, what she ate when her family landed on the Lower East Side in the early twentieth century. “Meat,” she said. “We ate meat.” She’s in her 90s and doing great.

The Spinetta Affair (and the Virtuous Burglar)

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Who dunnit? Neither Franco Ziliani nor I could have done it because on the night of Tuesday, February 12, Franco was at home with his family typing away at his computer and rubbing sleep from his eyes in Bergamo and I was eating a porterhouse at Keens in midtown Manhattan.

Who were the daring thieves who, according to La Stampa, arrived at the winery in a van that night, entered the cellar through an unlocked window, opened and tasted a few bottles, and then carried away more than 1,000 lots of La Spinetta’s “top-Wine Spectator-rated” wines? (Click the image above, left, to read the account in Italian, published February 14.)

Could it have been the mysterious underground organization The Committee for the Liberation of Barolo and Barbaresco from Modernist Hegemony?

Joking aside, the thieves knew what they were doing because they took only top-rated bottles: “evidently they had read the [wine] guides in which Spinetta has been one of the most highly rated wineries for the last three years.” It’s remarkable to think that the thieves, who somehow carted away more than 1,000 bottles of wine, took the time to uncork a few bottles and sample their booty.

Reading the account (sent to me by Franco), I couldn’t help but think of the classic play by Italian anarchist and Nobel laureate Dario Fo (left): “Non tutti i ladri vengono per nuocere,” literally, “not all thieves come to do harm” (the title has also been translated as “The Virtuous Burglar” and “Some Burglars Have Good Intentions”).*

Here’s the opening of the play:

A half-dark stage. Sound of breaking glass. Enter burglar. His flashlight shows a living room filled with expensive things. Phone rings. Pause. Rings again. Burglar picks up phone. Very long pause. Burglar, into phone: “How many times have I told you not to call me at work?**

The caller is the burglar’s wife.

The play — a farce — is a about a thief who spends an evening in the home of bourgeois family. As he leafs through their belongings, the man of the house comes home with his mistress. The thief hides but when he can no longer conceal himself, the couple contemplate how they can dispose of him so that he will not reveal their secret. Then, the lady of the house appears and her husband asks the burglar to pretend to be the husband of his lover. Then the burglar’s wife appears and then… well, you’ll just have to read the play yourself.*** In this satire of bourgeois hypocrisy, it turns out that the thief is the virtuous one.

By virtue of their theft, the Spinetta burglars didn’t do anyone any good and I sincerely hope the Rivetti family gets their wine back. So be on the look out for:

160 6-packs Barolo Campè 2003
20 6-packs Barbaresco Valeirano 2004
360 6-packs Barbaresco Gallina 2003
600 bottles Barbaresco 1999, 2000, and 2001****

That is to say, look out for those wines if you like the same wines as the editors of The Wine Spectator.

Notes:

* First printed in 1962 but first performed in the late 1950s.

** For brevity’s sake, I’m borrowing Ben Sonnenberg’s paraphrased version from his 1993 Nobel recommendation of Fo (The Washington Post, December 5). “The main reason I choose Fo,” wrote Sonnenberg, “is because he writes satirical plays that people applaud and governments fear.”

*** For an English translation, See “The Virtuous Burglar,” translated by Joe Farrell, in Dario Fo. Plays: One, Portsmouth (NH), Methuen, 1992, pp. 313-49. I also found this flawed translation online.

*** As reported by the Rivetti family.

Interesting, miscellaneous facts about Dario Fo:

– He won the Nobel Prize in 1997.

– In 1980, the U.S. State Dept. refused him (and his wife Franca Rame) entry to the country. He was supposed to attend the Festival of Italian Theater in New York. Arthur Miller, Norman Mailer, and Martin Scorsese — among others — attended a rally to protest the U.S. denial of his visa.

– As is the case with “Non tutti i ladri vengono per noucere,” most of Dario Fo’s titles have a proverbial or aphoristic sound to them. My favorite Fo title is “La marijuana della mamma è sempre la più bella.” I’ll let you translate that yourself.

I’m Too Sexy for This Wine

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Above: Roman-born Piera Farina makes a line of wines called “Sexy” in Sicily (click the image to read more in Italian).

