BIRDS, TOMATO PASTE AND GARLIC.
While the Italians are sparing in their use of meat, it must not be supposed that they do not know how to make the most of it when they do indulge in it. They are born cooks—it's a great pity none of them are ever to be found in our "intelligence offices"—and their experts know as well as the great French chefs how to prepare a savory roast, stew, broil, entrée, or dessert. In the making of sauces, the blending of meat and vegetable flavors, the cooking of fish and shellfish, one also finds much variety and local Flavor on the peninsula. Details as to those points may be found in abundance in the forty pages Col. Newham-Davis devotes to this country in his "Gourmet's Guide to Europe."
To enjoy the national and particularly the local varieties of Flavor, it is well to take only a room in an Italian hotel and eat in the restaurants. I always do this, paying a little more for the room, which is only fair to the host. The trouble with these hotels is that the table d'hôte, though usually good, is not Italian but French, and in Italy you want something different, to get an idea of the variations in flavor of the spaghettis, the minestrone soups, the gnocchis, the risottos, and so on. Sometimes the hotel has attached to it a locally conducted restaurant, in which case it is needless to hunt for another.
For one of their gastronomic habits the Italians are justly denounced by other Europeans—their slaughter of millions of birds, largely blackbirds, siskins, green-finches, and other song birds, that yearly seek a refuge among them on their flight to or from the north. All efforts to curb this slaughter have so far proved unavailing. The difficulty is double: the birds are very good to eat and the common people cannot understand our point of view. Lina Duff Gordon, in her book, "Home Life in Italy" (which takes the reader right into the kitchens and the market places), tells about one of the hunters: "Once, when he offered us a bunch of blackbirds strung together by the neck, which he said made an excellent roast, we seized upon the opportunity to deliver a lecture on the shooting of singing birds. He listened so attentively that we rejoiced at having made an impression on an important convert, until looking up with eyes very wide open, he exclaimed: 'Ah! Sangue della Madonna! Then you have no sport in England!'"
It is hardly fair to chide the Italians for making too much use of garlic, unless we include in our censure the French—particularly those of the Southern provinces—and the Spaniards, who not only put it in their food but eat it raw in chunks. On this point I may be permitted to cite from my "Spain and Morocco" some remarks on a peasant who drove me from Baza to Lorca: "At noon he took his lunch, composed of ten raw tomatoes, half a loaf of bread, a piece of raw ham, and a large bulb of garlic consisting of a score of bulblets, which he took one at a time to flavor his portions. It is doubtful if he expected another meal that day, and in watching him a brilliant theory came to my mind:—perhaps the poorer classes in Spain are so fond of garlic for the reason that they have so little to eat; for, as it takes several days to digest a bulb of it, they always feel as if they had something in their stomachs."
In the best Italian restaurants, as in those of Paris, it is understood that garlic, while delicious for flavoring, is so only in homœopathic doses. Moreover one can always dine without garlic by simply saying to the waiter, when ordering a dish, senz' aglio.
Whether Italian peasants eat raw ham, as that Spanish teamster did, I do not know. Ham is not an Italian specialty. At Naples one may get the genuine smoked article, but it is so expensive that only the wealthy folk can afford it. But in his enthusiastic addiction to tomatoes that Spaniard was akin to the Italians. How they do love them—raw or cooked—more even than we do, if that be possible. Next to cheese, nothing is so frequently added to the macaronis as tomato sauce, either as we make it, or in the form of the paste which is one of the unique Italian products that ought to be better known in other countries.
The best tomato paste comes from the Province of Naples, where it is made of a small variety of the fruit which has a special Flavor that is much relished. This, to be sure, they do not waste on foreigners. What is exported is, as we read in the "Daily Consular and Trade Reports" (Dec., 1910), usually not even second rate, but "of the third quality," which is "of course, very inferior, because it contains little tomato extract and is almost entirely liquid. There is no demand for it in the Italian market, and it is prepared exclusively for exportation to America, where it meets the requirements of the immigrant peasants from Sicily. The latter, when at home, either do not use any tomato paste or consume a certain kind of hard tomato paste (conserva di pomidoro) which is made by the peasant women."
Consul Hernando de Soto further informs us that "tomato paste of the first and second quality also is exported, though in much smaller quantity, from Palermo to the United States, where it is patronized by a more prosperous class of Italians and also, it is stated, by some Americans."
Many more Americans would buy tomato paste were they sure of not getting the third-class article after paying for the best, as happens with so many things we eat.
