In Italy, by contrast, the food sprang from a dominant culture rather than a ghettoized culture centered on a dominant (by official lights, the only) religion. But here, too, the people of a community (each church parish) were responsible for making the year happen through feast days, many in Italy being tied to the rural agricultural cycle. The kitchen was a theater of meaning, though a more public kind of meaning. Various cookbooks explore the incredible wealth of Italian holiday food. Most are meant simply as recipe collections. I’d single out Michele Scicolone’s Italian Holiday Cooking (William Morrow; $35) for its wide-ranging selection of dishes (about 150) plain or elaborate, arranged by menu category (not position in the calendar) and marked by Scicolone’s usual gracefulness of touch. Mario Batali’s Holiday Food (Clarkson Potter; $23) is also attractive, though narrower in scope, consisting of four menus, covering Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, New Year’s Eve, and New Year’s Day. Some of Batali’s approximately 70 recipes have a traditional holiday connection, some are just appropriate menu additions.
Quite another animal is Carol Field’s Celebrating Italy (HarperPerennial; paperback $20), which broadly ponders the nature of Italian festivals sacred and secular, vividly describes a few dozen of them (some strictly local, some pan-Italian), and presents recipes for about 160 feast dishes, including some stupendous pieces of edible pageantry. Her accounts of feste and sagre powerfully communicate the sense of everybody getting in on certain acts that bring together tradition and spontaneous group purpose in order to cry to the world, “Hey, this is us!”
Should we ask our own big year-end holidays to resonate with equal meaning? I’m not sure. It would certainly be unfair to expect cookbooks to do the job for us, but still, I wish more of them would try harder. Gastronomic achievements on parade ring a little hollow in a troubled and uncertain time.
Plenty of cooks will still want books chiefly meant as master recipe manuals and schedule sheets, and some of the ones mentioned above (for example, Christmas 1-2-3 and The Thanksgiving Table) fill that role capably and honorably. With others, I might not think every recipe the very best of its kind, but I am grateful for a more important contribution to the holiday table: the reminder that what we can really use at some moments are meals representing the act of belonging to something outside of but connected with ourselves.
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