The making of authentic tortellini: Aestheticization of artisanal labor and elite univorism in the case of local food

Introduction ¹

Contemporary global north food culture is voracious: quality and quantity of food on tables might be lessened, but the discourse on food has never seemed more abundant, and most food is now sold with a narrative. The proliferation of food discourses infests cultural industries, politics and market strategies (Fischler, 1979). From foodie blogging (Johnston and Baumann, 2010) to food activism (Counihan and Siniscalchi, 2014) and from the nationalization of territories (Fourcade, 2012) to alternative food networks (Goodman, 2003), food has become not just ‘good to think’ but first and foremost ‘good to talk’.

These global trends overlay Italian culture, already iconic for its worldwide distinguished food culture. Sociological and anthropological studies on material cultures and practices (Counihan, 2004; Guigoni, 2009) show how Italians – as consumers and producers – manage their food culture toolkits creatively and with great expertise and affective intensity. Italian food studies across aesthetics, philosophy (Perullo, 2006), semiotics (Marrone, 2014), history (Capatti and Montanari, 2003; Montanari, 2016), anthropology (Guigoni, 2009; La Cecla, 2016) and sociology (Naccarato et al., 2017; Sassatelli, 2004; Sassatelli et al., 2015), are analyzing a foodscape that produces complex cultural discourses around traditionalization and the establishment of authenticity. ‘Tradition’ and ‘authenticity’ are yet another set of intricate food discourses, now constructed in elaborate and reflexive ways that often rely on cultural intermediaries’ (Maguire and Matthews, 2014) schemes of certification and labeling (Evans and Miele, 2017 edited by Halkier, Keller, Truninger and Wilska), but also on moral repertoires and aesthetic judgments.

In this article, I will look at two distinct Bolognese practices within the tortellini commodity circuit as cases in the cultural production of traditional local food. By analyzing two practices of valorization of one product, I will point out two different simultaneous enactments of aesthetic and moral values stemming from the same material object: the tortellino. Two contrasting aesthetic framings – the artisanal craftsmanship of skilled workers (sfogline) and the exclusive practices of elite gourmands (Confraternita) – unfold in the tortellini circuit. They will allow us to address two main theoretical issues: the construction of elite practices based on aesthetics and the orchestration of aesthetics and moralities at different stages of the social life of a traditional food product (production by the sfogline, valorization by the Confraternita).

Together with mortadella, the iconic food product most closely associated with Bologna is tortellini. Bologna has been the city most active in attempting to secure tortellini as a city brand (and city branding itself has invested overall in food culture, in an attempt to secure Bologna as the ‘city of food’). Any restaurant claiming to offer traditional cuisine must propose them as the flagship dish, any cooking class targeting tourists attempts to transmit the complex process of their preparation, while every gift shop is crammed with tortellini-shaped fridge magnets. Locally, many actors have been responsible for the construction of the aesthetic value of tortellini. Currently, a variety of initiatives attempt to capitalize on such value and promote tortellini to different targets: festivals, blind tastings and tournaments to declare the best tortellini are promoted by business associations, network of operators in the food sector and local newspapers, younger entrepreneurs sell take-away tortellini on the Internet, and celebrity housewives establish cooking schools employing Italian-Japanese interpreters. ²

Tortellini are a kind of ring-shaped filled pasta: a filling of pork loin, cured ham (Prosciutto di Parma), mortadella, parmesan cheese, egg and nutmeg, is enclosed by egg pasta. They can be served in a broth as a first course. Tortellini can thus be seen as a ‘matrioska’ of ingredients already infused with symbolic value: mortadella (‘bologna’) actually competes for the title of most distinctive food of the city, while parmesan cheese and cured ham are products certified under various schemes of denomination of origin. Egg pasta is itself another symbol of the area. Something apparently as simple as mixing egg, flour and water is the object of study for many cooking schools. Competitions are regularly held where amateur contestants – increasingly, foreigners – race to roll the smoother and larger layer of pasta.

The time-consuming skilled work required to prepare tortellini accounts for the largest part of the final retail price: artisanal tortellini are sold for between 37 and 42 Euro per kilogram. Purchased in restaurants, where a portion weighs around 100g per serving, the price for a plate of tortellini in broth ranges from 10 to 14 Euro. This makes tortellini an exclusive and high-priced commodity.

By following the social life of tortellini, this dual case study allows us to address common trends in contemporary food markets as they are enacted in their various and often contradictory enactments. The case of ‘pasta fresca laboratories’ – where artisanal tortellini is produced and sold by ‘sfogline’ – and of the ‘Dotta Confraternita del Tortellino’ – a local association of amateurs responsible for the filing of the traditional recipe in 1974, will be framed in terms of elite consumption and aesthetics of traditional labor.

