MACARONI THE REAL STAFF OF LIFE.
Next to olive oil the best edible thing Italy gives to the world is macaroni in its many varieties. We import more than four million dollars' worth of it yearly, and we have learned, by raising durum wheat, to make a fair imitation of the products of a Gragnano factory; but most of all this is probably eaten by the Italians who have come to live with us.
In the average American household macaroni is far too seldom served. In one of its varieties, it might advantageously replace potatoes served at one at least of our three daily meals. Just why we should have potatoes served at every meal I have never been able to understand. Most desirable substitutes, besides macaroni, are boiled chestnuts, rice and hominy, the rice and hominy being particularly good when fried. Not that I would say a word against potatoes. Baked, fried, boiled, steamed, mashed, hashed and browned or with cream—in all these and many other ways they are good, and it would be a calamity to be deprived of them because they not only make an excellent accompaniment to other foods, especially to meats, but are also most tasty when served as a separate course, in the French style. But enough is as good as a feast. What we need is variety; and sometimes, when we have to economize on meat, we need something more nutritious than potatoes.
Potatoes impose much work on the kidneys, wherefore those afflicted with rheumatism should avoid them. Besides, macaroni has many times the value of potatoes as a flesh former. It owes this value to the large amount of gluten in it, the potato being useful chiefly as a heat-producer.
Gluten is a word the meaning of which everybody should know.
When wheat flour is kneaded in a current of water most of the starch is removed and there remains a sticky substance which is called gluten. It is the nitrogenous, or flesh-building, part of the flour. In ordinary wheat flour there is enough of this gluten to make the dough cohere and to give the bread a food value apart from that coming from the large percentage of starch in it which is a heat-producer. In macaroni wheat there is a smaller percentage of starch and a much larger percentage of gluten. Genuine macaroni which is made of the best durum wheat flour has nearly twice the amount of gluten as the highest grade wheat flour.
Bread is generally called "the staff of life," but in Italy macaroni is the staff of life, and it has a much better title to this designation than bread because it contains so much more of the body-building gluten.
"Gluten is to wheat what lean is to meat," as Charles Cristodoro has tersely put it. "When you think," he writes, "of macaroni flour, it is like going to the butcher and buying a roast and getting less bone, less gristle, and less fat, but about twice as much lean for the money. A butcher who would give his customers twice as much lean meat as another butcher would get all the trade in the neighborhood."
In other words, macaroni is both bread and meat. It is not merely a side-dish, as many American and English housewives fancy, but a complete meal in itself, although, owing to the mildness of its Flavor, it is generally relished more when cooked with tomatoes, or a little chopped meat, or, better still, some cheese or butter or both, because, like bread, macaroni is deficient in fat, some of which it needs to make a dish well balanced as to nutritive ingredients.
Macaroni Drying
For lunch there is perhaps nothing quite so desirable as a dish of macaroni thus prepared. At present it is difficult to get such a dish properly cooked, except in our Italian and French restaurants. But I believe the time will come when every American and English business man and woman will have a chance to eat an appetizing and easily digestible lunch in a macaroni cook-shop.
This point seems of such great importance that I shall emphasize it by citing Sir Henry Thompson's advice.
"Weight for weight, macaroni may be regarded as not less valuable for flesh-making purposes, in the animal economy, than beef and mutton. Most people can digest it more easily and rapidly than meat; it offers, therefore, an admirable substitute for meat, particularly for lunch or midday meals, among those whose employments demand continuous attention during the whole of a long afternoon. To dine, or eat a heavy meal in the middle of the day is, for busy men, a great mistake: one nevertheless which is extremely common, and productive of great discomfort, to say the least."
Macaroni might, this eminent dietician suggests, be prepared at the restaurants "as a staple dish, in two or three forms, since it sustains the power without taxing too much the digestion, or rendering the individual heavy, sleepy, and incompetent afterwards."
All these remarks refer to macaroni generically—the whole macaroni family, which is a big one. Its best known members are spaghetti, and vermicelli; but there are many others equally good and known only to Italians. Among these are fidelini, stellete, tagliarini, lasagnetti, and many others. Altogether, I am told, there are about fifty varieties of pasta—which is the generic name for all of them.
The most delicately and deliciously flavored of them all is tagliatelli, but it is hard to get. Beware of substitutions!
