In Marcella’s last years, physical limits closed in on her life. To travel, give classes, sometimes just to go out the door, exceeded her strength. We had always spent nearly all of our time together, but before her decline we were fully engaged in doing things. When her life began to wane, it was her body that weakened, while leaving her mind and palate intact. Watch the video of her interview with Mark Bittman of the Times that took place a few days before she died - nytimes/2013/11/10/magazine/remembering-marcella.html?ref=magazine&_r=0 - and you can see for yourself that, although noticeably feeble, her spirit’s bright flame was undimmed. We spent those final years, sitting at table or working in the kitchen, closer to each other than we had ever been. There were no large projects left to launch, she had closed the notebooks she had filled in her tight quick hand with a guide to ingredients, so we used our days to talk our lives over, we talked about what we had seen and done and felt and tasted, about the people we had known, those we liked and some of the others. When watching a video we hit the pause button from time to time so we could talk about it. We talked from the first coffee of the morning through our hallowed midday meal to the final late nibble of the day when, before preparing for bed, we took our supper, a crisply toasted English muffin with butter and jam. What we often spoke of was how loosely, self-described practitioners of ethnic cuisines, were using the word “authentic” in this country. Marcella had promised her Friends here that she would post her thoughts on this topic, but the more we talked about it the more slippery the subject seemed to get, and by the time we were satisfied that we had gotten a good handle on it, it was too late to do anything about it, she was gone. I must speak for her then, indeed for the both of us. We distinguished between authenticity and tradition because they are not quite the same thing. They may in fact diverge. Tradition is formed over time by the consensus of a group, it is the manifestation of a territory, of its social organization, of its political and economic history, of its climate, of the configuration of its land and sea, of the unique products native to each. Traditions encapsulate the tried and true. They do evolve, but their progress is immeasurable, almost imperceptible. Authenticity draws life from the roots of a tradition, but it is more fluid, strained by a cook’s intuitions. It may be compared to spoken language, and to such vernacular elements as idiom and accent. A native speaker can express novel ideas, but delivers them in idiomatic form using a recognized accent. It is possible for a cook to produce a dish with ingredients or procedures that might vary from those of the standard Italian repertory yet conceived as legitimate enunciations of genuine Italian taste. On the other hand, we hear how the speech of someone who has lived apart from his or her country of origin can in time lose its original native intonation. So would his or her cooking. Spaghetti and meatballs or a smothering herb- and garlic-saturated red sauce or shrimp scampi are obvious examples, among many others, of foods that have suffered from culinary amnesia. In Italian, the word that corresponds to “authentic” is “autentico or autentica”, depending on gender. It is used when authenticating a master painting, a valuable antique, or other historical objects. In Italy, we have never seen it applied to cooking. Why would anyone want to falsify a dish? The word we were wont to use when praising a cook’s work is the Italian for genuine, as in “una cucina genuina”. Genuine because it is unpretentiously prepared as a diligent cook would do at home. Before Italian restaurant cooking became modern, which is the currently voguish descriptive adjective, before it became an exercise in self-promotion, a ceaselessly changing parade of news items, before the competent, but originally anonymous Cuoco acquired the new international title of Chef, driven to bask in the glow of a critic’s stars, what you would look for when eating out would have been a place whose “cucina” was recognizably “genuina”. Or, as you might like to say, authentic. Victor.
Posted on: Fri, 22 Aug 2014 03:50:23 +0000
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