Sfogline and the Confraternita are actors along the lines of the production of tortellini as material, discourse, symbolic and economic goods. Thus, they do not occupy a teleological role in a subsequential, mechanical commodity chain that proceeds linearly from production to consumption. Theoretical framings departing from the notion of ‘commodity chain’ are vast and often conflicting (Jackson et al., 2006; Leslie and Reimer, 1999). In this article, I employ the notion of the ‘commodity circuit’ (Sassatelli, 2007), which builds on the concepts of ‘systems of provision’ (Fine, 1994; Fine and Leopold, 1994) and of ‘food networks’ (Arce and Marsden, 1993; Goodman et al., 2012). Commodity circuits allow us to understand the social life of things (Appadurai, 1986) as they are made by nonhuman actors, human actors as consumers and ultimately by ‘circulations: interconnected flows not only of materials but also of knowledges and discourses’ (Leslie and Reimer, 1999: 416).

This article will offer an analysis of this circuit aiming at disentangling the different roles of actors and particularly in the segment of this circuit where traditionalization is secured. The analysis of the culture of an elite gourmand association – the Confraternita – will point out how elite exclusionary practices are constructed by mobilizing aesthetic markers for the consolidation of quality as authenticity. The material on skilled workers producing artisanal tortellini – the sfogline – will give access to the backstage of actual artisanal production, revealing how the culture shared by skilled workers points far away from the romanticized version of its symbolic valorization, and how the sustainability of ‘tradition’ within small, artisanal practices, seems threatened rather than supported by the invention of tradition (Hobsbawm, 1983).

Referencing these two stages of tortellini production and consumption as part of a circuit is meant to highlight how two very different scenes of enactment of aesthetics, morality and food, are actually part of the same story, where tortellini can be both the burdensome product of hard condition of labor and the luxurious commodity of exclusive consumption. Both contradictory aspects, however, are never fully removed from the other segment of the circuit, because ‘all items consumed […] incorporate a residue of labor and […] the form of the labor affects the meaning and status of the product’ (Warde and Martens, 2000: 10). Thus, in order to be exclusive tortellini need to be produced artisanally, and in order to justify its artisanal production tortellini need to be an exclusive commodity. Both sets of empirical material will thus contribute to the discussion on aesthetics as morality and on the aesthetic of moralities, as they unfold along the commodity circuit of the tortellini.

Methodology

This research is based on ethnographic observation of food events (festivals, markets, pasta-rolling competitions), laboratories and amateur or semi-professional cooking schools in the city of Bologna, document analysis, interviews with ‘sfogline’ [skilled workers] and with the ‘Dotta Confraternita del Tortellino’ [Learned Brotherhood of Tortellino], with cooking schools managers and teachers, and with privileged informants from the local artisanal food industry.

The broader context of the social life of tortellini was drawn by identifying the main actors in the areas of productions, regulation, commercialization and communication, thus delimiting the circuit. Such initial appraisal, aimed at contouring the circuit of tortellini in the area of Bologna, quickly revealed how tortellini could mean everything and its opposite, as they were being produced, consumed, and talked about in widely different ways. How could tortellini maintain their iconic status of the traditional food from the city of Bologna and not be diluted and rendered culturally inert by the variety of appropriations by so many different actors, agenda and modes of consumption?

The case of the Confraternita initially emerged in relation with the filing of the traditional recipe (which is still the one act the Confraternita is most famous for) and was thus originally guided by a frame on the production of authenticity by means of certifications, credentials and normative schemes. However, when we discovered that the filing of the recipe bears no actionable normative power, it became clear that the Confraternita was better understood as a case of elite consumption. As such, it needed to be approached with a ‘how’ question, that is: if not by legal authority, how did the Confraternita consolidate authenticity? As we will see, the ‘how’ of the Confraternita was indeed a performative power, in which aesthetics played a fundamental role.

The case of the sfogline, on the other hand, was guided since the beginning by concern over moralities. Interviews were mostly ethnographic in this case, and the method loosely guiding both fieldwork and its analysis was derived from convention theory (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006). I inquired about professional biographies, knowledge sources, routine practices, opinions on the market, on customers, and on what counts as quality, but the underlining question was always meant to identify what was morally guiding the sfogline in their practices, judgments, and justification of their judgments.

In order to maintain a ‘cross-eyed’ gaze on the same object, interviews, desk research and ethnographic observation were conducted recursively. The clash of different aesthetics, in particular, was easier to appreciate when I could spend, for example, one morning sweating with the sfogline in their laboratory and the afternoon being served tea in precious china at the house of one member of the Confraternita. Reflecting on my own position, embarrassment was the ever-present emotion: with sfogline, I was embarrassed for lacking the basic culinary skills of an assigned female at birth person; with the Confraternita, I was embarrassed for lacking elaborate table manners and knowledge of the city nobility lineage. As an outsider to both worlds, however, I could ask basic questions and approach my subjects with a life narrative approach in which the ‘life of tortellini’ and the lives of subjects intersected.

