Feast and fast: the Church calendar in Italian cooking

The rhythm of abstinence and celebration set by the Roman Catholic Church shaped the Italian table across the whole peninsula, and it did so over many centuries. Waverley Root, in The Food of Italy, treats religious observance as one of the forces that explain why regional dishes took the forms they did, alongside geography, climate and the political division of the country.

The calendar divided the year into days of meat and days without it. Fridays, the weeks of Lent and the vigils of major feasts were days of abstinence from meat, and the cook of a Catholic household had to supply a table that obeyed the rule without becoming poor. The consequence was a large and inventive repertoire of dishes built on fish, eggs, vegetables, pulses and oil, and the coast and the interior answered the requirement differently. Where the sea was near, fresh fish served the fast; where it was distant, preserved fish, above all salted cod, baccalà (Gadus morhua), and dried cod, stoccafisso, took its place, and both remain fixtures of inland and northern cooking long after the rule has relaxed. The rule also governed fat. In a country where lard and butter were the fats of the north and olive oil that of the centre and south, the days of abstinence tested the cook's choice of medium, and the use of oil on fast days is one of the reasons it spread in cooking where it was not the everyday fat. The vigil of Christmas, la vigilia, is the clearest surviving example: a meal without meat, in the south centred on a number of fish dishes, which shows how the observance of a fast could itself become an occasion for abundance. Feasting followed fasting, and the great dishes of the year are tied to its turning points. Christmas, Carnival, Easter and the patronal feast of each town called for dishes made with the richest materials a household could command: meat, eggs, white flour, sugar and spice. Carnival, the days of licence before Lent, gave fried sweets and rich pastries their place, since the fat and sugar that Lent would forbid were to be used up beforehand. Easter ended the fast with eggs, lamb and enriched breads and cakes, and the form of these preparations varies from province to province, so that the same feast is marked differently in each region. The effect on Italian cooking is lasting in two ways. First, many dishes that are now eaten in any season keep the character of the day for which they were made, whether the meatless soup, the dish of salted cod or the festive sweet. Second, the calendar fixed a sense of occasion at the table: the ordinary meal and the feast differ in kind, and the cook is expected to know which is being served. Root's account is useful because it places these customs in the setting of local produce and local habit, rather than describing a single national observance, and the reader is left to see that Italian cooking is a set of regional cuisines that share a common religious frame.

At table the calendar produces a contrast of flavours as much as of ingredients. The fast days favour the clean, savoury tastes of oil, salted fish, pulses and greens, while the feasts bring the sweetness of sugar and honey, the richness of eggs and meat, and the warmth of spice. A meal in the Italian manner was understood as part of this alternation, and its pleasure depended on the difference between the plain day and the festive one.