Does anybody remember the one-hit-wonder Right Said Fred? I’m sure that even Right Said (is that his first name?) wouldn’t be “too sexy” for Barolo… unless it were a Barolo made by a modernist producer like Domenico Clerico, who chimed into the “Barolo is the sexiest wine” debacle a few weeks ago saying, “Of course it’s a sexy wine, because it’s fascinating, just like all things that are hard to attain and conquer.”

Maria Teresa Mascarello, a traditionalist producer (one of my all-time favorites), was a little more even-handed in her comment on the “sexy” that never was: “‘Sexy’ can be an ironic term but I believe that Barolo is more of a intellectual wine. That doesn’t mean it’s any less seductive. I might have used the word ‘intriguing’ [to describe Barolo]. I’d use ‘Sexy’ to define a wine that belongs in a lower category.”

Clerico and Mascarello were quoted in Roberto Fiori’s January 19 article published in La Stampa, “According to Americans, Barolo is the sexiest wine.”

Never mind that Eric Asimov never called Barolo “sexy.”

Here’s my original post on the tidal wave of misunderstanding that followed an Italian news agency’s mistranslation of Eric’s January 16 article on Barolo. (The Agenzia Giornalistica Italiana erroneously claimed that he had called Barolo “the sexiest wine.”)

Italians’ views and attitudes about sex are much more liberal than Americans’ and nudity and sexuality are often incorporated into advertising for food and wine. I find it all the more strange that the “sexy” never written caused such a furor there. Below I’ve collected some “sexy” wine images — Italian in provenance — to put it all into perspective.

Alice e il vino is on of Italy’s most popular wine blogs (click image to read the post).

Even the Gambero Rosso — publisher of Italy’s leading wine guide — isn’t above the fray.

I found these bottlings of Cabernet Sauvignon from Emilia-Romagna on Italian Ebay.

*****

I’m too sexy for this blog…

I’m too sexy for my love too sexy for my love
Love’s going to leave me

I’m too sexy for my shirt too sexy for my shirt
So sexy it hurts
And I’m too sexy for Milan too sexy for Milan
New York and Japan

And I’m too sexy for your party
Too sexy for your party
No way I’m disco dancing

I’m a model you know what I mean
And I do my little turn on the catwalk
Yeah on the catwalk on the catwalk yeah
I do my little turn on the catwalk

I’m too sexy for my car too sexy for my car
Too sexy by far
And I’m too sexy for my hat
Too sexy for my hat what do you think about that

I’m a model you know what I mean
And I do my little turn on the catwalk
Yeah on the catwalk on the catwalk yeah
I shake my little touche on the catwalk

I’m too sexy for my too sexy for my too sexy for my

‘Cos I’m a model you know what I mean
And I do my little turn on the catwalk
Yeah on the catwalk on the catwalk yeah
I shake my little touche on the catwalk

I’m too sexy for my cat too sexy for my cat
Poor pussy poor pussy cat
I’m too sexy for my love too sexy for my love
Love’s going to leave me

And I’m too sexy for this song

— Right Said Fred

Veronelli “subversive” activist and editor

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Click here to read the original interview in Italian at Veronelli.com.

Above: the jacket for one of the few extant exemplars of Pino Bava’s Italian translation of De Sade’s Historiettes, contes, et fabliaux with illustrations by Italian artist Alberto Manfredi, published by Veronelli in 1957. Veronelli was sentenced to prison for obscenity that same year but never served time. The book was one of the last burned publically in Italy (image courtesy of Veronelli Editore, Bergamo).

Some may remember my October post on Luigi Veronelli (1926 – 2004) and his 1982 trip to California. My translation of Veronelli’s preface to Catalogo dei vini d’Italia (1983) inspired a few other bloggers, notably Eric and Alan.

Later in the year, when I met my dissertation adviser and sometimes collaborator professor Luigi Ballerini for a holiday drink, he reminded me that he was working at Rizzoli Editor in Milan in 1964 when Rizzoli published Veronelli’s now required-reading Cocktails. Luigi (Ballerini) has many fond memories of the congenial Veronelli, including a dinner hosted by Veronelli at his home in San Siro (Milan) to thank his editorial staff. “It was the first time I tasted Château d’Yquem,” said Luigi (Ballerini), who was 24 years-old at the time of their meeting, “Veronelli held it up to the light and showed us how it turned emerald in color.”