The dual focus of this paper eventually emerged as an attempt to identify two extremes of one circuit, where the same material object – the tortellini – circulates and comes to live two very different biographies thanks to diverse aesthetics and moralities.

For the purpose of this article, data was mostly drawn from observations in pasta fresca laboratories, interviews with store owners and sfogline, from interviews with Confraternita’s members and document analysis. Five pasta fresca laboratories were selected, each representing a different example of artisanal practice: one was recently opened by young entrepreneurs, one was run by non-local (i.e. not originally from Bologna) store owners, one doubled as a cooking school, two were well-respected, old, traditional family stores. Each store was first visited once as a paying customer, a second time for observation, and a third time for follow-up interviews (with both workers (5) and store owners (7), for a total of 12). Despite the variety of backgrounds of these businesses, the data collected for the purpose of this article did not reveal remarkable differences.

Interviews with the Confraternita members were conducted, thanks to the intermediation of the local Chamber of Commerce (also interviewed). Out of four members interviewed, only one allowed the dialogue to be transcribed. Due to the unforeseen difficulty in accessing the field, data on the Confraternita was supplemented by desk research. Document analysis, in particular, was conducted by researching the pages of Il Resto del Carlino, the local conservative newspaper, ³ which has the most extensive coverage of the Confraternita and tortellini-related news (46 articles retrieved).

The artisanal production of tortellini

For the purpose of this article, the starting point of the production circuit of tortellini are the ‘pasta fresca laboratories’ ⁴ where tortellini are produced and sold by artisans. Ethnographic vignettes and interview excerpts illustrate the aesthetics of traditional labor and its corresponding moralities as they emerge from practice. Elements such as the aesthetic markers of visual discontinuity, the morality of gendered domesticity and the craftsmanship of traditional labor, are the emerging themes in this production chain that will be valorized by cultural discourses around tortellini. Yet, how do they unfold in practice? Is there a correspondence between the romanticized version of tortellini artisanal production and its reality as it is narrated by workers themselves?

Artisanally, tortellini are produced in laboratories by ‘sfogline’. Most artisanal laboratories are no bigger than a private kitchen and do not have (or have but do not display) special equipment. Sfogline – even when wearing white professional uniforms – do each wear their own personal and unique apron. A radio is often broadcasting Italian tunes in the background. The cramped spaces feel crowded, as sfogline chat unremittingly over orders calls.

In order to make a tortellino, egg pasta needs to be rolled in thin layers and cut into 3 cm squares. A dab of filling is posed on each of the squares, which are then closed forming a triangle first and then giving them, with a characteristic and swift movement of a finger and the other hand, their classic shape. Size is a crucial matter: tortellini should be small, yet artisans must find a balance between size and pasta-to-filling ratio. Tortellini which are too small will taste blunt due to lack of filling, too large and the tortellino will lose its important aesthetic marker of exclusivity, which is also the signal of a higher amount of manual labor: ‘you got to be able to hold seven in one spoon’ [gastronome, tortellini expert]. In artisanal laboratories, in restaurants, in ‘gastronomie’ ⁵ and ‘pasta fresca’, ⁶ only a few of the production tasks can be automated. Machinery available for automation, which the industry of the area did invent, ⁷ are expensive and bulky: rarely can they be fitted in the cramped and small artisanal laboratories placed in the medieval city center. Moreover, machinery forces various technical limitations on production: both the filling and the pasta needs to be prepared in such a way that does not jam the machine, yielding a less smooth and flexible product.

Automation forces a renunciation of the visual discontinuity which is the valuable aesthetic marker of artisanal production. In fact, the construction of quality in adjudicating the value of tortellini ultimately rests on the valorization of manual artisanal labor, not in its embodied form, but for its final visual yield:

You can have the machines but still you have to have somebody there to look after the machine, to put flour in it, to watch over it. Imagine we keep the ingredients the same, if you work them with machines how much will it save you? We’re in the order of 20-30 cents per portion, it’s just not worth it. Doing it by hand it’s what gives you discontinuity in the product, here is thicker, there is pressed more… if you look at a photograph of tortellini in a plate, they are all different. [Confraternita brother]

Considering that bulk frozen tortellini can be purchased at 3–5 Euro per kilogram, the 10-fold increase of artisanal tortellini retail price can be accounted for by labor cost and by the cost of raw materials. Certainly, tortellini produced by industrial machinery and filled with low-cost ingredients (such as giblets, bamboo fibers, half-processed dairy, potato flakes) allow for a reduction in the price tag. However, in this quote we can find a clear example of the move toward aestheticization in food discourses (Miele and Murdoch, 2002), where aesthetic characteristics are explicitly indicated as markers of quality. When invited to isolate a single distinctive trait that authenticates the product as ‘worth it’, one member of the Confraternita pointed not to taste, not to the origin of product, not to a past experience, not to price tags, but to an aesthetic marker.

