{"id":154382,"date":"2021-09-02T14:36:12","date_gmt":"2021-09-02T18:36:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=154382"},"modified":"2021-09-02T17:54:44","modified_gmt":"2021-09-02T21:54:44","slug":"sister-sauce","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2021\/09\/02\/sister-sauce\/","title":{"rendered":"Sister Sauce"},"content":{"rendered":"

In\u00a0Off Menu<\/a>, Edward White serves up lesser-told stories of chefs cooking in interesting times.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Albina Becevello.<\/p><\/div>\n

During a life of astonishing incident and variety, Gabriele D\u2019Annunzio inhabited many guises. In the twenty years before World War I he established himself as a giant of Italian culture: an epochal writer often known simply as \u201cthe Poet\u201d in Italy, a nationalist proselytizer, a storied lothario, and a daring aviator of spellbinding charisma. When the war came, D\u2019Annunzio transformed himself into a soldier and a statesman who presaged the rise of Mussolini and the aesthetics of Fascism. A \u201cpoet, seducer and prophet of war\u201d is how his biographer Lucy Hughes-Hallett describes him, \u201can urbane socialite and man of letters,\u201d as well as \u201ca frenzied demagogue\u201d who was \u201cas ruthless and selfish as a baby.\u201d<\/p>\n

His life intersected with many famous and infamous people, such as his sometime lover and muse Eleonora Duse, one of the most acclaimed actors of her day. But away from the excitement, scandal, and infamy that defined D\u2019Annunzio\u2019s public existence, one curious relationship ran like a steel girder through the last twenty-three years of his life: that with his cook, a much younger woman named Albina Becevello, about whom little is known other than her cooking. At a time when certain thinkers\u2014inspired, to some degree, by D\u2019Annunzio\u2019s ideas about aestheticism, technology, and national identity\u2014were advocating a complete revolution in Italian cuisine, Becevello nourished and indulged her employer with recipes that would have been familiar to the people of the Italian Peninsula even before the unification of Italy in the late nineteenth century.<\/p>\n

Becevello was not a pioneering chef, but one who catered perfectly to her audience. As the authors Maddalena Santeroni and Donatella Miliani detail in their book about Becevello, D\u2019Annunzio\u2019s mania for eggs\u2014he would routinely eat five a day\u2014meant his cook became a brilliant exponent of frittata, the Italian variant of the omelet. Often Becevello could send him into raptures with an even more simple creation, such as her re-creation of the egg-and-anchovy dish he remembered from his childhood. \u201cAlbina, be praised forever and ever,\u201d he once wrote her, \u201cshine forever in the Constellation of the Egg and the Nebula of the Anchovy! Amen.\u201d Santeroni and Miliani suggest that the relationship between Becevello and D\u2019Annunzio gives the lie to the Poet\u2019s reputation for misogyny. That seems a stretch, to put it kindly. But they\u2019re surely correct in saying that through Becevello and her traditional cooking\u2014her risotto alla Milanese and her spaghetti alla chitarra\u2014a real human emerges beneath the layers of obnoxious and grandiloquent mythmaking in which D\u2019Annunzio swaddled himself for the half-century that he occupied a central place in Italian public life. <\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Albina Becevello was in her early twenties when she first cooked for D\u2019Annunzio. From 1910 the Poet lived as a sybaritic celebrity in Paris but returned to his homeland to support its entry into World War I, a conflict he saw as an unprecedented national opportunity. To him, the carnage wrought by modern warfare was a chance to destroy, cleanse, and rejuvenate. Only in slaughter, he believed, could Italy claim its glorious destiny.<\/p>\n

