For lunch today, I decided to make something patriotic.
The green pesto is from Genoa, the white cheese from Umbria, and the red 'nduja from Calabria. This makes for a fairly representative selection of regional specialties.
Most people are familiar with pesto and know that it consists of oil, basil, pine nuts, and cheese. I think that garlic is usually also present, but my jar proclaims 'senza aglio' on the label. The basil from Genoa is apparently sufficiently highly regarded to have won a DOP (denominazione di origine protetta). European regions are especially proud of their traditional agricultural produce, and there has arisen a somewhat complex system of controlling how and by whom terms like 'chianti,' 'parmeggiano reggiano,' and 'prosciutto di Parma' can be used. As Benjamin Oliver reminds us:
"... actually all champagne is French; it's named after the region. Otherwise it's sparkling white wine. Americans of course don't recognize the convention, so it becomes that thing of calling all of their sparkling white "champagne", even though by definition they're not."
The cheese is young pecorino from Norcia. We are familiar with pecorino romano as a hard, grating cheese with a tangy suggestion of caprine spoor. What most people don't know is that 'pecorino' means that the cheese is made from sheep's milk, like manchego, which gives it a brilliant whiteness quite unlike the dull ivory yellow of cheese made from cow's milk. This is the same pecorino, just young, soft, and with a much more aggressive ovinity [Although I have not been able to find it in a dictionary, I apparently did not make this word up; ovinitas appears in book 2 of St. Thomas' De Ente et Essentia (at least according to google's book search). Ovinitas is the quidditas that sheep possess.]
And that brings us to 'nduja. I first became aware of 'nduja last Sunday, when I went out for neapolitan pizza with the Paideia folks. I saw it on the menu, had no idea what it was, and so necessarily had to order it. Here is a listing of the ingredients from the top of the jar:
It has become one of my favorite foods. The odd apostrophe at the beginning of 'nduja (pronounced ən-doo'-yuh) is apparently a marker of southern Italian dialect. In good Tuscan, the definite article la elides with a following vowel, so that the sequence la arancia becomes l'arancia. In the south they have things the other way around. If you want to use 'nduja in a sentence, you will usually say la'nduja. I propose that 'nduja was originally anduja. The initial a has disappeared from the word because the word boundary has shifted. Our ancestors when preparing bread would have asked for someone to hand them 'the napron,' and when reaching for a hoe to dispatch a garden snake, would have warned their friends to be wary of 'the nadder.' In situations where the indefinite article was used, 'a napron' and 'a nadder' became 'an apron' and 'an adder.' If 'nduja has followed this same path, then anduja is probably a sound reconstruction. Since 'nduja consists mainly of pig guts and chili pepper, and the south of Italy was ruled for nearly half a millennium by the Bourbons and their relatives, I don't think it's going too far to suggest that Louisiana's andouille sausage, at the extreme western extent of the Bourbon domain, is a cousin of Calabrese 'nduja.
I leave you with a picture of the dinner I had last night, gnocchi alla marinara. 'alla marinara' means 'with sea creatures,' and you can see that they have crowned the gnocchi with a comely selection. I recuse myself at present from speculating on how 'marinara' came to mean 'tomato sauce' in the United States. In Italy, tomato sauce is called 'salsa di pomodoro,' which means, oddly enough, 'tomato sauce.'
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