After Veronelli’s passing in 2004, many apocryphal anecdotes regarding his life have been published on the internet. Curious to find out more about his activism and his controversial publishing career, I recently contacted Gian Arturo Rota, president of Veronelli Editore in Bergamo, and submitted the following questions (in italics). I have translated Rota’s answers below.

Beyond being the architect of the Italian food and wine renaissance, Veronelli was also an editor who published poetry and literary works. What were his principle literary interests?

He began in the 1950s publishing works by De Sade, Anatole France, philosophical works (like Giovanni Emanuele Bariè’s concept of neo-trascendentalism) and political works (like Pierre-Joseph Proudhon), and books on gastronomy (like Le ghiottornie di Gabriele d’Annunzio* and Apicius). He also published books on sports.

He published magazines as well: I problemi del socialismo (Problems of Socialism and Il gastronomo (The Gastronome).

Veronelli closed the doors of Veronelli Editore [his publishing company] in the 1960s because he wanted to devote himself exclusively to his work as a journalist and writer. His literary interests? A bit of everything, I would say, with a predilection for classical authors and for eighteenth-century France. He was a highly erudite man.

Veronelli was also politically engaged: what were the defining moments of his political life?

Inasmuch as he actively worked for a political party, his interest in politics didn’t last long. He worked for the Italian Socialist Party when – as he liked to say after the Tangentopoli scandal** – socialists were still serious. Keep in mind that he was a friend of Lelio Basso, one of the party’s founders and one of its most illustrious theoreticians, and a contributer to his magazine I problemi del socialismo.

Veronelli’s “occupation” of the train station at Santo Stefano Belbo and the translation of De Sade: on the internet, there are contradictory, apocryphal accounts. What were the facts?

September 19, 1980: Veronelli attended a rally in Asti (and not in Santo Stefano Belbo) where grape-growers and winemakers had gathered to discuss the then serious problems faced by Asti’s viticultural community. He had promised that he would speak on behalf of grape-growers only if those politicians responsible – in his view – for the situation would also attend. The politicians did attend and gave their patent answers without assuming any responsibility. The thousands of grape-growers who had gathered in the square begged him to speak. He did. In his harsh speech, he emphasized the fact that the grape-growers needed help and that their rights needed to be defended. Spurred by the crowd’s enthusiasm, the grape-growers took the stage and asked their colleagues to block the streets and occupy the Asti train station. Veronelli encouraged them to do so and he was later accused and convicted for aggravated obstruction of a public thoroughfare. He was granted amnesty four years later [and did not serve time in prison].

Above: the frontespiece of De Sade’s Storie, storielle, e raccontini.

Regarding De Sade’s Storie, storielle, e raccontini),*** I know that it was one of the last – if not the last – books burned in a public square in Italy. The court of Varese [a town north of Milan] ordered it burned because the book contained texts and images that had been deemed obscene. Veronelli attended the bonfire and to protest his sentence, he applauded and laughed the entire time. He sentence to jail-time was however commuted and he was never imprisoned.

Notes:

* Gabriele d’Annunzio (1863 – 1938) was one of Italy’s greatest poets, dramatists, and novelists. Known for his insatiable appetites (for food, women, and adventure), he often wrote about his culinary exploits and feats. Ghiottornie (from the Italian ghiotto or “insatiably hungry for”) can be loosely translated as “the oversized appetites” of Gabriele d’Annunzio.

** Tangentopoli or “bribesville,” the widespread political corruption scandal, unraveled by the Italian authorities’ Mani pulite or “clean hands” campaign in 1992.

*** Historiettes, contes, et fabliaux or “Stories, Tales, and Fables,” published in Paris as early as 1800 in Les crimes de l’amour or “Crimes of Love.”

Addendum:

See this informative obituary published in The Independent.

Aglianico ≠ Ellenico?

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Does the grape name Aglianico come from ellenico or Hellenic as so many claim? A look at the earliest references leads me to believe that it probably doesn’t. May the philologically curious please read on…

Above: the frontespiece of Giambattista della Porta’s Villae or On Country Houses (Frankfurt, 1592) in the rare books collection at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden.