Such aesthetics can only be guaranteed by manual labor. Sfogline are personnel specifically employed to carry out the rather qualified task of filling and closing the tortellini pasta. Store managers – in mediating between the production side and customers – cheerfully allow tourists to photograph or video record the sfogline while immersed in their hypnotic, frantic yet rhythmic, task of preparing the traditional filled pasta. Such tourist moments and their objectification as souvenirs of the local are part of a grass-root marketing of the ‘authentic’ experience of Bologna as a city of taste. They allow one to bypass the commonplace stereotype of food ‘made in Italy’, offering consumers and foodies a further localized focus for the refinement of their taste (Figure 1).

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Figure 1.

Sfogline showing off their products (credits: CNA Bologna).

Producing ‘pasta fresca’ is a gender-segregated job: ⁸ even at the amateur level, one of the most popular pasta rolling competitions is entitled ‘Miss Tagliatella’, a prize not many males have ever had the honor to achieve.

Gendered perspectives on food studies have highlighted the complex relationship between femininity and food preparation and consumption (Cairns and Johnston, 2016). Alongside discourses disciplining the female body and its relationship with food intake (Bordo, 2004), as well as structural analysis of the oppressive nature of unpaid domestic labor (Dalla Costa and James, 1975; Hook, 2010), a very common aesthetic framing of women in food discourses is that of the idealized domesticity of the mother, nurturer, and protector of family, tradition and nature (DeVault, 1991). This idealized figure does not spare female professional cookers (Harris and Giuffre, 2015).

Domestic aesthetics prevail in the field of tortellini production, which is framed within the history of a traditional festive preparation. Indeed, tortellini being a time-consuming preparation, it was traditionally carried out by more than one person, namely the family’s women gathered for seasonal or Sunday celebration. In tourist promotional materials, the very same domestic ladies are often juxtaposed to the sexualized narrative regarding the shape of tortellino as being originally figured out to simulate Venus’ navel. However, sfogline’s embodied aesthetics is far distant from contemporary food porn and closer to the markers of authenticity work identified by, among others, Johnston and Baumann (2007). As they claim (Johnston and Baumann, 2007: 184), ‘food with a face’ is a very common discursive strategy for constituting gastronomic authenticity, and most of my informants proved aware of the added symbolic value of employing sfogline and having them ‘on display’, while carefully orchestrating the backstage and stage of the their stores themselves.

However, price economy and symbolic value often clashed in the field observed: while elderly sfogline might be sought after because they can be employed off the books and on call, and at the same time adding cultural value to those stores (the majority, indeed) that have an open space, perhaps the most sought after sfoglina in Bologna is a migrant woman in her 40s, from Moldova, once a professional nurse, who can fill and close a spectacular volume: 1.3 kg of tortellini per hour, which will be later sold for up to 42 Euro per kilogram. The social meaning of money (Zelizer, 1997), and in this case of ‘tortellini money’, that is, the cultural justification for its high price, relies heavily on the valorization of artisanal modes of production. However, in the realm of artisanal production, tortellini are, as one of my informants – owner of a pasta fresca shop – told me, ‘a debt’. Expensive ingredients and the cost of labor do not allow for sizable profit margins, especially if one considers that for sanitary reasons tortellini, even when sold fresh, still needs to be partially dried (thus reducing their weight). The selling price must be set accordingly, making tortellini a high-priced ⁹ commodity that invites sporadic, ritualized consumption. However, it is still important for any pasta fresca or gastronomia shop to produce tortellini, because, as one owner related, ‘it is our business card, if you nail it [the tortellini], they [customers] will be coming back, even if they’ll buy pasta e fagioli ¹⁰ from then on’.

Despite the symbolically-charged environment, working as a sfoglina is not as easily glorified by workers themselves. This is basically piecework: sfogline known as the fastest are more easily employed. Most sfogline work as freelancers, many receive their salaries – or parts of them – off the books. It is also an intermittent, on call, seasonal job, that can be reconciled with reproductive labor or with a pension but characterized by high levels of precarity. The job is also physically very demanding. Long hours are required during seasonal peaks: 16-hour shifts are not uncommon when Christmas orders pile up, and most of the elderly women I interviewed suffered from repetitive strain injuries. Store managers are aware of the physical challenge of the job, in what appears as both recognition and reinforcement of the peculiar specialization of sfogline, who are meant – almost fated – to do tortellini and tortellini only:

I do them [tortellini] sometimes, I’m not as fast as them of course, but still … And I tell you, I, after one hour of making tortellini, I’m done, I just can’t … it’s a terrible thing, terrible, believe me, it’s the rhythm, the position, the concentration. I mean, last week I did lasagne. I started out on Friday morning and finished on Saturday morning, non stop, all night. And, beside some sleepiness I fought off during the night, the morning after I felt ok, really. But with tortellini … I don’t know how they do it. [store owner]