D\u2019Annunzio settled in Venice, where he rented the Casetta Rossa, a property belonging to Prince Fritz Hohenlohe of Austria. With the house came a small domestic staff, including the young woman who ran the kitchen. Where Becevello had learned her craft is unknown, but she would surely have picked up the rudiments of the local cuisine\u2014characterized by risotto, polenta, and radicchio\u2014from the sharecropping family who raised her from the age of eight in the countryside surrounding Treviso, not far from Venice. Considering how dedicated D\u2019Annunzio was to the indulgence of the senses, he was surprisingly ambivalent about food. Immaculate in dress and manners, he found the physical process of eating messy; he considered it \u201chumiliating to fill the sad sack,\u201d he said, though he had no qualms about sating his other bodily appetites. Often, he would forego meals, and claimed to prefer dining alone, though that may have been due to pain or embarrassment caused by his appalling teeth. Yet food\u2014its flavors, colors, and aromas\u2014could excite him as much as any artwork. The event of dining could likewise stimulate him, if only because it gave him a captive audience, and Becevello became a vital element in D\u2019Annunzio\u2019s political and personal life, catering for the guests who flowed through the Casetta Rossa.<\/p>\n

During the war years D\u2019Annunzio crafted a distinct public reputation as a warrior-poet, and found ever more exhibitionist ways to champion the nationalist cause, culminating in a highly publicized flight over Vienna in 1918, when he dropped thousands of leaflets urging the Viennese to surrender. Because D\u2019Annunzio had seen the war as a chance for national glory, he was enraged when Italy\u2014despite being among the victorious Allied powers\u2014was prevented from acquiring the city of Fiume (now Rijeka, Croatia) by the terms drawn up at the Paris Peace Conference. In September 1919, D\u2019Annunzio defied the Paris settlement by leading two thousand soldiers into Fiume, seizing control of the city, and setting himself up as its dictator. For fourteen months Fiume was like nowhere else on earth, a place that attracted artists, radicals, and outsiders of all sorts. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti\u2014the founder of the futurist movement of artists and thinkers, heavily influenced by D\u2019Annunzio\u2019s veneration of speed and violence\u2014was thrilled by Fiume, as was a young Mussolini; many of D\u2019Annunzio\u2019s political ideas and his flamboyant, theatrical style of leadership, complete with Roman salutes, black uniforms, and rabble-rousing oratory, laid the groundwork for the Fascist surge that was soon to come.<\/p>\n

When D\u2019Annunzio was driven out of Fiume, on Christmas of 1920, he returned to Italy and looked on as Mussolini\u2014whom D\u2019Annunzio apparently considered to be an ill-educated vulgarian\u2014established himself as Italy\u2019s dominant political force. After suffering serious injury from being pushed out of a window\u2014possibly by one of Mussolini\u2019s supporters\u2014the Poet withdrew to the banks of Lake Garda, where he created the Vittoriale degli italiani, a vast estate that was to be his home for the rest of his life. Here, D\u2019Annunzio built a magical kingdom all his own, insulated from the daily realities of Mussolini\u2019s Italy, where he could further his mythology and leave future generations of Italians with a physical monument to himself.<\/p>\n

Albina Becevello was integral to the project; she cooked not only for D\u2019Annunzio but for all twenty-five people who lived on the estate. As with every other inch of the Vittoriale, Becevello\u2019s kitchen was carefully designed, with the contemporary abutting the traditional: modern refrigeration devices were placed next to tools for making pasta native to the Abruzzo region, D\u2019Annunzio\u2019s childhood home. Much of the food that Becevello prepared in this space evoked the Abruzzo\u2014pecorino cheese, cured meats, and many cakes and desserts\u2014but she refrained from making the region\u2019s famous meatballs, which D\u2019Annunzio dismissed as \u201cAbruzzo bullets.\u201d<\/p>\n

When D\u2019Annunzio was entertaining, Becevello\u2019s creations were served in the \u201cCheli Room,\u201d a lavish dining room of gold and red, named after his pet tortoise. When Cheli died from overindulging in tube roses, D\u2019Annunzio had a bronze cast of him made and fixed to the end of the dining table\u2014a warning to guests about the perils of gluttony. However, much of Becevello\u2019s work was not designed to impress guests but to salve and fuel D\u2019Annunzio as he wrote, made new plans for the Vittoriale, and conducted his sexual adventures. Frequently, Becevello would be called upon at short notice late at night or early in the morning to make a plate of eggs for D\u2019Annunzio and something for a woman he had shared his bed with.<\/p>\n

