The Cuisine That Outlasted an Empire

Drive north from Verona and watch Italy slowly change its mind about itself. The vineyards shift from Corvina to Blauburgunder — which you may know as Pinot Noir, but they will correct you here, politely, as they correct everything. The architecture thickens, the roof pitches steepen against the weight of alpine snow, the signage becomes bilingual and then, quietly, more German than Italian. By the time you reach Bolzano — which they call Bozen — you have left the Mediterranean world entirely without crossing a single border.

South Tyrol was ceded to Italy in 1919 as a reward for switching sides in the First World War. Mussolini spent the following decades attempting to finish the job culturally — banning the German language in schools, renaming every mountain and village and street in Italian, calling the region Alto Adige as though a new name could accomplish what armies had not. It failed. Not dramatically, not with resistance movements or open rebellion, but in the quiet totalitarian way that kitchens resist: they simply kept cooking what they had always cooked.

Order Speck — the cold-smoked, mountain-cured ham that is to South Tyrol what prosciutto is to Parma — and you are eating a preservation technique developed for alpine winters that have nothing to do with Italian geography. Order Knödel — the dense bread dumplings served in broth or with sauerkraut — and you are eating the direct ancestor of what the Venetians softened into gnocchi when they brought it down from the mountains and forgot to mention where it came from. Order the wine and use the Italian name for the grape and someone will correct you. Not rudely. With the patience of a people who have been correcting this particular mistake for a hundred years and expect to be correcting it for a hundred more.

They do not call themselves Alto Adige. They call themselves South Tyroleans. The distinction is not semantic. It is the whole argument. You can legislate a name. You cannot legislate an identity. And identity, it turns out, lives most stubbornly not in language or law or flag but in what a people choose to put on the table when the government is not looking.

The Habsburgs built an empire that stretched from Vienna to Venice, from Prague to the Adriatic, and held it together for six centuries with bureaucracy and marriage and the remarkable insight that people who eat together can be governed together. The empire collapsed in 1918 under the weight of nationalism and war and the sheer exhaustion of the twentieth century. The paperwork dissolved. The borders moved. The kingdoms became republics and the republics joined unions and the maps were redrawn so many times they lost their authority.

The food did not get the memo. It is still there — in a bowl of risi e bisi in Venice, in a plate of pastissada in Verona, in a Knödel in Bozen, in a Tuesday night family dinner in Fort Bragg, California, where a seventy-three year old restaurateur serves the Venetian lagoon to the northern California coast and knows, from a lunch in Burano years ago, that he got it right.

Empires are remembered for their wars. They should be remembered for their kitchens. The kitchen is what lasts.

Joseph Harris