During my observation, most of the sfogline invited me to participate and close some tortellini with them (a skill they were shocked I did not possess despite the gender assigned to me at birth) but I could barely fold the pasta in two. However, regardless of my appalling performance, the addition of another voice in the chat was always welcomed, as the sense of community emerged powerfully and was recognized as important by many professional sfogline working in stores:

We are like sisters, really. When you spend all this time together…. I like that I can share, you know, the little problems and preoccupations of life, what happens in the family, and things like that, and we always help each other, always are there for the others, we’ve known each other for so long now. [sfoglina]

Thus, while the ingredients themselves and the final results were rarely the most pressing subject matter of sfogline conversations, the sense of commonality and the importance of being together emerged as the most immediate moral consequence of the artisanal mode of production. In the aesthetic cultural appreciation of sfogline’s work, their being together resonates with the idea of domestic production, when all the women of a given family would gather around a table and prepare tortellini for the entire family. Moreover, multiplying the set of hands preparing tortellini will secure even more effectively the important marker of visual discontinuity, as each worker brings her own personal style to the pasta, increasing the discontinuity of the final product. However, in the narratives and practices of workers themselves, being together is mostly important in order to endure the hardships of a job that is demanding and precarious.

According to their discourses, sfogline’s practices and aesthetics are framed within a coherent moral landscape. Their gendered aesthetic of domesticity is the result of a mode of production characterized by small working spaces, long-lasting and intimate relationships, homogeneous age and class composition, and the hardship of long hours of hard labor endured together. Under the consumer gaze, too, the gendered aesthetic of domesticity is linked to a specific mode of production, yet in this case the mode of production is romanticized. If ‘food with a face’ (Johnston and Baumann, 2007: 184) is a consolidated marker of gastronomic authenticity, not any face will do. An intersectional (Crenshaw, 2018; Hill Collins and Bilge, 2016; Yuval-Davis, 2006) analysis of this market segment – which we could not develop in the space of this article – may reveal how intersections of gender, age, race, ethnicity, and nationality, configure unequal values of surplus labor.

In the cultural valorization of artisanal labor, aesthetics is conflated with morality: the public, commercial spectacle of domesticity is meant to guarantee the authenticity of the product. As we will see in the discussion of the Confraternita, the elements of labor, which are so central in the experience of sfogline and clearly crucial to artisanal production, is removed from discourse and in particular from aesthetic practices and judgments with which the Confraternita engages.

The credentialization of tortellini

In this section, we will look at the history and culture of the ‘Dotta Confraternita del Tortellino’, the local association of elite food amateurs responsible for the canonization of the traditional recipe in 1974. The analysis is aimed at highlighting the elitist aesthetic of the Confraternita and its relationship with moral judgment over better taste. This case creates a contrast with the material on the sfogline presented above, and we will see how this contrast is indeed functional to the creation of the exclusionary ‘univorous’ culture of the Confraternita.

With the Confraternita practices, tortellini travel a long way: from the crammed spaces of artisanal laboratories to the polished rooms of highbrow restaurants, from female-only to male-dominated spaces, ¹¹ from the hands of precarious workers to the mouths of wealthy aristocrats, from secluded kitchens to public spectacle, from worn-out aprons to glorious draperies. The Confraternita’s aesthetics is certainly in stark contrast to that embodied by the sfogline. The Confraternita’s elitist practices separate production and consumption not only in aesthetic terms but ultimately on moral grounds. Recent trends in food cultures attempt to bring production and consumption closer, be it in the form of short food chain buying schemes or open kitchen restaurants. The Confraternita, instead, distances itself from the scene of production by crystallizing the process of production into a notary deed and by embodying a blatantly different, wholly opposite aesthetic. This separation and contrast serves a functional ranking that consolidates the moral superiority of the taste of this elite group.

As I entered the historical mansion of Count C.G., active member of the Confraternita, I could better understand why the association’s Statute requires the biannual dinner of the Confraternita to be ‘prestigious, of high quality and very well refined’ (Figure 2).

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Figure 2.

Serving in white gloves and refined mise en place at the Confraternita’s dinner (credits: Mazzanti Media).

