The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 03, No. 18, April, 1859. Various
from whose caffés, unlike all others throughout Italy, such a staple of breakfast was banished.
I am fond of buttered toast, I own. If it is a weakness, I candidly plead guilty. My mother—bless her soul!—brought me up in the faith of buttered toast. I had breakfasted upon it all my life. I could conceive of no breakfast without it. Hence the shock I felt. "Not the custom!" Why not, I wondered. A problem of no easy solution, I can tell you! It has been haunting me for the last seven-and-twenty years. If I had a thousand dollars,—a bold supposition for one of the brotherhood of the pen,—I would even now found a prize, and adjudge that sum to the best memoir on this question:—"Why is buttered toast excluded from the caffés of Turin?" It is not from lack of proper materials,—for heaps of butter and mountains of rolls are to be seen on every side; it is not from lack of taste,—for the people which has invented the grisini, and delights in the white truffle, shows too keen a sense of what is dainty not to exclude the charge of want of taste.
"Pray, what are the grisini? what is the white truffle?" asks the inquisitive reader.—The grisini are bread idealized, bread under the form of walking-sticks a third of a little finger in diameter, and from which every the least particle of crumb has been carefully eliminated. It is light, easy of digestion, cracks without effort under your teeth, and melts in your mouth. It is savory eaten alone, excellent with your viands, capital sopped in wine. A good Turinese would rather have no dinner at all than sit down to one without a good-sized bundle of these torrified reeds on his right or left. Beware of the spurious imitations of this inimitable mixture of flour, which you will light on in some passages in Paris! They possess nothing of the grisini but the name.
"I have it!" I fancy I hear some imaginative reader exclaim at this place. "The passion for the grisini accounts most naturally for the want of buttered toast in Turin. Don't you see that it is replaced by the grisini?"
A mistake, a profound mistake. Grisini are never served with your coffee or chocolate. Try again.
The white truffle,—white, mark you, and not to be confounded with its black, hard, knotty, poor cousin of Périgord,—well, the white truffle is—the white truffle. There are things which admit of no definition. It would only spoil them. Define the Sun, if you dare. "Look at it," would be your answer to the indiscreet questioner. And so I say to you,—Taste it, the white truffle. Not that you will relish it, on a first or second trial. No. It requires a sort of initiation. Ambrosia, depend upon it, would prove unpalatable, at first, to organs degraded by coarse mortal food. It has,—the white truffle, I mean, not the ambrosia, which I have never tasted,—it has a shadow of a shade of mitigated garlic flavor, which demands time and a certain training of the gustatory apparatus, to be fully appreciated. Try again, and it will grow upon you,—again and again, and you will go crazy after the white truffle. I have seen persons, who had once turned up their noses at it, declare themselves capable of any crime to get at it. Nature gave it to Piedmont, "e poi ruppe la stampa." Gold you may find in different places, and under different latitudes;—the white truffle is an exclusive growth of Piedmont.
To return. If it is not the want of proper materials, or of taste to use them, what can be the cause of the unjust ostracism against buttered toast?
A Genoese friend of mine accounts for it on the same principle on which another friend of mine, a Polish refugee in London, accounted for the difference, nay, in many points, the direct opposition, between English and French habits of life,—that is to say, on the principle of national antagonism. Why does the English Parliament hold its sittings at night? my Polish friend would ask. The reason is obvious. Because, the French Parliament sits in broad day, when it sits at all. Why is winter the season of villeggiatura in England? Because in France it is summer and autumn. Why are beards and moustaches tabooed in Great Britain? Because it is common to wear them in France. Why are new pipes preferred in England for smoking? Because in France the older and more culottée a pipe, the more welcome it is. And so on, ad infinitum.