“As philologist, one sees behind the sacred texts,” wrote Friedrich Nietzsche in The Twilight of the Idols.* While most think of Nietzsche as a philosopher, few remember that his early training was in philology, the (inexact) science of the history and development of language and literature, literally the “love” (Greek philo-) of the “word” (Greek logos).

My philological curiosity recently led me to the Brooklyn Botanical Garden where I hoped to get to the bottom of a a etymological conundrum that has bothered me for a long time: does the grape name Aglianico come from the word ellenico or Hellenic as so many oenophiles claim or does it come from Aleatico (literally, a grape that ripens in July, from the Italian lugliatico or of the month of July) as many Italian philologists believe?

The excellent rare-book collection at the BBG includes a rare copy of Villae (On Country Houses, 1592, Frankfurt), an almanac of farming, vine-tending, and winemaking in sixteenth-century Campania by Giambattista della Porta (1535? – 1615), the great Neapolitan scientist, agriculturist, and viticulturist. Most ampelographers agree that Della Porta’s book was earliest to refer to the Aglianico grape as hellanico or Hellenic (ampelography is the study of grapes, from the Greek ampelos or “vine” and graphê or “writing”).

Above: folio 501 and a detail highlighting the line, “Ergo nostras hellanicas helvcolas [sic] antiquorum dicerem.”

The reference is found in the chapter on grape varieties and wines (folio 501): “Ergo nostras hellanicas helvcolas [sic] antiquorum dicerem.” “Therefore, I would say that the helvola [yellowish] grapes of the ancients are our Hellenic grapes.” He is referring to a passage from the Historia Naturalis (14.29) where Pliny (23 – 79) describes grapes that grow in the shadow of Mt. Vesuvius (it’s not clear that Della Porta and Pliny were describing the grape we know today as Aglianico because both of them refer to it as helvola or yellowish in color).

The earliest known occurrences of the word Aglianico in print occur around the same time as Della Porta’s Villae (Andrea Bacci, De naturali historia vinorum, 1596, and Jean Liébault, L’agriculture et maison rustique, 1586 [I’ve been able to verify the mention in Bacci but — to date — I haven’t been able to get my hands on a copy of Liébault]).

There is no question that the Aglianico grape has been called hellenico, hellanico, and ellenico since the sixteenth century. But is there really a reason to believe that Aglianico comes from ellenico (besides the fact that the words sound somewhat similar)?

It is unlikely that Aglianico comes from ellenico because the the terms Hellenic and ellenico were coined around the same time Aglianico first began to emerge as a grape name.

According to the Grande Dizionario della Lingua Italiana (The [Unabridged] Dictionary of the Italian Language, edited by the great twentieth-century philologist Salvatore Battaglia), ellenico and ellenismo were coined in Italian after the French hellénisme, for which the earliest known reference dates to 1580 in France. It is a term derived from Hellenes (a tribe of ancient Greece) and came into use during the Renaissance to denote the Grecian realm and Grecian culture (according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest occurrence in English is 1609). Pliny and his Roman contemporaries wouldn’t have recognized the word hellenicus because it did not exist in their time (they used graecus).

Della Porta did not claim that Aglianico comes from ellenico. He simply speculated that the grape described by Pliny (helvolas antiquorum, the yellowish grapes of the ancients) was called hellanico (hellanicas nostras, our Hellanico grapes) in his day (i.e., as of 1592).

Does Aglianico come from Aleatico and/or lugliatico? Most Italian etymologic dictionaries report that it does (and my research won’t stop here). What’s clear is that Aglianico and ellenico first appeared at roughly the same time and are related historically but probably not etymologically.

Pardon the pun: when I look “behind the text,” I find it’s not all Greek to me.

Above: the Rare Books reading room at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden. In another lifetime, I worked many nights as a guitar player in a wedding band in the Garden’s atrium, a popular NYC wedding venue.

* The Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ, trans. R.J. Hollindale, New York, Penguin, 1990, p. 175.

Barolo, the “sexiest” wine? Eric Asimov mistranslated by Italian news wire

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My inbox greeted me this morning with a message of alarm and disbelief from my friend, top Italian wine blogger, Franco Ziliani:

“The Italian press decided to give the following title to an article about Eric Asimov’s recent and excellent articles on Barolo in The New York Times: ‘According to Americans, Barolo is the sexiest of all wines: it makes you wait just like a beautiful woman [does].’”

