The Food Maven Diary
[Archives]

[Previous Entry] [Diary Home] [Next Entry]

06/25/2002 Archived Entry: "Italian Food Labels"

Following is a speech I delivered last week to fellow members of the media on behalf of the Italian Trade Commission. It explains to a small degree the new labeling laws of the European Union, the regulations that guarantee the authenticity of certain food products. I didn’t actually read this speech, but I had to write it down anyway. It was a sort of security blanket that I placed on the podium in case my mind went blank. When I give lectures or speeches, I always need to write things out so I know where I am going, but then I try to talk as naturally as possible, without looking at the paper in front of me. As they come to me, I tell jokes and anecdotes that are not in the written speech, which makes the speech seem extemporaneous. So forgive me if this is a little dry. I think the content – the explanation of the EU regulations and the fact that labels are changing – is fair justification for sharing it here.

Until about five years ago, I had what I thought was a really clever packing system for whenever I returned from Italy, which was at least once a year, if not several times a year. The goal was to make my food at home taste as much like Italy as possible.

To that end, I would buy several pounds of the tiny, tasty lentils from Pantelleria – that’s an island off Sicily –or from Castelluccio di Norcia– that’s in the highlands of Umbria -- and I’d pack the lentils in plastic bags. Sometimes I had to buy them in boxes and empty the boxes into plastic bags. Then I would use the soft bags of lentils to pack around and between the pottery that I could never resist buying.

I did the same with the famous capers from Pantelleria. Pantelleria is a very arid, volcanic island and it’s capers are considered among the best, if not the best in the world. (Pantelleria is actually know for four things – lentils, capers, a wine made from raisins, and the weekend home of Giorgio Armani.) They are cured with sea salt, spread out on the ground in the sun to dry, then packed in sea salt, not vinegar. Treated like this, they taste – and just as importantly, they smell – like the flower buds that they are, and not like pickles, which may be okay for garnishing smoked salmon, but not for Italian food.

I wonder what Pantellerians would think about a guy who uses their capers as packing for pottery.

Anyway, I’d get home, and my pottery, packed in lentils and capers, would still be intact. Not one broken plate or bowl.

And I’d have the capers to put in my pasta sauces, to dress roasted peppers, to add to tomato salad and dozens of other dishes, and I’d have the lentils to make really Italian tasting maccheroni e lenticchie, one of my 1,000 favorite comfort foods.

Certainly, I can make a decent bowl of pasta e lenticchie with American lentils from Michigan -- our great lentil-growing area -- but it won’t taste authentic. It won’t be a really Italian tasting dish.

And as I said, my goal was to make my food taste genuino – genuine. How about we use that word instead of authentic. I love the sound of genuino. Autentico somehow sounds autocratic, like there is only one right way to do something. And in Italy, as you must know, there is no one right way of doing anything.

Speaking of pasta e lenticchie, and the genuine taste of Italy, only a few years ago – certainly while I was writing Naples At Table -- it was very difficult to buy pasta mista in the States.

You may well ask: What is pasta mista? It’s a mixture of various shapes of pasta – usually pieces of mezzanelli – a small tubular macaroni -- broken vermicelli – which is really just thin spaghetti -- broken malfadine, which is a ribbon with a ripple edge … like that. When packed together in one bag they are called pasta mista. Or pasta mischiatta, as Neapolitans call it.

And by the way, yes the different pasta shapes do cook up differently, some soft, some firmer. That’s the point. Pasta mista adds textural interest to humble dishes like pasta e fagioli, pasta e lenticchie, pasta e zucca (that’s pasta and pumpkin), or pasta e patate. Yes, pasta and potatoes. Double starch.

Back then, I knew one store in Bensonhurst, in Brooklyn, that carried pasta mista, but that was a rarity. So I used to put bags of pasta mista in my suitcase, too. Pasta mista also makes good packing material for fragile pottery. And since it’s all broken to start, it doesn’t matter if it get crushed a little in the suitcase.

My goal in telling you about what I packed in my suitcase is to point out that not so many years ago there were many Italian food products that you couldn’t obtain in the United States.

That unless you went to Italy and packed your bags as if you were stocking a grocery, you couldn’t make Italian food at home in America that tastes as it does in Italy. Let’s not even get into the situation with restaurants. Of course, I wouldn’t be telling you all this – and none of us would be here today – if things hadn’t changed.

Okay, so here’s one more thing that I love and couldn’t find in our stores until very recently – paccheri. These are pasta tubes that are so large they collapse when cooked. In fact, they are so large and fragile that I brought them home in my carry-on.

Nowadays, I find paccheri in many stores, even supermarkets, and they, along with a slew of other macaroni shapes, are usually made in Gragnano or Torre Annunziata, two towns near Naples that have been famous for nearly 400 years for their superior pasta.

It was the sun and the sea breezes whipping around the Golf of Naples, the intense heat of the day and the coolness of the evenings and nights, that made these towns the ideal places to manufacture pasta. Like no other place in the world.