In 2015, Maddalena Santeroni and Donatella Miliani published a book about the tranche of notes and letters that D\u2019Annunzio sent to Becevello during the course of their long association. What emerges is a fascinating insight into the domestic routines of a highly unusual man, and a portrait of a unique, peculiarly intimate relationship. As Santeroni and Miliani note, despite D\u2019Annunzio being nearly twenty years Becevello\u2019s senior, the relationship between them sometimes appeared more like son and mother than boss and employee, something the authors put down to D\u2019Annunzio\u2019s endless search for a mother figure and his associating food with maternal love. He would sprinkle his messages to her with words and phrases from their native dialects (Venetian and Abruzzese), and had numerous pet names for her that were both jocular and respectful: \u201cSister Gluttony,\u201d \u201cSister Sauce,\u201d \u201cSister of the Plenary Indulgences.\u201d Santeroni and Miliani agree with Giordano Bruno Guerri, president of the foundation that now looks after Vittoriale, that Becevello was one of the few women in D\u2019Annunzio\u2019s life with whom he didn\u2019t try to have sex. Indeed, it seems that she was granted a great deal more respect than other women on his domestic staff, whom he harassed and mistreated. As Lucy Hughes-Hallett reveals in her biography, D\u2019Annunzio said that he considered a maid who brought him the meals that Becevello cooked to be no more to him than \u201ca piece of furniture, a cupboard on feet.\u201d<\/p>\n

As Santeroni and Miliani show, D\u2019Annunzio often issued Becevello strangely specific instructions. Sometimes he wanted ribs beaten \u201cthinner than a banana peel\u201d with a stone pestle. Out of the blue, he once insisted that \u201cfrom now on, every day, between three and four in the afternoon, you must be ready to prepare me cold veal with or without sauce.\u201d If fresh meat proved hard to come by on any given day, he instructed Becevello to buy a live calf, slaughter and butcher it herself, and freeze whatever wasn\u2019t used. This is the D\u2019Annunzio that\u2019s familiar to us: impulsive, demanding, egocentric. But Santeroni and Miliani\u2019s study offers a glimpse of a much less recognizable man who was capable of empathy, compassion, and thoughtfulness. According to the notes he sent Becevello, he sometimes insisted that she prolong her vacations because she seemed tired, and very frequently he gave her cash bonuses, as well as substantial sums of money to send to her disabled brother. Perhaps it was gratitude for service, and her ability to coat him in nostalgia and home comforts; perhaps, in his solipsistic way, he saw in her creative talent and hard-earned skill something that he recognized as true artistry, and therefore deserving of a respect he withheld from other servants.<\/p>\n

By and large, the fare that D\u2019Annunzio required of Becevello was rooted in the nineteenth century in which he had been raised. \u201cI have a sudden passion for can-nel-lo-ni,\u201d he wrote Becevello one evening. \u201cYou must have cannelloni ready at any time of the day and night. cannelloni! cannelloni!\u201d Not all of his contemporaries shared his passion for the traditional taste of Italy; at a time when Fascism threatened to transform Europe, certain of those in his circle wanted to turn Italian cuisine on its head. In the thirties, Marinetti, the leader of the futurist movement who had been so excited by D\u2019Annunzio\u2019s Fiume escapade, published his half-joking ideas for futurist cooking and eating, which advocated radical new flavor combinations and the use of poetry, music, colored lighting, and perfume in the dining experience. \u201cUntil now men have fed themselves like ants, rats, cats or oxen,\u201d proclaimed Marinetti. \u201cNow with the Futurists the first human way of eating is born.\u201d He foresaw a time when most nutrition would be consumed in the form of pills and powders, freeing up time for people to study, create, and think. The few mealtimes that remained would be opportunities to stimulate the senses and inflame passions, by making them multisensory experiences. The interior of the Taverna del Santopalato (Tavern of the Holy Palate), a futurist restaurant that Marinetti helped to establish in Turin in 1931, was intended to resemble a submarine, but decorated with aluminum (then an excitingly futuristic material), bright columns of color, and large eyes painted on the walls. When the food came, diners received small portions of various strange-sounding dishes such as chicken stuffed with zabaglione (similar to eggnog) and topped with silver confetti, and an orange risotto named the Roar of Ascent.<\/p>\n