Arguing on the same principle, my Genoese friend avers that buttered toast is proscribed at Turin because it is so justly popular in Genoa. The Genoese, in fact, excel in the preparation of that dainty article. They have, for the purpose, delicious little rolls, which they cut in two and suit to all tastes and whims. The upper or under crust, soft or hard, deep brown or light brown, with much or little butter, with cold or hot butter, with butter visible or invisible:—be as capricious in your orders as you like, and never fear tiring the waiter. Proteus himself never took so many shapes.
There is some speciousness in my Genoese friend's argument. The Superba, naturally enough, cannot forget that she was first and is now second. Turin, on her side, does not intend to have her official supremacy disputed. No wonder that the two noble cities should look at each other rather surlily, and stick to their own individuality. "Hence it is," concludes my friend, "that the comparatively easy Apennines have proved to this day an impassable barrier to the buttered toast on one side, and to the grisini on the other."
"But not so to the white truffle," I put in, triumphantly. "The Genoese have adopted that; and honor to them for having done so! What do you say to this, eh?"
My friend scratched his head in quest of a new argument. We will leave him to his embarrassment, and have done with this string of digressions.
I was saying, that my first visit to Turin dated as far back as 1831. On that journey I had a singular travelling-companion, a beautiful fish, a John Dory, carefully wrapped up, and neatly laid in a wicker-basket, like a babe in its cradle. The officers of the octroi, who examined my basket, complimented me on my choice,—nay, grew so enthusiastic about my John Dory, that, if I remember right, they let it pass duty-free. The mistress of the house, at whose table it was served, paid it a well-deserved tribute of admiration, but lamented the unskilfulness of the hand which had cleaned it: "How stupid to cut it to the very throat! See what a gap!" I laughed in my sleeve and held my tongue. It was a frightful gap, to be sure,—but not bigger than was necessary to admit of an oilskin-covered parcel, a pound at least in weight, a parcel full to the brim of treasonable matter, revolutionary pamphlets, regulations of secret societies, and what not. My John Dory was a horse of Troy in miniature. But Turin stood this one better than Troy the other.
Turin was, or seemed to me, gloomy and chilly at that time, though the season was mild, and the sky had cleared up. Jesuits, carabineers, and spies lorded it; distrust was the order of the day. People went about their business, exchanged a hasty and well-timed sciaô, (schiavo,) and gave up all genial intercourse. Far keener than the breath of neighboring snow-capped Mount Cenis, the breath of despotism froze alike tongues and souls. How could buttered toast, emblem of softness, thrive in so hard a temperature? I left as soon as I could, and with a feeling of relief akin to joy.
I was in no haste to revisit Turin, nor, had I been, would circumstances have permitted my doing so. The fish had a tail for me as well as for many others, and a very long tail too. Most of the years intervening between 1831 and 1848 I had to spend abroad,—out of Italy, I mean. Time enough for reflection. Plenty of worry and anxiety, and difficulties of many a kind. Rough handling from the powers that were, cold indifference from the masses. A flow of gentle sympathy, now and then, from a kindred heart or two,—God bless them!—a live spring in a desert. A hard apprenticeship,—still, useful in many ways, to develop the sense of realities, to teach one to do without a host of things deemed indispensable before to keep the soul in tune. I declare, for my part, I don't regret those long years of erratic life. I bless them, on the contrary; for they opened my eyes to the worth of my country. The right point of view to take in physical or moral beauty, in its fulness, is only at a distance.
The great convulsion of '48 flung wide the gates of Italy to the wanderer, and I returned to Turin. I had left it at freezing-point, and I found it at white-heat. Half Europe revolutionized,—France a republic, Vienna in a blaze, Hungary in arms, Radetzky driven out of Milan, a Piedmontese army in Lombardy,—there was more than enough to turn the heads of the Seven Sages of Greece. No wonder ours were turned. Serve a splendid banquet and pour out generous wine to a shipwrecked crew who have long been starving, and ten to one they will overfeed themselves and get drunk and quarrel. We did both, alas!—and those who are drunk and quarrel are likely to be overpowered by