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

other words, does this newly conceived latitude, of which many “Artusian” recipes are a testimony, not encourage the very assumption and display of responsibilities that strict obedience to blueprints (no matter how perfect) would in fact discourage? In the recipe for
pasticcio di maccheroni
(meat and macaroni pie; recipe 349) the ultimate implications of Artusi’s softer, less obsessive, and, in this case, mirthful approach cannot go underestimated: playing on the the word
pasticcio
, which of course means
pie
, but also,
pastiche, hotchpotch, jumble, mess
, and so on, he concludes his invitation to “modify the recipe as you please” with the remark that “a pasticcio always comes out well no matter how it is prepared.” 120
    Progress does not stand in the way: quite the contrary. The more precisely cooks can control their equipment, the freer they will be to improvise, to add personal touches, and to rely on established and codified experience merely as an inspiring point of departure. When basic procedures can be repeated with a minimal margin of error, even culinary “transgressions” are welcomed as the sign of a need to explore the realm of the possible, that kingdom of temerity and risk, situated just opposite the land of the plausible. In this inspirational territory ideologies and manifestos do not qualify as devices to shoreup knowledge: observance of premises are profoundly shaken by an alternative and deliriously provocative logic. The implication in
Scienza in cucina
is that, while a rather mediocre kind of pleasure can be derived by confining oneself to the laws of calculability, real fulfillment implies a ravaging of the certainties that have enabled the process in the first place. Sapience and savoring are once again connected in Artusi’s book.
    Much has been written about a title that would seem to imply that the cognitive advantages of
scienza
belong with the making of food, while those of
arte
refer to its appreciation and consumption. In reality their coming together is a marriage of convenience. While Artusi may not have the confident air of superiority of a true man of science or the divine inspiration of the artistic genius, he shares with the first the dominant ideology that reason and science can provide certain and lasting answers to any problem, physical or metaphysical, and with the second the reliance on techniques and the training of the imagination.
    Citizen of a century filled with books singing the praises of “physiology” (dozens by Mantegazza alone), dating back to Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s trail-blazing
Physiologie du goût
(1825), Artusi was in no position to ignore the temptation to secure his culinary edifice on a clearly marked positivist foundation. The debt
Scienza in cucina
owes to this philosophical school, however, does not extend much beyond lip service, except perhaps in the area of social problems, where a modicum of rationality has never done any harm anyway.
    The Artusian notion of
art
, on the other hand, while not antagonistic to that of
science
, is akin to that of
technè
– of ability, or skill obtained (and surpassed) by observing masters at work. It conjures up the atmosphere of a Renaissance
bottega
121 or any other ergonomic environment in which the original semantics of
Ars
have not been altered or betrayed. They can be encapsulated as follows: “any productive activity of man (as opposed to nature), disciplined by a group of specific, technical knowledge (by means of norms and rules) and founded as much on experience as on ability and the personal geniality of the person who is executing it.” 122
    While seemingly swarming with “mothers, sisters and servant girls” 123 whose “culinary wisdom” the author neither shuns nor ridicules, Artusi’s kitchen is in fact the ideal training ground of those sorcerer’s apprentices who, having studied statistics, prefer to be guided by the empirical wisdom of their palates, and by the notion