Marinetti\u2019s ideas, collated in The Futurist Cookbook<\/em>, have been described by one scholar as \u201ca serious joke\u201d intended to rile and provoke. He certainly provoked a strong response to his call for the abolition of pasta, which he argued kept Italians trapped in a sluggish, premodern existence. Marinetti viewed gastronomy as a vehicle for making a new breed of Italians to inhabit what was still a young country. As he saw it, pasta was the coddling embrace of tradition in carbohydrate form. \u201cMen think, dream and act according to what they eat and drink,\u201d he averred. Replacing the thick beige ribbons of pappardelle with small mouthfuls of \u201cAlaskan salmon in the rays of the sun with Mars sauce,\u201c or \u201cPolyrhythmic Salad,\u201d which diners would eat with one hand while simultaneously turning the crank on a music box with the other, would help to create lithe bodies and alert minds, all the better to pursue national glory.<\/p>\n

Mussolini\u2019s regime was no less committed to fashioning new Italians, but it drew a direct link between traditional cooking and national identity, a scheme supported by popular magazines such as La cucina Italiana<\/em>, established in 1929 and still going to this day. One could see Becevello in her kitchen at the Vittoriale as a fusion of these two visions: a domestic cook working in the established Italian tradition for a novel, very modern cause, and the provider of comfort food to a Modernist aesthete who entertained in the louche splendor of the Cheli Room.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

As Mussolini grew ever closer with Hitler in the early thirties, D\u2019Annunzio wrote to the Duce expressing his disgust for the German chancellor. However, when Italy invaded Ethiopia, in 1935, D\u2019Annunzio was so delighted that he sent Mussolini the gift of a sword adorned with a depiction of Fiume. Despite his misgivings about Nazi Germany, D\u2019Annunzio still believed Italy\u2019s rightful destiny lay in war, conquest, and imperial expansion. He died at the age of seventy-four in 1938, before these ideas reaped their bitter fruits. Marinetti, committed to the priapic madness of futurism and Fascism until the last, died in 1944, at the age of sixty-seven, having served a stint on the Eastern Front a couple of years earlier.<\/p>\n

Following the Poet\u2019s death, Becevello, then in her fifties, returned to the Veneto and her family. If she was hoping for a comfortable early retirement, she was to be cruelly disappointed. Santeroni and Milaini tell us that her brother had squandered all the money D\u2019Annunzio sent him over the years, leaving Becevello with a great financial burden. Santeroni and Miliani don\u2019t know quite how her final days played out, but she died in poverty in 1940, at the age of fifty-six.<\/p>\n

At the Vittoriale\u2014now open to the public as a museum to D\u2019Annunzio\u2019s life and work\u2014traces of Becevello live on, though, as always, one must look through the lens of the Poet to glimpse them. The Cheli Room, with its bronze cast of D\u2019Annunzio\u2019s beloved tortoise, looks as it would have just before an epicurean evening ninety years ago, ready to receive some of D\u2019Annunzio\u2019s favorites: lean slices of cold partridge, perhaps, or a rose risotto, followed by budino al cioccolato, a delicious Italian chocolate pudding.<\/p>\n

Many of the dishes she cooked are still with us, of course, but in restaurants across the world they share space with elements of Marinetti\u2019s futurist food revolution. His prescriptions for treating cooking and eating as a multisensory art foreshadowed the nouvelle cuisine that developed after World War II. Heston Blumenthal is the best known of a generation of celebrity chefs who have brought Marinetti\u2019s ideas about eating into the mainstream. His recipes for bacon-and-egg ice cream and snail porridge could have been taken from Marinetti\u2019s manifesto, as could his dishes that come served with atomizers, dry ice, and soundscapes\u2014but these are the lauded dishes that have earned him Michelin stars and great commercial success. Albina Becevello had neither of those. But she did add a unique texture to one of the most consequential lives of the twentieth century. Thanks to Maddalena Santeroni and Donatella Miliani, perhaps in time Becevello will be remembered not simply as the hidden woman who cooked for D\u2019Annunzio, but as a culinary artist in her own right.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

For further reading, the author recommends the following:<\/em><\/p>\n