In the article, published by one of Italy’s most respected dailies, La Stampa, journalist Roberto Fiori erroneously reports that Eric, writing for The New York Times, calls Barolo “the sexiest wine in the world.”

In Franco’s post on this rigmarole, he points out — among other things — that:

a) Eric never used the word “sexy” (he used the words “seductive” and “sensuous”);

and

b) Fiori also incorrectly translates Eric’s “Burgundy” as “Bordeaux” (yet another instance of sloppy journalism).

Here’s a link to Fiori’s article.

The article in question was just one of a slew of reports that appeared today in the Italian papers, all based on a news flash released by AGI (Agenzia Giornalistica Italiana or “Italian Journalistic Agency,” similar to AP or Reuters):

“The sexiest wine in the world? Barolo, according to The New York Times. Especially when one has the time, patience, and opportunity to age the wine for at least ten years, because only in this manner will it become ‘austere, mature, and sensual.’ These are the words of Eric Asimov, official wine critic for the American daily.”

Evidently, neither the AGI reporter nor Fiori took the time to verify what Eric had actually written.

Adding insult to injury, Fiori writes that his readers should take “satisfaction” in the fact that “The New York Times has acquired a taste for Barolo: just one week ago [The Times published] a long article that listed Italy’s many ills but cited the noble wine of the Langhe as one of its few positive things” (the article to which he is referring was actually published — another instance of sloppy journalism — more than a month ago: Ian Fisher’s “In a Funk, Italy Sings an Aria of Disappointment,” December 13, 2007). Good news, he says, “for the 10,000,000 bottles of the 2004 vintage, on the market since January 1.”

I’m only reporting the facts and will spare you my editorial. But I am reminded of what Alessandra Stanley wrote in The Times some years back a propos the Italian press corps and the then Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi: “the Italian press got the prime minister it deserves” (“A Virtuoso At Playing The Press In Italy,” August 21, 2003). Seems that things haven’t changed much since then…

Carbonara (and Matelica)

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Yesterday was international Carbonara Day and New York hosted a number of carbonara celebrations organized by the GVCI (Virtual Group of Italian Chefs). The origin of Spaghetti alla carbonara is unknown but the GVCI has put together this relatively well-informed page citing all the theories as to its provenance (I was glad to see that the group referenced my edition of Ippolito Cavalcanti’s Cucina Teorico-Pratica).

I didn’t get to taste Cesare Casella’s Carbonara with Winnie but I did convince Roman chef Salvatore Corea to whip up a Carbonara just for me at his newest restaurant Bocca.

Above: Salvatore Corea’s Spaghetti alla Carbonara is not on the menu at Bocca but it was great.

I paired it with La Monacesca’s 2005 Verdicchio di Matelica: clean and fresh in the mouth, with nice fruit flavors. While Verdicchio dei Castelli di Iesi, which lies on the Adriatic coast of the Marches, is the more famous of the two appellations, Matelica, which lies in an inland valley, is known for its fruity notes (thanks to the temperature variation of the valley). It’s a wonderfully food-friendly wine and also went well with Salvatore’s grilled scamorza and culatello.

Above: Salvatore also had me taste his Spaghetti alla gricia, a similar dish, also made with guanciale (and black truffles) but no egg. It wasn’t as good as the carbonara but tasty nonetheless.

Above: to be avoided at all costs! The Spaghetti alla Carbonara at Il Mulino in the West Village was by far the worst I’ve ever tasted.

Late last year I tasted the Spaghetti alla carbonara at Il Mulino, in the West Village, where I had one of the worst meals of my life. It’s really unbelievable — inconceivable in fact — that this would-be landmark restaurant has not been exposed for what it truly is: a sham.

Above: another dish of equally dubious origins, Fettuccine Alfredo, also at Il Mulino, and equally bad as its carbonara.

The only bottle I could find worth drinking at Il Mulino was a 1988 Barolo by Marchesi di Barolo (the rest of the list is over-oaked and WAY over-priced). Thankfully (or sadly, depending on how you look at it), I was the guest of another wine professional. We were both shocked by the obscene prices. So, please, don’t ever go there!

Stick to the professionals (hopefully we can get Salvatore to make his carbonara a regular dish on his menu).

