Nonna Genia, an anti-diet Italian cookbook from 1982
“Eating and preparing food is communicating, it is giving and receiving love.”
“Mangiare e preparate il cibo è comunicare, è dare e ricevere amore.”
“Eating and preparing food is communicating, it is giving and receiving love.”
-- Beppe Lodi, Nonna Genia
I was flipping through one of my favourite old cookbooks, Nonna Genia, a collection of recipes from the Langhe region of Piemonte, about an hour from Torino and one of the most delicious corners of northern Italy. I mean, it’s the home of Slow Food, a region known for vermouth, extraordinary wines, white truffles and chocolate. I even incorporated a chapter of recipes from this area in my cookbook Tortellini at Midnight. I've been inspired to make so many recipes from this book – salsa verde (a sauce I would put on anything and everything but especially on anchovies, which is coming up in my next Cook Corriere column), bagna cauda (the most delicious anchovy and garlic sauce for dipping fresh vegetable sticks of peppers and cardoons), agnolotti al plin (below), fonduta or fondue with truffles, torta alle nocciole, hazelnut cake, is one of my all time favourites and torta di pasta frolla, to name just a few.
I had not really noticed this before, but it suddenly jumped out at me: “The positive function of being fat and the neurosis of the skinny.” It's not a title of an essay you'd expect to find in a cute little book written in northern Italy in 1982, inspired by the co-author's grandma, Eugenia or “Genia,” who was born in 1864.
But this essay – one of many written by Beppe Lodi in Nonna Genia – is an ode to fatness and a warning against dieting and the obsession with thinness. It's a point of view that you definitely do not hear anymore in Italy, and especially not in a cookbook. I thought I should translate some of this into English to share with you for some food for thought as fatness rarely gets celebrated. It’s interesting to note that the English version of Nonna Genia, which came out in 2007, does not have this essay included it.
[Side note, there is a reference to suicide quoted in this piece, which is a love letter to fatness and the enjoyment of food, and that this is just a translation from an Italian cookbook from 1982 for some interesting food for thought, it it not intended as medical or scientific advice.]
