Eat This Newsletter 210: Ur-pizza
Hello
For some reason, food from Italy features in this issue. Go figure?
Ancient Italian Flat Round Thing
It is the purest coincidence, I am sure, that the latest video from Vicky Bennison’s Pasta Grannies is about an old Italian dish that is flat and round. Not the ubiquitous did-the-romans-invent-pizza nonsense that has accompanied that most recent find at Pompeii, but an even older form of pasta known as testaroli.
Here is the Pasta Grannies video.
At the risk of repeating what is in the video, a testarolo is a kind of pancake made of flour, water and salt cooked on a round cast-iron paddle topped with a cast iron dome or another paddle. It can be eaten fresh, hot off the testo, dressed with pesto, or left to cool and reheated some time later.
This episode of Pasta Grannies is particularly dear to me because testarolo is one of my secret emergency dishes that is bound to impress people who have never come across it, as it impressed me when my friend Michele, for whom it is a local dish, first served it to me. I get mine from Eataly, the only place I know that stocks testaroli in Rome. It is vacuum packed, and released from the plastic resembles a floppier version of the linoleum I once made linocuts with. However, cut into lozenges, dumped into boiling water, off the flame, for two minutes, and dressed with pesto (or basil, cheese and oil) it miraculously becomes deliciously nutty and soft, while still chewy, and a superb vehicle for the sauce.
I’ve never really known how they were made (unaccountable lack of curiosity) and now I am desperate to travel to Pontremoli, where they are apparently available morning, noon and night.
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UnItalian Fizzy Bitter Thing
Prompted by a tweet, the Toronto Star last week lifted the lid on Brio, a soft drink that is considered “an essential pairing for Italian food”. It is made from chinotto, the bitter fruit that is indeed the essential ingredient of drinks like Campari. The whole point of the article is that although there are many brands of chinotto soft drinks in Italy, Brio is a homegrown Canadian, albeit of Italian parentage.
The article is a fun history of a reasonably familiar story: immigrants wanting to recreate the taste of home. In this case, of course, they tempered that taste, with “a North American version of chinotto. The Italian version is a bit more bitter”. In 2017 the company toyed with a slightly more bitter chinotto “to keep up with the burgeoning craft soda market,” but there’s no mention of what happened to that.
One lesson I take from the story (and especially the responses to that tweet) is that Brio’s branding (red, white and green; modernist san serif font) was absolutely spot on. No word on who was responsbile for that.
Here is a link to a version of the article at the Internet Archive because the silly sausages at the Toronto Star don’t actually want people to share their stories.
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Entomophagy May Be for the Dogs. (And Cats)
Despite the crudely mocked-up image, Ambrook Research’s Insects for Dinner: Separating the Hope from the Hype does a reasonable job of delivering what it promises, separating hope from hype. Most Americans, it concludes, are not yet ready to eat insects as a visible ingredient, though they might try a chocolate ant as a dare. That is despite the environmental benefits of insects compared to, say, intensively raised beef. (Mind you, when it comes to food I’m not convinced that environmental benefits are a big selling point to most people.) There’s a lot of coverage of the kind of cultural shift that may be needed for insects to become more than a regular and frequent claim on investors’ money.
Comments like this one tickled me:
“Americans eat a lot of processed foods, and by using insects as a big component in them, there’s an opportunity to make them healthier and more sustainable — and also a lot more marketable than whole edible insects might be.”
In other words, let’s not shift away from processed foods, lets use insects in them to make them “healthier and more sustainable”. Hmmm.
The great hope for insects is probably as an ingredient in processed food not for people but for their pets and other livestock. I can see it for livestock, but for pets? I doubt that insects will be a selling point for pet food either, but perhaps if they are just hidden in the ingredient list they could be useful.
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Food System Analysis
What to make of a report from an investment bank that offers Four ways to revitalise our food system? Ordinarily, I wouldn’t give it much attention, but the bank in question is Triodos, which has a good history of ethical and thoughtful work in food and agriculture. So ...
The report takes an intersting approach, picking four foods — lentils, bananas, kale and walnuts — on which to hang the main points it seeks to make. My main complaint is that it doesn’t give enough information for me to fully understand the changes it would like to see. The banana case is about transparency and true pricing, and makes the point that “the environmental and social costs of a box of bananas (18 kg) was estimated at USD 6.70 in 2017”. Fair enough. But how, exactly, would this information be used to promote transparency and true pricing, and how would that affect purchasing decisions? There’s a diagram from a paper in Nature Food but it is barely legible and even after scanning the paper I’m not sure I understand what it demonstrates.
The report is replete with links to supportive studies, which are very useful. It would have been even more useful, in my opinion, had the report given a bit more interpretation. I realise I too am guilty of sometimes offering a link without much more in the way of context, so I understand the difficulty.
Take care.