While publicly represented as engaged in an operation of cultural valorization, in practice the Confraternita is not engaged in promotional activities. It doesn’t strive to promote events, partnerships, lobbying or educational initiatives, or any of the plethora of cultural initiatives in which many local gastronomic associations are heavily investing. The Confraternita rather cultivates a culture of exclusivity. The very foundation of the Confraternita appears muddled with preexisting conflicts in the local aristocracy, politics, and with upper mobility aspirations of local entrepreneurs in the medium-scale food industry. I was not able to properly disentangle these politics due to the unexpected difficulty in accessing the field and information. A post-interview note can give a sense of the culture of boundary making the Confraternita is engaged with:

I asked the Count if they ever do join initiatives with X [local amateur gastronomic association] because I had the sense they ‘don’t get along’ very well… vague tone. He commented to his nephew ‘she understood the matter already!’ … allusive tone. I did not succeed in having him further elaborate. The conflict is acknowledged but the matter still remains obscure. [Field note]

From public records and documentary analysis, one can learn that the association was founded in 1965. The founding members were a group of upper-class foodies, entrepreneurs, and aristocrats, concerned with the declining quality of the city cuisine, and worried about public polemics hosted on the pages of the local conservative newspaper, Il Resto del Carlino, about the origin of tortellino, with Modena being the fiercer contestant. Instrumental in the foundation and promotion of the association’s activity was the manager and owner of the largest local mortadella industry, ¹² who was also member of another prominent gourmand association (the ‘Accademia Italiana di Cucina’ (Italian Cuisine Academy)) and promoter of one of the first amateur pasta rolling competition, the ‘Mattarello d’Oro’ (Golden Rolling Pin).

Bologna, 1960s: with the economic boom and a reconstructed country, foreign tourists began to rediscover Italy, on the well-established Milan-Venice-Florence-Rome-Naples route. The Grand Tours of that time were traveled by bus. Tourists traveling from Venice would make a quick stopover in Bologna, have lunch and proceed toward Florence. At that time, the highway was still under construction: the alternate route was a steep, winding road across the Apennines, that would result in too many passengers throwing up the tortellini in broth. The tour operator asked the famous restaurant who served tourists at that time to come up with an alternative to tortellini in broth. ‘Cesarina’, nowadays considered part of the bastion of highbrow Bolognese cuisine, came up with a very successful ‘tortellini con la panna’ (tortellini with cream), something that later became the ultimate culinary blasphemy, an epitome of how not to serve tortellini.

Bologna, 1974: this was a time of social and political turmoil all over the nation, and the city was one of the centers of action for radical left groups and the students’ movement, confronting the long-standing political communist tradition of ‘Bologna la rossa’ [the red Bologna]. Among the number of incidents of both left-wing and right-wing political terrorism, in the summer of 1974 neo-fascists blew up a train in a station nearby the city, while the first Italian free radio was founded in a caravan on the Bologna hills. It is in this sociopolitical context that the same year, the ‘Learned Brotherhood of the Tortellino’ registered the ‘authentic recipe’ of the filling of tortellini in a deed executed before a notary. While the rest of the city was witnessing tanks entering the city center in attempt to break up students’ demonstrations, the Confraternita secured its major achievement toward the preservation of local gastronomic tradition, threatened by diversification and the tourism market encouraging abominations such as tortellini with cream. On 7 December 1974, the District Magistrate of Bologna and the Mayor signed the document documenting the recipe that was filed at the local Chamber of Commerce (Figure 3).

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Figure 3.

A brother in full robes and paraphernalia (credits: Confraternita).

The filing of the recipe was meant to mobilize legal and paralegal codes. The Chamber of Commerce was chosen as the deputy authority not for a substantive reason but rather for the circumstances of social capital connection and for a convenient aesthetic resonance. Indeed, Chambers of Commerce in Italy are delegated to compile a ‘Customs and Traditions’ document, that can be used by mediators in controversies, when cases cannot be decided due to a lack of available legal regulation:

The ‘Customs and Traditions’ document contains very archaic agricultural norms, like right of passage on farmland, stuff like that. They knew we compile this document and thought our office could be the right place to file the recipe. [Chamber of Commerce clerk]

The filing of the recipe, however, does not have any normative power whatsoever, and it is a purely symbolic operation. Moreover, the codification itself is not without ambiguities. The recipe, proposed by a Bolognese housewife, was chosen after a public consultation promoted on the pages of Il Resto del Carlino, and does list the basic ingredients, while remaining vague on the preparation. For example, a recurring dispute in the construction of the tradition of tortellini regards whether the filling should be cooked or raw: eventually a ‘brother’ of the Confraternita explained to me be that the filling is neither cooked nor raw, but – pace Levi-Strauss – ‘browned’. Even the blasphemous tortellini with cream is actually admissible, provided that one does not use industrial cream, but that ‘just skimmed from the milk’, because such was the cream traditionally used by Cesarina. Finally, even the vexed question of the origin of tortellini got settled in 2007. The place of origin of tortellini was declared to be Castelfranco Emilia, a small town exactly halfway between Bologna and Modena, that used to be under the administrative borders of the province of Bologna, was moved to the province of Modena in 1927, but it is still currently under the religious administration of the Bishopric of Bologna. The diplomatic solution seems to hold and the matter appears settled, for now.