Qui si parla italiano

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An errand brought me out to Bensonhurst (Brooklyn) this afternoon where I had one of the best espressos I’ve had in long time. The Caffè Italia is a classic Italian bar where coffee is served at the counter.

Caffè Italia
6921 18th Ave. (at 69th St.)
Brooklyn, NY
(718) 234-7010

Italian is spoken at nearly every business along 18th Avenue in Bensonhurst.

Above: the Villabate pastry shop in Bensonhurst.

Pasticceria Villabate
7117 18th Ave. (at 71st St.)
Brooklyn, NY
(718) 331-8430

The origins of Sugo alla puttanesca?

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puttanesca9bAbove: spaghetti alla puttanesca. There’s one thing we can all agree on: “sugo alla puttanesca” (literally “whoreish sauce”) is made with tomatoes, olives, capers, salt-cured anchovies, garlic, and chili flakes (give or take an ingredient or two). There’s no questioning that it tastes good.

In the wake of my post-new-year’s eve post “Taittinger alla puttanesca”, fellow bloger Marco wrote me, collegially questioning my belief that “sugo alla puttanesca” should not be attributed to prostitutes or their culinary preferences. I promised Marco that I would do some more research and another post. Here’s what I found:

1) the earliest text to reference pasta “alla puttanesca” cited by the Grande dizionario della lingua italiana (edited by Salvatore Battaglia) is Raffaele La Capria’s 1961 novel Ferito a morte (translated as The Mortal Wound, 1962).

2) according to a study commissioned by the Unione Industriali Pastai Italiani (Italian Pasta-Makers Union), pasta “alla puttanesca” first became popular in Italy during the 1960s.

3) a search in The New York Times electronic archive revealed that the first mention of “puttanesca” sauce in the paper was made on January 28, 1972 by restaurant reviewer Jean Hewitt in her review of Trattoria da Alfredo (then located at 90 Bank street): “spaghetti Puttanesca [sic], which has a tantalizing tomato, garlic, anchovy and black olive sauce.”

4) in her landmark tome on Neapoitan cuisine, La cucina napoletana (1977), Jeanne Carola Francesconi attributes the creation of sugo alla puttanesca to Ischian painter Eduardo Maria Colucci (1900-1975) who — according to Francesconi — concocted “vermicelli alla puttanesca” as an adaptation of alla marinara or “seaside-style” sauce.

But the definitive albeit anecdotal answer to this conundrum may lie in an article published by Annarita Cuomo in the Ischia daily, Il golfo, in February, 2005: “Il sugo ‘alla puttanesca’ nacque per caso ad Ischia, dall’estro culinario di Sandro Petti,” “Puttanesca sauce was born by accident in Ischia, the child of Sandro Petti’s culinary flair.”

According to Cuomo, sugo alla puttanesca was invented in the 1950s by Ischian jet-setter Sandro Petti, co-owner of Ischia’s famed restaurant and nightspot, the “Rancio Fellone.”* When asked by his friends to cook for them one evening, Petti found his pantry bare. When he told his friends that he had nothing to cook for them, they responded by saying “just make us a ‘puttanata qualsiasi,'” in other words, “just make us whatever crap” you have (see my original post for a definition of the Italian puttanata).

“All I had was four tomatoes, a couple of capers, and some olives,” Petti told Cuomo. “So I used them to make the sauce for the spaghetti.” Petti then decided to include the dish on the menu at the Rancio Fellone but “spaghetti alla puttanata didn’t sound right. So I called it [spaghetti] alla puttanesca.”**

Petti’s anecdote is probably tenable but is by no means exhaustive (from a philological point of view). To make matters worse, Colucci was Petti’s uncle and it’s unclear why Francesconi attributes the dish to the painter. But philology is an inexact science: the origin of sugo alla puttanesca probably lies some where between the isle of Ischia and the Amalfitan coast, where tomatoes, capers, olives, anchovies, and garlic are ingredients of choice. It’s clear that the dish emerged sometime after World War II when tomato-based sauces grew in popularity among the Italian middle class. My philological sensibility leads me to favor the “puttanata/puttanesca” theory over any other and there is no evidence — at least that I can find — that points to prostitution as the origin of the dish.***

There’s one thing we can all agree on: sugo alla puttanesca tastes good.

