Delizia! The Epic History of Italians and their Food by John Dickie

A Review

🎧 Paired Listening — Spaghetti a Detroit by Fred Bongusto

🌊 Acqua Alta Rating — +150 (exceptional!) 

📖 Read outside, at a bustling cafe 

Thanks to John Dickie, the question of French versus Italian food may never have a clean answer. The terms of comparison carry too much baggage.

Delizia! takes its reader on a tour of Italy through its food. Chronological and geographical, it begins with a seat at a medieval table in Palermo and ends with the beckoning call of a Slow Food salon in 21st century Turin. It answers all of the questions one has about Italian food, and touches on all of the main points of contention and stereotypes. Highly political, of course. Delizia! rests on the fact that food cannot be untangled from the politics of a place and time, especially in a country as richly historied as Italy. The story of Italian food is the story of Italian immigration and emigration. 

Dickie is also very attuned to divulging just enough historical context for the reader to orient themselves without getting lost in the weeds. Certain culinary decisions are impossible to understand without their context. Heavily sugared main dishes make little sense without reckoning with the lack of refrigeration and thus salting preservation practices. The emigrated Italian's disdain for polenta is impossible to understand without reckoning with feudal peasantry and the fact that millions of poor Italians were forced to eat this grain for years on end. Pesto isn't just pesto, and the American's spaghetti and meatballs take on new meaning once understood as the immigrant's way of telling family back home, don't worry, there's pasta and meat on the same plate, the kids are going to be alright.

This book is enlightening, informative, and encourages curiosity moving forward. A trip to the grocer's will never be the same. It gives way to good cocktail party talk and references historical cookbooks worth trying. The ending brings the reader to present times with the Slow Food movement salon in Turin. If you already knew of this collective, your thoughts on it will change by the end of Delizia!. 

This book made a splash. Delizia! does exactly what it says it is going to do, to Dickie's credit as a thoughtful and engaging writer of Italian politics, culture, and history. For those who haven't yet, his Cosa Nostra offers an equally engaging, if not more gossip-y, account of the Sicilian mafia and its history.