Abstract
It is in Risorgimento Italy that there is an incessant quest for a definition of what it means to be Italian amongst a reality of economic paucity and clear social divisiveness. During this tenuous yet crucial epoch, there is a cohesive attempt to define Italian taste with an ideological terminology previously absent from sensorial and aesthetic discourse. A fundamental purveyor of this novel approach is the self-defined “poligamo delle scienze,” Paolo Mantegazza. To the plurality of roles attributed to the medic (anthropologist, pathologist, senator, writer, etc.), there is one yet to be explored—Mantegazza as didactic gastronome. In the attempt to combat what he considers the anti-hygienic conditions plaguing the nation, the medic inaugurates a pedagogic process that would ideally lead to the formation of the Italian citizen. With the goal of creating a stronger and more capable Italian populace, the author goes to great lengths to provide guidelines for maximizing nourishment through the humblest of foods. Ultimately, Mantegazza’s pedagogic gourmandism is integral in the propagation of a social model of comportment that defines the Positivist framework of biological and nationalistic renewal and to a new vision of taste.
Highlights
It is in Risorgimento Italy that there is an incessant quest for a definition of what it means to be Italian amongst a reality of economic paucity and clear social divisiveness
After the 150th anniversary of the Italian unification (2011), there has been a new focus on the role of cucina in the creation of italianità (Italianess), with keen attention given to the figure of Pellegrino Artusi (1820–1911)
The construction of an Italian nation leads Mantegazza to disseminate the message of cuisine as nutrition for all sectors of Italian society, from the proletarian to the aristocrat to the peasant, and, for the lower classes, he sees in the humblest of foods the possibility for regeneration
Summary
To commence the Mantagazzian narrative of taste, it is important to consider cuisine as a subject of anthropology; after all, it is Mantegazza who is famed for founding the first cattedra di Antropologia (i.e., the first professorship of Anthropology in Italy), in addition to the Museo Nazionale di Antropologia ed Etnologia (the National Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography) and its subsequent periodical and society. Whether focusing on the use of stimulants such as the coca leaf and liqueurs for manual workers in Peru, the excellent coffees or the manners of cookery and consumption of meats such as reindeer in Lapland, or the preparation of millet, fish and the best mangos of the world in India, it is evident that the products to which Mantegazza is exposed go far in shaping the way he envisions his nutritional ideals It is through this optic that the author establishes a very modern premise, one that is the subject of such recent texts as Massimo Montanari’s Food is Culture [20] and Richard Wrangham’s Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human [21]: that is, cuisine as civilizer. Mantegazza, dedicates an entire volume of his popular Almanacco igienico popolare in 1887 to L’arte di conservare gli alimenti e le bevande (“The Art of Preserving Foods and Beverages”), accentuating evolved man’s conscious effort to preserve food, as well as divulging all of the techniques that the modern sciences have afforded him
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