What’s a stuzzichini? A bit of a manifesto

What’s a stuzzichini? A bit of a manifesto

Good, simple ideas are everywhere: a deconstructed/DIY smoked salmon sandwich at a function upstairs at Roxy, Imperial Lane, Auckland. It's also actually a stuzzichino (snack).

BY JOHN CORBETT. 6 November, 2014. Alimentary, like everyone else, has the odd blank moment. Not, one hastens to say, senior-type moments, but the common or garden kind in which you meet someone you know casually and chat away brightly to them – while desperately trying to remember their name. It's annoying, but it happens to us all.

Sometimes we blank on culinary terms, and we also don't feel too bad about that because they form a very large universe. We can, in particular, never remember the ingredients for sauce
rémoulade (a mayonnaise for meat and seafood with added capers, gherkins, mustard, shallots and herbs), or what exactly is a chermoula (it's a Moroccan marinade and seasoning for meat and fish). We're philosophical about it and a quick hop onto Google (which knows everything) always solves it. The other day though we blanked on some words and became quite angry.

We were reading an up-market food magazine (the name is suppressed to avoid a catfight) and came across the word garbure. Now, we know what agarbure is (it's a robust pork and vegetable soup from southwest France – the Béarn, Gascon and Basque regions, to be precise), and goodness knows we have eaten our share of them in the past. But that was a while ago. We blanked.

We figured out from the context that a garbure was some kind of soup, but what kind was it exactly, and from where? Was it French? It could easily have been Italian. Or even Hungarian, the way words go. Google soon sorted it out and we tapped our head, called ourselves a duffer for forgetting, and read on. We were a bit annoyed though with the food writer (or more likely the subeditor) for not glossing the word.

And then we became really annoyed. In the same issue of the magazine was a pull-out booklet of Italian recipes littered with unglossed terms likestuzzichini*, ciccheti, spiedini, and many more. Steam came out of our ears.

Even if you are writing for a sophisticated magazine, and even if your readership is more familiar with Italian or whatever cuisine than the average joe, unglossed term-dropping is a naughty form of food snobbery; it's akin, say, to going in to a French restaurant outside of France and finding all of the menu items untranslated.

The problem is not of course restricted to uppity French restaurants. Despite the superabundance of food media today, many people still lack knowledge and confidence about food and cooking. Rubbing their noses in their lack of expertise may serve to elevate the status of food writers (we could tell you some doozy stories about food snobbery, folks – and when we write our salacious and best-selling memoirs we will) but it doesn’t help anyone else. Except to feel inadequate.

That said, a great deal of the culinary terms used in English are foreign – an estimated 60 percent, for example, derive from French, the Norman Conquest having been good in all sorts of ways for English cuisine. There is no way of avoiding the terms, which are part of the rich culture of cooking, and there is no way that you would want to. But you will find at Alimentary that if we use a culinary term that isn’t commonly understood we always provide a gloss. Just so we all know. www.alimentary.co.nz
*Stuzzichini – plural of stuzzichino: an appetiser or snack.
Cicchetti – plural of cicchetto: a drop or a nip.
Spiedini – plural of spiedino: a skewer or kebab.

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