The most important thing I learned during a brief visit to Italy recently is the difference between a masculine table and a feminine one.
“Il tavolo”, the male version, refers to the item of furniture, as found in kitchens and dining rooms. It’s also the thing you book in a restaurant. But what happens on and around the table is feminine. When you add in food, people, conversation, centuries of Italian culture, etc, the result becomes “la tavola”.
Short as it was, in fact, my tour of Bergamo, Bologna, and Ravenna, was also an education in the staples of Italian cuisine.
Bergamo, I noticed, is a stronghold of polenta, that strange cornmeal concoction I have never seen the point of but which seems to comfort northern Italians the way potatoes do the Irish.
Return Journey – Frank McNally on the (almost) forgotten pleasures of Italy
Coarse Notes – Frank McNally on the drunken parrots of ancient Rome and other surprise language lessons
End of the Line – Frank McNally on the dubious legacy of the last Earl of Clanrickarde
Fighting Words – Frank McNally on the best and worst songs of the Northern Troubles
There was polenta with everything in Bergamo, whereas Bologna was pasta country, like most of Italy only more so, even if you would struggle to find “Spaghetti Bolognese” in it.
Another thing that struck me, everywhere, was the tendency of restaurants to serve bread in paper bags. When I first saw people at my neighbouring tavolo rummaging around in one, I thought they were cheapskates who’d brought their own food.
But I soon got used to it, except at a trendy café in Ravenna, where my bread came in a recycled flour bag and I thought for a moment I had to bake it myself.
Readers will have their own ideas about which country has Europe's greatest food. But if there were a culinary equivalent of the European Football Championships, I suggest, nine out of ten finals would pitch France against Italy.
I imagine the result coming down to penalties, with France taking an early lead thanks to its superior range of cheeses and some crisp finishing from a baguette. But then, as pressure mounts, pasta and olive oil would be guaranteed to score, unlike French fries or vinaigrette.
Finally, I foresee the vaunted but flaky Haute Suisine living up to its name by firing high over the crossbar. At which point, the ageless Cucina di Nonna strides forward (looking like Andrea Pirlo) and wins it for Italy by stroking the ball calmly down the middle, half a second after the overexcited goalkeeper has dived haplessly out of the way. Of course, that’s just my opinion.
Italian food has not always been as admired as it is today, even in Italy. In the early part of last century, the Italian Futurist movement – a bunch of lunatics who glorified speed, mechanisation, and war – even launched a campaign to abolish pasta, which they blamed for the nation’s pacifism and supposed lethargy.
One result was a restaurant in Turin, opened in 1931, whose pasta-free menu included the “Ultravirile”: a dish combining lobster, prawns, veal tongue, cockscombs, and “fried testicle”.
That was for women only, but there was also a delicacy for both sexes, “Arousedpig”, comprising “a peeled salami jutting out from a sauce of espresso coffee and eau de cologne”.
The movement didn't take off, for some reason, and pasta retained its humble popularity. So did Italian food in general until its big international break in 1954 when an American physiologist, Ancel Keys, published an epochal study on the benefits of what he later called the "Mediterranean diet".
A subsequent cookbook, eulogising the health-giving joys of pasta, olive oil, vegetables in season and the like, sold enough to buy him a villa in Naples and promote the Italian ideal that, as the TV ad claims, “no one grows old at the table”. Keys did grow old, meanwhile, which only helped. He died in 2004, aged 100.
Speaking of tables again, I sat at one outside my Bologna hotel last week after a long’s days touring. It was midnight and the tiny café was winding down.
Apart from me, alone with a glass of wine and Corriere della Sera (reading newspapers is allowed at il tavolo, I knew, but considered rude at la tavola), the only other customers were a few friends of the host, who eventually brought out another bottle and joined them.
When he went back inside for something later, I took the opportunity to pay and leave. But he met me in the doorway, carrying a plate of food for his friends and a smaller one for me. It was mortadella – a local speciality, he explained, encouraging me to sit down again and eat. There was nothing for it except to order another glass of the local vino bianco he had recommended. Then I returned to il tavolo, which was now la tavola, and put away the newspaper.