In previous research on local food (Sassatelli and Arfini, 2015), we used the notion of credentialization to speak of branding attempts that aim to provide more than hard data useful to enlighten the rational actor but of little symbolic effect. The Confraternita’s actions attempted to secure a credential for tortellini:

We wanted to set a legitimate point of reference, to be able to say ‘this is the original recipe, period’, so that if in – say 20 years – we start putting rosemary in them, we can say: sorry, that’s not the traditional way of doing it. Who knows maybe it will taste good, I’m not saying that interpretations can’t be done, you can do whatever you want, but we’re not interested, we’re only interested in the tradition. [Confraternita brother]

The passing acknowledgment of variations to the tradition conceded here reifies the moral ideal being promoted: the superiority of traditional tortellini. The Confraternita’s repertoire thus appears to reclaim a form of univorism, by legitimizing a form of authoritative historical continuity supported by the aesthetic codes related to the law, the promulgation of official acts, the sovereignty of jurisprudence, the timelessness of the canon.

The Confraternita is now composed by gourmands, but it adopts visual, ritual, and narrative codes that are a mix of goliardery and freemasonry (including honorific titles, coats of arm, seals, decorative robes, etc). Both aesthetic traditions carry heavy symbolic, political, and moral codifications associated with secrecy, elitism, conservative moral codes, and right-wing political orientation. Such symbolism is consistent with the group shared attitude perceived as that of ‘nice people, but very jealous, they are peculiar indeed, maybe I shouldn’t say…. but… they are, like, little bit freemasonry you know?’ [Chamber of Commerce clerk]

The Confraternita’s aesthetics here again stand in contrast to most trends characteristic of contemporary cultural omnivores, including what Johnston and Baumann (2009) call the ‘casualization’ of restaurants (p. 21). Like the court nobility studied by Mennell (1985), the Confraternita engages in a certain kind of culture in food consumption as an indicator, rather than a determinant, of its social position. Its explicit attention to highbrow aesthetics is essential in reclaiming, contrary to the nouveau rich foodie who is regarded as a status seeker byproduct of leftist counter-cuisine, their entitlement to authenticate the tradition.

Beyond the embodiment of such elitist aesthetics, in fact, the Confraternita is not interested in promoting the tortellino industry and is not even invested in the promotion of consumption of traditional food itself. Judgment on the proliferation of apparently similar cultural initiatives – such as festivals or cooking events focused on tortellini – and the possibility of creating synergies among like-minded cultural actors is, likewise, quite stern: ‘those [cultural events] are all things one does if one has two cents and knows one alderman, to get the ball rolling at times of crisis’ [Confraternita brother]. Nowadays, the province of Bologna is one of the most numerously certified areas in Europe, with 15 denominazione di origine protetta [protected designation of origin] and indicazione geografica protetta [protected geographical indication] products, and 27 organic and traditional products (as certified by the Italian Ministry of Economic Development). However, when one – old and highly respected – gastronomia shop in Bologna claimed its tortellini were ‘approved’ by the Confraternita, the association reacted boldly to the offense, warning any shop against utilizing the Confraternita’s seal as a marketing device.

Distancing the Confraternita’s field of action from branding market economy effects is a careful refinement of its moral boundaries, complemented by another contrast: a distancing from the political landscape, meant as both local political orientations (which, in the case of Bologna, is historically characterized by a hegemony of left- and center-left-wing formations) and as a more general reference to the role of the democratic institutions and the State. Indeed, during our encounter, one member of the Confraternita even frowned upon the reception of an national official recognition of the cultural value of the association, granted by the then-President of the Italian Republic Giorgio Napolitano in person, because, he (President Napolitano) is ‘not one of our kind’ – referring to Napolitano’s history as a left-wing politician with a background as a once-prominent figure of the Italian Communist Party – and because the association ‘is not a political thing’ (Confraternita brother; Figure 4).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 4.

Appointment of a new brother (credits: Mazzanti Media).

Naturally, membership of the association is not easily granted (two out of three applications are rejected), access to the field itself has proved more difficult than anticipated, and the climate of secrecy was reinforced by requests to keep interviews off the record. The Confraternita does not seem to enable any trickle-down effect but stands out as an example of valorization of certain moral value in food consumption predicated on the utmost importance of aesthetic markers of products, consumers, and mode of consumption. The Confraternita maintains a culture of exclusivity that gains even more distinctive potential against the backdrop of the proliferation of food discourses and cultural initiatives on tortellini. Such exclusivity is first and foremost an aesthetic one: paradoxically, the exclusion laying at the center of the Confraternita culture is the material condition – in its aesthetic and moral enactments – of the artisanal labor of tortellini production. The case of the Confraternita thus illustrates how aesthetic and moral exclusivity operates as elitist taste at times when – as much research on distinction suggests – there seems to be ‘no more need for snobbism’ (Van Eijck and Knulst, 2005).

