Fatto in casa ≠ home made

In Italy and the rest of the Mediterranean, the expression “fatto in casa” is paying the price of a very recent history that the older generations have not forgotten: the post-war economic hardship that continued up until the 1960s, which dictated that “home made” equated to not being able to buy the product ready-made elsewhere.

“Home made”, on the eastern shore of the Atlantic, gives the idea of a Mediterranean housewife wiping her hands on her apron before greeting her next guest with an embarrassed smile.

Curiously, the relationship is turned on its head in the world of haute cuisine, in which Italian chefs have acquired an international reputation for intransigence: their catchphrase is “make everything at home”, from bread to petits-fours served with coffee. In fact, a Boston chef with several well-starred Italian restaurants to his credit, blushed when we asked him whether the bread was home made: «No, I’m sorry, I know you Italians love to do everything at home, but this is a traditional New England loaf that’s made specially for me by a small bakery»… he was obviously embarrassed about not being able to offer a completely “home made” dinner. In Milan, chef Gianfranco Vissani, when judging an amateur cooking contest, chided one entrant who was guilty of using a ready-made ingredient: “remember you should always make it at home”.

How can we heal the apparent divide in the concept of fatto in casa, half-pride and half-shame? Nadia Santini, the first female Italian chef to have obtained three Michelin stars, creates food that transmits the warmth of home more than any other cuisine, representing the trait-d’union between the two sides to best effect. «I’m proud to have grown up in an environment where everything was made at home», she says.

Originally from Veneto, she moved to Mantua after marrying Antonio Santini, who brought her a “dowry” of his parents’ restaurant, “Dal Pescatore” in Canneto sull’Oglio; «most importantly, I was lucky that both my own and my husband’s families knew that things taste better when they’re made at home. In today’s restaurant trade, you can find a whole host of ready-made mixes for everything, even for colouring sauces, but I think that cooking should be slowed down, we need to rediscover the slowness of home cooking».

The key seems to lie with the traditions handed down through the generations: Giovanni Santini, who now works alongside his mother Nadia in the kitchen, makes a striking comment while describing a recipe for wild duck: «the taste of this dish reminds me of my grandmother». These are flavours which are discovered at home, memorised and cherished, then handed down with the sense of belonging to a region and a tradition, instead of the shame of not being able to afford anything else. «Nowadays people are more aware of technique», observes Giovanni Santini: «my grandmother used to make bread “by sight”, now everything is checked down to the last gram – there’s more emphasis on the chemistry of cooking». Yet the flavour remains the same, even for the cotechino, a traditional sausage from Northern Italy that is facing extinction: «It’s a question of rediscovering that taste stored in your memory», says Giovanni, «and recreating it without completely revolutionising the technique, but following a natural evolution». If we follow this route, “fatto in casa” really could equate to home made, not just in grammatical terms, but with the same idea of pride and “specialness”.

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Childhood memories

The first thing they teach you at journalism school in Italy is never to use the pronoun “io” (“I”). The author hovers above the words but never shows his face. He has no opinions, he never talks about himself. In journalism typical of English-speaking countries, once again the added value comes from the personal “filter” that
makes the story unique. Here is our story, English style. It was the 1970s. Children in towns and cities were already drinking UHT milk, but for my sister and I, milk meant a walk through the woods – not one but two steep short-cuts – with two jugs that we had to be careful not to spill on the way back. Sometimes we arrived  too early, and “Netta” (Ernesta) still had to finish the milking.
There was an acrid smell of farming that I can still remember now. Netta’s milk changed with the seasons – sometimes, in early May, it was undrinkable, with a pungent flavour from some mysterious flower that the cows used to graze on. Netta also made cheese, a farmhouse toma, and butter of a yellow colour that I have never seen since.
Then, like a disease, UHT spread outside the towns and cities, as far as the mountains, complete with its tetrapack. It looked so modern: it was like going to school with a shop-bought biscuit instead of mum’s apple cake – never mind if the cake tasted nicer – the important thing was to be cool. As for the tetrapack, the milk always tasted the same, there were no surprises caused by the pasture, and we saved time we could spend doing our homework.
Our mother changed allegiance. A few years later, Netta sold all her cows – too many people had changed allegiance.
Netta’s story is typical of the problems inherent in establishing the quality of something “home made”, in an Italy that is still very recent. But there is a nemesis: when my first book of stories was published in 1995 (Ho fatto un pan pepato – ricette di cucina emotiva), the illustrator designed a whirl of ingredients for the cover. As the brief season of the tetrapack had ended at least ten years earlier, I don’t know how she got the idea of drawing a tetrapack milk carton. But each time I look at the cover, I pay for my betrayal, for having abandoned the wholesome (“home made”) for the convenient (shop-bought).
Paris 2007. In a chain of organic food stores, Naturalia, I find a milk bottle bearing the name of its producer. I try it. It’s a delight, a revelation: it’s Netta’s milk, with the same fragrance of grass and stables. My heart melts: if a small-scale producer can manage to reach large-scale distribution (even if it is “niche” and chic), that means “fatto in casa”, after a troubled past, has a great future.
Perhaps one day it really will be the same as “home made”.