Eating Up Italy:
Voyages on a Vespa
Matthew Fort
Reviewed by Karen Morse
A travelogue cum cookbook, Eating Up Italy
chronicles British food writer and critic Matthew Fort's
culinary exploration of Italy
from Melito Di Porto Salvo in Calabria
to Turin.
Each of the book's twelve chapters begins with a blurb
pulled from the chapter text to set the scene and ends with recipes for
dishes
featured in that chapter. The recipes
highlight everything from the relatively tame dishes like pasta
al forno (baked pasta, 28) and puré di patate
(mashed potato, 240) to the adventurous anguilla in umido
alla comacchiese (stewed eel
Comacchio style, 216) and trippa
Napoletana (Neapolitan tripe, 104).
Fort is a sympathetic character, a kind of everyman with a
well-trained palette. He describes
himself a balding middle-aged man with a slight paunch. He's
almost a comic character, experiencing a
kind of mid-life crisis, which has left him with the desire to take to
the
road. The Italians think Fort is crazy
for riding a vespa on the highway, but they warm to him and his obvious
love of
food and he in turn gets them to open up to him about their own love of
all things
culinary.
Eating Up Italy
is a book that will appeal to all foodies.
Descriptions of Italian landscape and gastronomic delights are
peppered
with reflections on Italian culture, agritourism, artisanal food
production, and
the Slow Food movement. Fort delights in
the simplicity of a perfectly ripe peach, bemoans the fact that the
British
have lost their taste for offal, and is not afraid to admit that before
the
trip he thought bergamot was a flower.
The end, however, left me a bit dissatisfied. After
all this talk of Fort stuffing himself
at every meal, I wanted to know how much weight he gained during his
trip. Beyond that, I have few complaints. There is a certain disjointedness in the
narrative, but that I suppose is to be expected given the book's
origins as a
travel diary. One thing that Fort and
his editors did not take into consideration when producing the American
edition
is exactly how parochial we Americans are.
Not only does Fort pepper his narrative with foreign words, he
rarely gives
the English version of an Italian word after its first appearance in
the
book. Normally this wouldn't be a
problem, but with the proliferation of Italian food items it becomes
impossible
to keep them all straight (especially when a word was first mentioned
only in
passing fifty pages earlier). Despite the fact that the book has an
index,
this may put off some readers.
The success of this book is tied up in Fort's evident love
and appreciation of Italian food and culture, which is perfectly
illustrated by
this passage: "This was what I had
come for. Each mouthful was a reminder
of the essential plainness, and grace, of Italian food.
There were no extraneous sauces, no
distracting garnishes, no mint sprigs or dashes of fancy oils. The flavours were clean and clear. The beauty of each dish lay in the quality of
the ingredients, and in the understanding with which they were cooked"
(10).
Currently Food & Drink editor of the Guardian,
Matthew Fort has written
for the Financial Times, the Observer,
Cuisine et Vin de France, Bon
Appetit, Country Living, Decanter,
and Food Illustrated. He
is the
author of a number of other food-related titles including Cooking
by Numbers.
Following on the success of Eating
Up Italy, Sweet Honey, Bitter
Lemons: Travels Through Sicily on a Vespa will be published in the UK
in 2008.