Free Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well by Pellegrino Artusi, Murtha Baca, Luigi Ballerini

attested by dozens of adages and popular rhymes:
Slender in Spring thy diet be, and spare
Disease, in Summer, springs from surplus fare.
From Autumn fruits be careful to abstain,
Lest by mischance they should occasion pain.
But when rapacious winter has come on,
Then freely eat till appetite is gone. 113
     
    Health concerns extend to food variety – no single food item is so necessary that it cannot be replaced, nor can it possibly constitute a complete diet by itself – as well as clothing, physical exercise, and, above all, ambience. 114 This last issue offers Artusi yet another opportunity to exercise his wit:
Try to live in healthy houses, full of light and well ventilated: illness flees where the sun shines in. Pity those ladies who receive guests in semi-darkness, and in whose homes you stumble into the furniture and know not where to put your hat. Because of this custom of living in dimly lit rooms, of not moving their feet or getting out into the open air, and because their sex tends by nature to drink little wine and rarely eats meat, preferring vegetables and sweets, such ladies are seldom seen with red cheeks, the sign of prosperous health, or with fine complexions all blood and milk. Their flesh is not firm but flaccid, their faces like vetches that one grows in the dark to adorn tombs on Holy Thursday. Is it any wonder, then, that among women one finds so many hysterics, neurotics and anemics? 115
     
    How far and wide we have traveled from the Romantic idolization of the
mansarde
or the much-below-standard dwellings of the proletarian and sub-proletarian families that populate Edmondo De Amicis’ pages.
    It is not just the dining room that undergoes radical changes during the last decades of the nineteenth century. Even more radical innovations take place in the kitchen, where meat grinders make their first appearance and the old wood-burning oven is replaced by the cast iron stove, a modern cooking unit that enables domestic chefs to determine precise cooking times at fairly exact temperatures, and boil, roast, and bake different dishes all at once. 116 Cooking leaves the world of alchemy and crossed fingers to enter the arena of precision, with no unpleasant surprises.
    From the time of Artusi to the present, Italy has become a country and, by and a large, a culture where the scientific adventure of cookingand the artistic experience of eating have once again sidestepped the emotions surrounding technology and intuition to achieve the status of a religious initiation. In and of itself, this is not necessarily an indication of progress, yet I would challenge anyone to label the rediscovery of gastronomic rituals as regressive. It would be enough to remember that the great-grandparents of those Italians who, in our own time, are subjecting themselves to one or more dietetic treatments, were likely to have eaten far less than was required for their daily sustenance. In spite of such major catastrophes as two world wars and the widespread irresponsibility that has characterized the last half century of their political and economic history, vast numbers of Italians have left behind poverty and malnutrition (as well as illiteracy) to live in a world where the immediate satisfaction of material needs has become not simply a birthright, but an opportunity to reconnect to a legacy of luxury and sophistication dating back to the Renaissance, when Swiss guards wore, as they do now, uniforms designed by none other than Michelangelo.
    On this evolutionary trajectory, the figure of Pellegrino Artusi occupies a pivotal place, not too remote from that of Maestro Martino in the late fifteenth century. Both of them, each in his own cultural and political environment, twisted into a cogent and organic whole threads of intuitions and habits that might have appeared unreconcilable on first sight. Each leaned on the past to usher in the new, reacting positively to difficult circumstances and turning “necessary conditions into