Cooking up Culture Italian Style

December 10, 2024

Authored by:

John DiConsiglio

In one of their last classes before Thanksgiving break, George Washington University senior neuroscience major Diana Black minced garlic on a cutting board as political science major Ava Holtzman stirred a pot of rice for a mushroom risotto. Nearby, journalism and communication classmates heated a custardy Italian sauce to top a tiramisu.

For these Columbian College of Arts and Sciences (CCAS) students, this wasn't a typical classroom. In fact, it was a kitchen-the GW Culinary Medicine Program's Seva Teaching Kitchen.

And chopping onions and simmering saffron wasn't a lesson in a cooking course-it was an assignment in Italian culture.

In the Culture and Conflict in Italian Foodways class, undergraduates use food as an entry point to examine critical moments in Italian literature and history. Taught by Professor of Italian Lynn Westwater and Visiting Assistant Professor of Italian Alessia Mingrone, the class is a wide-ranging recipe for understanding the special relationship between cuisine and culture in Italian society.

"We're exploring how deeply Italian foodways are enmeshed in other aspects-politics, regional divides, migration, labor practices," said Westwater, chair of the CCAS Department of Romance, German and Slavic Studies and an affiliate faculty member of the Global Food Institute. "Students come into the course thinking, 'I love Italian food! This will be fun!' But we also want them to realize how the food they love has very deep historical and cultural roots."

Part of the food leadership minor, the class transports students from the medieval era to the present, mixing a menu of favorite dishes with academic ingredients like gender, class and sustainability. The syllabus serves up Dante and Bocaccio side-by-side with pasta and pizza.

In the classroom, students address motifs from the symbolism of bread in "The Divine Comedy" to Mussolini's war on spaghetti. They were treated to guest speakers like D.C. chef Joe Farruggio, whose restaurants include Georgetown's il Canale. The class also welcomed Mingrone's own father for a taste-test of the fresh olive oil he manufactures from his home in Calabria, Italy.

Sophomore Sophia Cekola puts the finishing touches on a tiramisu during a kitchen session in the Culture and Conflict in Italian Foodways class.

In the kitchen, the course culminates with a student-prepared feast of mushroom and saffron risotto, salad and tiramisu-shared in a classic Italian family-style meal.

"The kitchen experience was really fun and allowed [us] to connect with the themes and pieces of gastronomic history we learned in class," said Holtzman, a senior minoring in sociology and sustainability. "And it isn't often that I get to cook for 20 people and eat communally with classmates!"

La dolce vita

Many cultures have their own special culinary connections. But from its San Marzano tomatoes to its Tuscan olive oil, Italy seems to hold a particularly romantic allure. "That's the million-dollar question: What is it with Italian food? Why do we feel such an attachment to it?" Mingrone said. "It's probably the first thing people who don't even know much about Italy at all think about."

Indeed, while some of the 44 students in the class' two sessions have visited Italy-like Holtzman who performed in an opera near Tuscany when she was 10-others were drawn to the class for the menu. Junior neuroscience major Yasmine Dakak calls herself a die-hard "gnocchi-person" while Mariana Corrales, a sophomore majoring in journalism with a minor in nutrition, worked at an Italian restaurant in her Charlotte, N.C., hometown. "I can savor…an endless variety of Italian dishes," she laughed.

Within the class, food is the "vehicle" for sharing cultural lessons, Mingrone said. Bread, for example, appears in Dante's work, with the unfamiliar taste of salted bread in faraway lands standing in for the loneliness of his exile from Florence. Likewise, in one class text, foreign bread represents the hardship of Italian American immigrants in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. "In America," read an immigrant's letter home, "the bread is soft, but life is hard."

Other lessons relate food to Italian politics-like Mussolini's propaganda campaign to promote rice over pasta and reduce the nation's dependence on imported wheat. The plan failed as working-class women defied the regime's policies and pasta became an anti-fascist symbol.

Professor of Italian Lynn Westwater designed the curriculum to connect culinary traditions to critical moments in Italian literature and history.

For their final projects, many students are presenting "unessays" with unconventional platforms like TikTok cooking videos. Dakak, whose family is from Lebanon, created artwork that compares shared Sicilian and Arab culinary traditions. And Black is tying her project into her neuroscience major. She is exploring how Italian ingredients like fermented cheese and extra virgin olive oil may support dietary interventions for improving mental health.

For most students, the highlight is the kitchen session, which Westwater described as "a lab section in a humanities class." Westwater stressed the importance of including a hands-on activity to reinforce the knowledge and skill behind Italian cooking. "It makes the class a 360-degree experience that I hope will enrich their lives going forward," she said. In the spring, Professor of French Masha Belenky will bring her Cultural Politics of Food in France class to the Seva Kitchen for a similar session.

Meanwhile, the Culinary Medicine faculty instructed the Italian Foodways students on everything from knife skills to whipping a classic zabaglione for the tiramisu. The session inspired Holtzman to make the mushroom risotto recipe as part of her family's holiday dinner. "This class tied together everything we've been learning about joy and culture," she said, "and the importance of eating good food!"