Wartime Cooking in Italy

Professor Carol Helstosky’s excellent book on Italian cooking from unification to today, Garlic and Oil, mentions a variety of cookbooks to draw upon as primary sources for those who would try to get into a housewive’s of the past’s brain as she takes out her knife and onions. One of the titles is La cucina del tempo di Guerra: Manuale Pratico per le famiglie (“Cooking During Wartime: A Practical Manual for Families”), written by Lunella De Seta and originally published in 1942.

I recently found a reprint of this book (Antonio Vallardi Editore, 2011), which is indeed a goldmine, a culinary snapshot of wartime Italy. Its recipes show what cooks had to work with (and what they didn’t), but also what they would have made had they not been working around wartime shortages and rationing. An example is the recipe for “mixed oil” for salads: 125g of olive oil, 25g of linseed oil, and a liter of water. Mix the three ingredients together cold and add a tablespoon of vinegar, a little bit of salt, and (a curious wartime ingredient) a pinch of saffron. Boil all together for 25 minutes then strain through cheesecloth. The author notes, without any sarcasm, that the “oil” should not be used for frying.

Italy’s food desires (100% olive oil on salads, meatballs made of meat and not bread, pasta with eggs) are in between the lines of this book, and one almost wants to go back and reassure the cooks using it that they only have to wait another ten or so years for the postwar economic boom to have them.  ZN