Il Sale e le Conserve nella Dispensa Italiana

Salt and the preserved foods that depend on it belong to the whole peninsula, and the producing place of each must be named rather than assumed. Sea salt is worked in the saline of western Sicily near Trapani and on the Adriatic coast at Cervia in Romagna, while the salted anchovy (Engraulis encrasicolus) is tied to the Ligurian and Sicilian coasts, and the cured pork of Emilia-Romagna and Umbria rests on the same mineral. Elizabeth David, in Italian Food, treats these preserved things as part of the everyday larder of the country and not as curiosities, and that is the footing on which this entry proceeds.

Salt is the first of the preservatives of the Italian pantry, and the others follow from it. Before the cold chain, the cook who wished to keep fish, meat, vegetables or cheese through the months of scarcity had recourse to salt, to oil, to vinegar, to smoke or to drying, and very often to several of these in sequence. Elizabeth David, in Italian Food, shows how much of the character of Italian cooking comes from this habit: the preserved ingredient is not a poor substitute for the fresh one but a flavouring with its own authority, used in small quantity to give a dish depth. The salted anchovy is the plainest example. Packed in salt, it is filleted and rinsed before use, and it dissolves in warm oil to give sauces, dressings and stuffings a savour that the fresh fish does not offer. Its place in the cooking of Liguria and of the south is well established, and it appears with garlic and oil in the warm dip of Piedmont, bagna cauda, and in many sauces for vegetables and pasta. Salted capers, which in Sicily are gathered from the plant Capparis spinosa and packed in coarse salt, serve the same purpose of sharpness and concentration, and they too must be rinsed and drained before they go into the pan. The preserving of meat shows the same principle applied to the pig, Sus scrofa domesticus. Prosciutto crudo, pancetta, guanciale, lardo and the many salumi of Emilia-Romagna, Umbria, Tuscany and Lazio are salted, rested and aged, and each is named for its place because the place governs the method, the climate of the curing rooms and the manner of the cut. David's account makes clear that these products are eaten as they are, thinly sliced, and also used as the fat and seasoning that begin a sauce or a soup. The cook who buys them should ask where they were made, since the name of a cut without its place says little. Preservation under oil and vinegar completes the pantry. Tuna packed in olive oil, vegetables sott'olio, and the pickled vegetables of the north, kept in vinegar, allow the produce of a short season to be eaten across the year. Dried and salted roe, salted cod (baccalà, from Gadus morhua, which reached Italy as a traded product and not from Italian waters) and stockfish also belong to this larder, and their soaking and cooking are skills of their own. The common discipline throughout is to understand how much salt a preserved ingredient carries, and to season the rest of the dish accordingly, so that the preserve supports the cooking and does not overwhelm it.