"Subito! Subito!" exclaimed the waiter at the Vapore restaurant in Venice when, for the first time, I had ordered this—to me—unknown dish and finally asked him why he did not bring it. He had gone out specially to buy some fresh butter to cook it with, and when it came on the table—tagliatelli al burro—it was a feast for the gods. If you gave me the choice, at your expense, of all the dishes on the elaborate lunch bill of fare of the most expensive New York restaurant and tagliatelli al burro was one of them, tagliatelli with butter I would order.
There is also such a thing as gluten bread, made for persons of weak digestion or troubled with diabetes; but it is said that one tires of this.
No one ever tires of the macaronis. I could eat a dish of them three times a day and smack my lips after each.
To be sure, there is macaroni and macaroni. An Italian can tell the genuine by its smoothness, its clear yellow color, its hornlike toughness and general glutinous aspect. The genuine is not necessarily imported; a good brand is, as I have said, made in America of real durum wheat; but in this, as in all other things, eternal vigilance is called for; the world is full of gay deceivers. Macaroni made of ordinary wheat flour is poor stuff, but fortunately it is easily distinguished from the real thing. Being deficient in sticky gluten, it is not able, when it is subjected to the drying process, to bear its own weight and is therefore laid out flat instead of being "poled"—that is, thrown over reed poles on which it is exposed first to sunlight and then to damp cellars and shaded storehouses. Therefore, to get the real Italian Flavor, look for the flattened pole marks at the bend in the end of the macaroni.
While macaroni is the national dish of Italy, it is as great a mistake to suppose that all Italians eat it three times a day, as it is to think that rice is the daily diet of all Japanese. Rice, in Japan, is a luxury to be served in the poorer families only on holidays, or in case of illness. Professor Chamberlain relates in his Things Japanese that he once heard a beldame in a village remark to another with a grave shake of the head, "What! Do you mean to say that it has come to having to give her rice?" the inference being that the case must be alarming indeed if the family had thought it necessary to resort to so expensive a dainty.
In the same way it has been said about Italians that it is as accurate to assert they live on macaroni, as to assert that Americans live on turkey. Some do, many don't.
When I arrived in Japan, some of the geishas were convulsed with laughter over my clumsy efforts to eat with chopsticks. I found it a good deal like fishing—never knew when I'd get the next bite. Macaroni eating is less difficult to the inexperienced, yet many Americans seem to be in doubt as to how it should be done. (Maybe that is one reason why it is not served as often as it should be.) The approved Italian way is to gently spear a stick of it with the fork, convey the end to the mouth, and suck it in without much waste of time. An American observer was so impressed by this process that he came to the conclusion that the Italians have reels in their throats.
Another way is to wind the paste round your fork till there is a wad that just fits your mouth. But there is no loss of Flavor if the macaroni is cut into convenient pieces and eaten ad libitum any way you please.
The most astonishing sight I witnessed during my seven visits to Italy was at Naples. We had hired a cab in front of the hotel and told the driver we wanted to see the people enjoying their open air life. He took us to a street where everything, including cooking and eating, was done outside the houses. Presently he stopped at a place where macaroni was being cooked in a huge kettle. A beggar ran up and offered to eat some right out of the boiling water if we would pay for it. The cook ladled a huge portion into a tin basin and the man swallowed it all in a few seconds, steaming hot. His stomach must have been lined with asbestos. The driver had in the meantime, also at my expense, taken a large glass of wine; but instead of being in league with the cook, as I supposed he would be, he told me to "give him a lira—quite enough," and drove off rapidly before the macaroni man could vociferate his demands for more.
Mabel Phipps Bergolio, the American lady whose remarks on frying were quoted on another page, hardly thinks it true that the Italians are too poor to eat macaroni. "My husband thinks it depends upon the part of Italy they live in. Here, the contadine eat minestrone—a thick soup made of oil, garlic, and all kinds of vegetables which they cultivate here. In Piedmont rice is the principal food, because it is grown there in large quantities. In the mountains near here, our maid tells me, they eat minestrone and chestnuts all the year round and nothing else. In the South, Naples, etc., macaroni is eaten and is cheaper there than in this part of the country on account of the flour which is raised there. Garlic and oil are used in preparing it, and this, with fruit, seems to be the food of the meridionale. In the North potatoes and polenta are eaten in large quantities in regions where the soil is adapted to raising tubers and corn."