Drying was done in the open air well into this century. And besides nature’s necessary cooperation, these places are famous for pasta making because of the skill of the Neapolitans, who understood the nobility of this food, dried pasta, maccheroni, the staple of what was a meager but healthful diet.

I use Naples and Neapolitan foods as examples only because I know Neapolitan food the best. But all of the Italy has a long, long tradition of distinctive agriculture and food manufacture that reflects the geography, climate, culture, and even the politics of every region, each province of every region, and each commune and town of every province.

This can’t be repeated enough: These foods gain their character from the earth they grow in, the climate that nurtures them, and the skills of the people who husband them and/or make them.

People come home from vacations in Italy and they want to know – they call my radio program to find out – is it possible to have food on this side of the Atlantic that taste as good as food in Italy. My answer is yes, if you seek out the genuine products of Italy, the products that taste of the earth, air, sea and sun of the 20 regions of the Italian peninsula.

Do you want your risotto to taste like it did on vacation in Venice? You must at least start with genuine Italian rice – arborio, vialone nano, carnaroli.

Do you want your pasta alla carbonara to taste as it did in that trattoria in Trastevere on your trip to Rome. Buy genuine pecorino Romano, which is easily identified by the stylized ram’s head on the rind.

Do you want your tomato sauce to have the gorgeous sweet-acid balance, depth of flavor and fragrance that you experienced on the Amalfi Coast. Open a can of genuine San Marzano tomatoes.

In Parma or Bologna or Modena you had the best prosciutto. At home, demand genuine prosciutto di Parma. I used to fool myself that prosciutto di St. Louis, Missouri was just as good. But it isn’t the same.

These are not names that anyone can use, by the way. Some Italian products have been protected by national laws, or by local consorzios, producer organizations, for many years, sometimes centuries.

Now, however, The European Union, the EU, has stepped into the fray – and it often is a contentious situation, allowing foods to carry guarantees of authenticity. They have formalized designations through two laws. The first was promolgated in 1992 and establishes two designations for distinctive food products.

DOP stands for denominazioni di origine protette. In English that means the name of the origin is protected. You should now begin seeing these letters – DOP – in small medallions on qualified food products..

The other legal designation authorized by the same regulation of the European Union is IGT, which stands for Indicazioni Geografiche Protette – protected denomination of origin. These products also must comply with specific production conventions, but only one phase of their production needs to be carried out in the region they are associated with. Still, they must be historically linked to that region, and when they are the letters IGT will appear in a small medallion on the label.

There are now 111 Italian products that the EU accords either DOP or IGP status. In all of Europe there are only 550, so that’s really quite a lot.

Let me give some examples:

Going back to my Neapolitan products, but also to a product about which there has been much confusion and that is new to this legal labeling system – cans of tomatoes of the San Marzano tomatoes. In order to be called San Marzano, and to sport DOP on the label of the cans, the tomatoes must be not only of the particular San Marzano type, but also grown in the designated towns around Mt. Vesuvius, which is where the type was developed and where the climatic and soil conditions, local agricultural practices, and locals skills, bring these tomatoes to their highest fruition.

To repeat, DOP is only accorded products that are produced entirely within their native region.

And again, the qualities of both DOP and IGP products are based on a mixture of local historical tradition, the manual skills applied to the products, in other words craftsmanship, and the local climate or microclimate.

In other words, the EU recognizes that the special quality of these products is the result not just of the climate in the area of production, but also of the traditional manufacturing techniques, the high-grade raw materials and ancient cultural traditions.

Some other products that are given DOP status are a slew of extra virgin olive oils from various places in Italy, certain cured meats, such as various prosciutti – like the hams of Parma and San Daniele, to name just the most obvious, several salamis, both the coppa and pancetta from Piacenza, more than 30 cheeses, and, of course, the true, the genuine, the traditional balsamic vinegar of Modena.

The EU law is not without backbone. Now that each member country of the EU has incorporated these standards in their national statutes, special monitoring agencies have been established to enforce the regulations.

Besides the DOP and IGP regulations, the EU is also regulating the production and marketing of organic foods. In Europe, as here, as you can imagine after the food safety issues of the last few years, there is heightened interest in food purity. Italy has had a tradition of organic farming, which is to say growing food without chemicals of any kind, since pre history. In some parts of the Italian south, there has never, in fact, been any form of chemical agriculture.

The organic sector has been expanding since the 1980s, however. In the year 2000, there were 56,500 organic farms and producers in Italy. And the entire cycle of organic production is now under scrutiny by EU and Italian regulators, from the preparation of the soil, through seeding, harvesting, and sale of the end product. You should now be seeing a small medallion guaranteeing organic status on Made In Italy organic products, and more will come.

This underscores the message of the Italian Trade Commission. If you want to make food that tastes genuinely Italian, you need to buy foods produced and made In Italy, foods that are Naturalmente Italiano. Indeed, for foods without DOP, IGT, or organic status, but that are truly made in Italy, there is yet another label to look for: The EU now authorizes member countries to put, in yet another well-designed and prominently displayed crest, the fact that the food is made in that country.