ACROSS THE BORDER

When Pellegrino Artusi published his cookbook () in 1891, Italy had only been unified politically for 30 years. His aim was to unify the country gastronomically by collecting its regional recipes. His readership was urban, middle-class and literate, but even as he wrote – and for different reasons – food was also on the minds of other Italians. Namely the peasants who, victims of a nationwide agrarian crisis, were fleeing the country to seek fortune across Europe and beyond. They might as well