In Search of Abundance: Mountains of Cheese, Rivers of Wine, and Other Gastronomic Utopias

How did the centuries-old Italian peasant's yearning for abbondanza—for an abundance of food and drink—get translated into a physical reality in Canada and the United States? In this collection of essays, Luisa Del Giudice invites the reader to explore various Italian immigrant moments to see the responses that emerged organically to that question. Del Giudice's approach is explicitly multidisciplinary, but the essays in the book cover not just events but also spaces: Del Giudice's father's cantina (both larder and wine-production facility), fading Italian markets, and church chapels and kitchens. Attuned to both the chronological and the spatial, Del Giudice shares with the reader her personal access to these moments and spaces.The book gathers research conducted over the past two and a half decades; it has an introductory essay, six previously published articles, and an encyclopedia entry on pasta reprinted as the sixth chapter of seven. The structure is chronological by publication date; other than the one on pasta, the chapters are linked thematically (all are about Italian immigrant foodways) and conceptually, as all cleave to, in one way or another, the concept of food abundance. Chapter 1 is the crucial theoretical-historical essay, which reviews the literature on the Italian peasant dreamworld of la Cuccagna (the Land of Cockaigne), a place of leisure and superabundance of all the foods that peasants desired but only rarely got to have. Chapter 2 shifts to the concrete: Del Giudice talks about wine in the context of her family's experience as immigrants in post–World War II Toronto. Chapter 3 follows Del Giudice's life trajectory to the West Coast of the United States, describing her experience in reviving a Sicilian custom of feeding the needy in a diasporic context in Los Angeles. Chapter 4 provides a short review of what Del Giudice calls “Ischian Cultural Sites” in the fishing community of San Pedro, California. Chapter 5 is the republished encyclopedia entry on pasta—thorough but very much a tertiary source and one that immediately seems out of place in the flow of the book. Chapter 6 is a reprise of the third chapter in a different context (the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles). Rather than another essay on Italian immigrants, the final chapter is set in Italy and attempts to maintain a connection to the theme of abundance through olive trees at the Roman poet Horace's Sabine Villa.Methodologically, the book is a multi- or interdisciplinary endeavor; Del Giudice is clearly familiar with the scholarly literature, and the base of her sources is both wide and quite rich in variety. Leaving aside the encyclopedia entry and the essay on olives and Horace, the chapters of the book are a combination of historical documentation, oral histories (collected by Del Giudice herself and collaborators), and the author's own rapportage, which could, to some extent, be called “autoethnographic.” The goal is to provide a wide-aperture look at her personal experience with the immigrant foodscapes of Italian immigrants—and, perhaps inadvertently, the twilight of those communities as coherent social groups—and in that, the book achieves its goals.Del Giudice's mixed approach contributes to the volume's strengths as well as its shortcomings. In examining the role of abundance in the culture of communities in Toronto and on the West Coast, she provides a rich ethnographic counterpoint to the usual New York/New Jersey-centric research. Some of the trends—the decline of close-knit communities and ethnic markets—are present on the West Coast as well. She is not only a passive observer but also an active participant in what she documents. Her book provides a blueprint for future researchers to undertake scholarly investigations while collecting, for example, oral histories for use by other scholars. The community-engaged research is a heartwarming part of the book and highlights the author's commitment to preserving this cultural heritage.That said, the author's deeply personal involvement also poses some questions about the limits of autoethnography: Given her repeated tributes to her informants in the (overly long) footnotes and the fact that some of them were relatives, the question of objectivity and scholarly detachment arises. The mixed structure also somewhat undermines Del Giudice's stated organizing metaphor, abbondanza. The encyclopedia entry and the final chapter really don't seem to have anything to do with other chapters. And many also reflect a somewhat dated scholarly apparatus. Del Giudice is up front about not having revised them and suggests in the introduction that this volume is a “tasting of [her] food publications” over three decades of research; that explanation doesn't avoid the fact that the chapters feel dated precisely because there was no revision. A firmer editorial hand would have strengthened the book by asking for an updating of the essays and significant cuts to the footnotes, which often contain a heterogeneous and largely unsuccessful mixture of superfluous information, homilies to various participants, and outdated citations: The book as a whole can feel functionally dated as both a source of primary research and as a review of the scholarly literature. There are some very old essays by food historian Massimo Montanari but none of the more recent work on Italian emigrant food by Simone Cinotto, Fabio Parasecoli, or Hasia Diner.This book would be excellent for those who would like a guide to not only cultural preservation but also activism in energizing the valorization of cultural heritage. It is also a valuable resource for the alternative possibilities in auto-ethnographic research and would be useful to anyone looking for a well-written connection between the peasant gastronomic utopia of la Cuccagna and its (at least partial) realization in post–World War II North American immigrant communities.

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