table talk / By Simona Carini

Words for Thought

A brief OED of la cucina italiana

(Nov. 20, 2008)  Have you ever wondered about the origin of Italian food words that have gained common currency in this country? Even if your answer is no, you may find the following linguistic morsels appetizing.

carpaccio

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I love Venice, I love everything about Venice and being in Venice in any season. And I like the painter Vittore Carpaccio (c. 1465-1526). Once, during a visit to that fabled city, I spent some time in the Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni museum in solitary admiration of Carpaccio’s vibrant paintings, observing their intriguing details, delighting in his art.

I did not know then that there was a connection between Carpaccio and carpaccio. The connection is Giuseppe Cipriani, who, in 1931, together with Harry Pickering, founded Harry’s Bar, a restaurant and bar located not far from St. Mark’s Square. On the Cipriani’s website (www.cipriani.com), Giuseppe’s son, Arrigo, says that his father created carpaccio in 1950, inspired by Countess Amalia Nani Mocenigo, to whom the doctor had prescribed a raw meat diet. The color of the meat reminded Cipriani of the brilliant reds of Carpaccio’s paintings, so he named the dish after the painter. (The same text references a great Carpaccio exhibition held in Venice. According to other sources, such event took place in 1963.)

The website also describes the sauce Cipriani used in his carpaccio, a combination of homemade mayonnaise, Worcestershire sauce, fresh lemon juice, milk, salt and freshly ground white pepper. The sauce was drizzled over thinly-sliced raw beef controfiletto (strip loin, or shell loin) in decorative patterns, “Kandinsky-style” (to remain in the realm of painting).

Nowadays, the word carpaccio is used to describe all sorts of dishes with a raw main ingredient (fish, various vegetables, even fruit). And the seasoning of beef carpaccio is, in my experience, often different from the one described above. Nowadays, you usually get olive oil, a bit of lemon juice and shavings of parmigiano. That is reminiscent of carne all’albese, meat in the style of Alba, another Italian dish that uses raw beef as main ingredient — finely chopped or thinly sliced, seasoned with olive oil, lemon juice and shaved white truffle. Alba, a town in Piedmont, is in fact famous for the precious underground fungus.

bruschetta

This simple dish is popular in central Italy, where I grew up. Bruschetta comes from the verb bruscare, which, in this context, means to toast. If I tell you that in Italian the consonant group sche is pronounced ske, you should get a sense of how the word bruschetta sounds in its native milieu. I was a bit disappointed in finding that the Merriam-Webster Dictionary lists first a pronunciation with she, giving the one with ske as an alternative, without explaining that the latter is how the word is pronounced in the word’s native language.

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