The aesthetic performance of the Confraternita produces its marker of exclusivity by making evident and embodied all the privileges of the elite: it is a very exclusive, almost ‘confidential’, setting, yet put on display through spectacular accessories and rituals. The Confraternita and the sfogline can afford different regimes of visibility: women in aprons–working in a backstage yet put on display–and men in ceremonial robes–put on display yet somewhat hidden beyond layers of exclusivity–are part of the same story. We argue that these two different aesthetics are not simply the result of different material conditions of production and consumption but also the necessary element for the development of a moral authority over better judgment in terms of (food) taste.

Conclusions

By nature, humans are omnivorous. This is, on the one hand, an evolutionary advantage, because survival is not dependent on limited varieties of food. On the other hand, it entails a risk, because one can be exposed to poisonous food. The biological basis of this ‘omnivorous paradox’ (Poulain, 2005) can easily be transposed into the realm of culture: food stuff and food cultures are abundant, yet so is the social risk of managing them. In the life of a food commodity circuit, cultural discourses flow, and sometimes collide, together with raw materials, labor, moral values, and aesthetic canons.

In this article, we have looked at the commodity circuit of a product, tortellini, and focused on two particular sites of enactment of aesthetics and moralities as they unfold along the relationships implied in this circuit. We chose to focus on two particular actors as contrasting yet co-dependent cases in which aesthetic and moral values are mobilized in the struggle to adjudicate quality and legitimate taste and authenticity.

In conclusion, this article has contributed to the debate around aestheticization in food discourses (Miele and Murdoch, 2002) and its relationship with the construction of quality. In fact, the data presented allow us to picture a circuit of cultural production of aesthetics that proceeds from the domesticity of the sfogline to the pomposity of the Confraternita. On the one hand, the Confraternita’s insistence on aesthetic markers is its primary tool to consolidate a whole set of moral dispositions: pomposity, historical prerogative, legal authority and, ultimately, entitlement to proclaim better judgments in matters of taste. On the other hand, those directly responsible for the production of the subject matter, that is, the sfogline, do not claim any moral authority over the authentication of the best taste. However, they are the ones embodying that aesthetic of domesticity that is so central to the successful placement of tortellini as a traditional product.

One could certainly look at tortellini consumption as it happens within other segments of its extended and variegated circuit, but this article does not address the role of consumers other than the ‘brothers’, and this is the main limitation of this study. However, we have shown how the elitist practices sought after by the Confraternita gain their status effects precisely by insisting on their exclusive practices. The Confraternita, by its insistence on exclusivity, by refusing involvement with lay matters such as cultural promotion or market value, and, of course, by its exclusive focus on the tortellino, is a contemporary example of the persistence of univorism and its continued distinctive effects. Against the backdrop of proliferation of discourses on food and on tortellini themselves, elite practices can emerge as such by reclaiming exclusion and the preemption of market, politics, material labor in its embodied gendered reality.

Finally, this article complemented the discussion of such materials relating to elitist practices with empirical observation of the actual artisanal production of tortellini by the sfogline. Our discussion of the sfogline case pictured a representation of artisanal labor as imbued with moral dispositions and as distinctively characterized by aesthetic markers. Both aspects contribute to the construction of a culture of artisanal labor as the only kind of labor that can guarantee the authenticity of the product. The images of ‘pasta fresca’ laboratories crammed with women only, sporting domestic aprons, hypnotically closing tortellini while chatting away on family matters, are now iconic in the tortellini foodscape. Further research is needed to inquiry how the consumer gaze, and the tourist gaze in particular, resonates (or not) with such foodscapes. An intersectional reading of this foodscape is, in particular, a promising avenue for further research. In fact, as we have seen, the aesthetic value infused to artisanal tortellini stem from a particular embodied subject position: woman (preferably middle aged), white, working class. What is the value of gender in this scenario? A discussion of the gendered segmentation of reproductive work, of the gender and race pay gap but also the emotional labor and feminization of the workplace could provide illuminating readings of cultures of food production.

It would be difficult to pinpoint the moment in history when a ‘small laboratory’ became an ‘open kitchen’, allowing workers to become the commercial spectacle of domesticity now sustaining the cultural valorization of tortellini. Similarly, the spectacle of the Confraternita might be regarded as residual and confined to an elitist practice. However, this was the aesthetic canon that sustained the para-legal filing of the traditional recipe of the tortellini and the actors’ consolidation as the ultimate arbiter in adjudicating authenticity.

Food production and consumption can easily act as an intersection point for discourses on inequality, welfare, localism, history, the environment, health, and so on. Thus, the possibility of consuming different cultural discourses is multiplied, bearing different symbolic and moral values but also intensifying the struggles over legitimate meaning, morals, and tastes. The case of tortellini served the purpose of disentangling some of these complexities, acknowledging that no matter how short local food chains can be in terms of procurement, the cultural chains they produce can certainly go a long way.