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He says so Alessandro Barbero in one of his tasty festival lectures that Marc Bloch, the great French historian of Annals tragically he died in 1944, in a letter to Lucien Fevbre In 1935 he wrote that he was passionate about the social history of food. Bloch told his friend and colleague that the story of Swarms – not the Swarms luxury, but grandmother’s jam, which is made at home and consumed mainly during winter – raised historical issues of some importance. In fact the jam is made with sugar, but it is sugar Has it always been cheap? No, because before being extracted from beets, sugar was a luxury and imported product, derived from cane, so it was not available to everyone. The homemade jam, which would seem like a food always made by grandmothers, on the other hand a recent origin, from the 19th century, and linked to strictly economic issues. So ‘grandmother’ jam, but not ‘great-grandmother’ as Bloch used to say in the 1930s.
If we turn to the texts of a Cuban anthropologist like Fernando Ortiz, they explained to us that sugarcane required investments also because it required a lot of labor, that is, the purchase of “those spectacular self-propelled ‘slaves’. A sugar refinery, says Ortiz speaking of his Cuba in Cuban Counterpoint of the snuff and the sugar, required 80 to 120 slaves constantly employed. Sugar was slavery me capitalist, and the landowners lived the good life in Havana.
But let’s go back to Bloch, or rather to the reflection that, in recent days, has brought to mind that episode. The thing came to my mind when I received the famous ‘bottom pack’, now so proverbial that it has even become a sketch of Casa Surace. In the package below, the mothers still put the typical products made by them. In my case, mine sent me Calabrian Christmas sweets of the Ionian coast of Cosenza: the giuggiulena, toasted sesame joined with honey, served on clementine leaves; the Cookie, small cylinders of fried dough covered with honey; there pasta to compete, fried dough balls joined in plates with honey. Below the use of seeds and honey betrays a ‘Mediterranean’ origin. Then the words: giuggiulena comes, according to Rohlfs, from the Arabic gulgulan (sesame).
When I unwrapped the package, a ‘Blochiana’ question came to mind: Why have the typical southern sweets not spread industrially in the rest of the country? Why in Reggio Calabria at Christmas you eat panettone and pandoro, or panforte, or ricciarelli, and in Milan you don’t eat petrali (if we exclude the thousands of ‘bottom packages’ that have clogged the post office)?
Wanting to give an answer as a historian of Annals without being historical, and in fact, by subscribing to the Facebook page Alessandro Barbero we are your vassals I declare myself a vassal of the illustrious historian and I ask for his numinous intervention, it seems that the reason is in the ability to capitalism from El Norte mass produce – modifying – some typical sweets of their tradition, transmitting their consumption through the ad but also through ‘indirect’ ways of advertising like the mass media, television and cinema.
It is not about invoking the autarky of the confectionery boycotting the panettone. Purity does not exist, as the aforementioned nomenclature of sweets also demonstrates lexically; but as also demonstrated by the fact that “Nordic” industrial sweets are radically different from their original version (which I fear is itself equally “mythical”), if not as a normative ideal of some identity entrepreneur. However, it is a fact that gastronomic approval (we think, in the salty one, tortellini) it happened: in the south you eat cotechino, in the north you don’t eat capitone.
Ortiz said that cultures mix, and he called it transculturation, that is, between two cultures that meet, one The third class that takes from both. And he had coined the term to differentiate it from acculturation which, as Malinowski says in the introduction to Counterpoint – “implies, due to the preposition ad […], the concept of limit in which”.
However, if in Calabria we eat panettone and in Milan they don’t eat it giuggiulena, it will not be that there is a subaltern and colonized culture, and not transculturazione is it (if we exclude the panettone alla ‘nduja)?
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