* A rancio fellone is a sea spider or spiny crab, a common ingredient in Mediterranean cuisine.

** Like the French à la, the Italian expression “alla” (the preposition a + the definite article la) denotes “in the style of” or “after the fashion of” and is always followed by an adjective (not a noun); alla puttanesca sounded better to Petti because puttanesca is an adjective (while puttanata is a noun).

*** In his Naples at Table (1998), the otherwise venerable but hardly philologically minded Arthur Schwartz reports a number of apocryphal etymologies whereby Neapolitan prostitutes are indicated — in one way or another — as the originators of this dish. He even goes as far as to write that a seemingly celebrated nineteenth-century courtesan, Yvette “La Francese” (Yvette the French [prostitute]), a native of Provence, may have created the dish to assuage her homesickness. The fact that the dish emerged during the 1950s would seem to dispel any romantic notions of pasta alla puttanesca in nineteenth-century Neapolitan bordellos. Brothels were outlawed in Italy in 1958.

Lunching at the UN for a Good Cause

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Above: in Italian the United Nations Secretariat building is called the palazzo di vetro or the glass palace. Italy is the sixth-largest contributor to the United Nations ordinary budget and a key player in the fight against hunger.

Thursday, December 13, 2007–It struck me as ironic: the same day that The New York Times published Ian Fisher’s article “In a Funk, Italy Sings an Aria of Disappointment,” I attended a luncheon at the United Nations honoring an Italian winemaker for his charitable contribution to the fight against world hunger.

That’s not to say that I don’t agree with Fisher. In fact, his eloquent however hard-to-swallow assessment is right on the money: I correspond daily with Italian friends and colleagues and their missives often convey a general sense of unease and uncertainty. While the malessere or malaise described by Fisher doesn’t cloud all brightness in the Italian sky, neither does it seem to contain a silver lining.

Like fellow blogger and italophile Terry Hughes, I’ve been known to gripe about Italy’s backwardness with respect to continental and insular Europe (check out this recent dispatch). But I’m sure that Terry would agree: Italians are among the most charitable people in the world and they generally and genuinely care about world issues (especially world hunger) despite the general cynicism and skepticism that have historically pervaded Italian life.*

Above: winemaker Marco Fantinel and tennis star Monica Seles, Iimsam’s Goodwill Ambassador and Spokesperson for its Global Sports for Peace and Development Programme Initiative.

At last Thursday’s luncheon, I was the guest of Friulian winemaker Marco Fantinel. He and I met many years ago when I was writing for The Magazine of La Cucina Italiana and when I received the invite, I gladly accepted.

Marco was named a Goodwill Ambassador by Iimsam, the Intergovernmental Institution for the use of Micro-algae Spirulina Against Malnutrition, a Permanent Observer Mission to the United Nations.

Spirulina is a type of easy-to-grow and easy-to-sustain nutrient-rich algae that is used in developing countries to help combat hunger and in particular, child hunger.

Marco travels throughout Italy raising awareness and funds for Iimsam and he has created a special label called “Celebrate Life,” a Friulian Merlot Grave, for which he will donate $1.00 to the organization for every bottle sold.

I hadn’t been to the UN since my days as an interpreter for Italy’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations back in 2003-04, when Italy was the president of the European Union. It was fun to poke around the Secretariat building and remember the days when I used to scurry about in a phalanx of diplomats (I was foreign minister Franco Frattini’s personal interpreter).

Complimenti, Marco, for taking time out to make a difference and to affect change in a world where we are increasingly faced by our inability to make the world a better place for all of us to live.

* The sense of one’s inability to affect change often expresses itself in Italy’s post-war concept of qualunquismo, perhaps best captured in Leonardo Sciascia’s short novel A ciascuno il suo (To His Own), 1966. I don’t know of any succinct translation of qualunquismo. The online version of the Oxford Paravia dictionary offers “indifferent and skeptical behavior towards politics” but this putative translation doesn’t capture the term’s nuances. From the Italian qualunque, meaning “whichever” or “whatever,” the literal translation is “whicheverism.” It denotes self-interest combined with egoism and has its roots in the Renaissance concept of the particolare, Florentine statesman and historian Francesco Guicciardini’s notion of self-interest as the guiding principle of human nature with respect to governance and political unity.