Related Resources • Europe Travel in Winter • Carol Field's Cookbooks • Italian Festas and Sagras • L'Ardia, a Sardinian Sacred Horse Race

From Other Guides • Cookbooks by San Francisco Bay Area Chefs and Writers • Celebrating Italy (Review) • Christmas Traditions in Altamura, Italy with recipes

Carol Field, "noted food writer" as they say, is one of my culinary heroes.

If it were up to me I'd call Carol Field a culinary anthropologist, since she writes passionately about Italian food traditions by begging interviews from people on the front lines. She has been called a "food historian," but the term invokes images of a scribe fidgeting between stacks of medieval manuscripts rather than a woman passionate about traditional food consulting with living grandmothers over recipes prepared for sacred holidays. Ms. Field's work is a celebration of the harvest, sacred traditions, and the hunt, the stuff of life itself.

Upon my first visit to Sedilo, Sardinia, I got hooked on a festival called L'Ardia di San Costantino. L'Ardia is a ritual horse race, the results of which the whole of Sedilo relied upon for assurances that God would look upon them favorably over the coming year. The food served at the festival was a bit unusual, even for me. Eels were skewered live, their heads always pointing skyward as they tried valiantly to avoid the heat of the coals. (I figure one must see these things as Alan Watts saw them: our responsibility to that which we must kill to survive is to make sure we appreciate the sacrifice--and we do that by cooking well and wasting nothing.)

Cruelty aside, eels turned up in a talk given by Carol Field in San Francisco recently. Telling the story of her visit to the house of a Sicilian family over the Christmas holidays, Ms. Field sadly related the fact that when the traditional platter of the eels was offered, the young people howled with squeamishness, refusing to even try them.

With scenes like these on the rise, the serving of eel on Christmas Eve is not likely to last long in Sicily, Field reminded us. American narrowness in taste seems to be making an impact.

And, given the fact that at least two McDonalds now exist in most historic centers throughout Italy, I wouldn't be surprised if L'ardia was sponsored by the American chain in the near future.

"Ah!" I can hear you breathe a sigh of relief. The unrecognizable, ground-up meat parts from heaven knows where (or when), steamed on a barely warm iron plate can finally replace the disgusting, freshly caught and properly grilled eel. But even so, the festival will have lost its soul and Sicilians their long held Christmas traditions if such things are allowed to happen.

I don't know about you, but that's a sad thing to me, the wanderer. I don't want everyone in the universe to be the same. I cringe at the thought of viral food prejudices being forced on people for commercial gain. I don't want everyone on the planet to limit themselves to eating purposely unidentifiable bits of the earth's biggest, most ungainly barnyard animals laid to rest in tiny styrofoam trays as a way of masking the victim's "animalness" just so we can diminish our guilt over having to kill things in order to survive. I like celebrations that target the fecundity of the earth. I like lusty eating--and even tolerate the fasting that traditionally takes place before the feasting. I like most of all cooking things well as a means of saying thanks--and eating things outside the narrow boundaries set by popular fast-food moguls.

Maybe it's only me.

But every once in a while you get the oportunity to affirm your beliefs. Carol Field and I chatted briefly after her talk, together lamenting the loss of culinary traditions in places like Italy. "Tell them they must go soon, go now, or it will be all gone!" she said.

There. It's not just me.

photos on this page © 2002 by James Martin, Licensed to About.