Italian Prescriptiveness with Livia Franchini

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Listen to this episode here.


I follow a lot of avid readers on various social media and towards the end of last year I saw lots of people sharing pictures of a particular book online; the cover particularly caught my eye, with its blue egg box open to reveal a single egg inside.

The book is called Shelf Life (out in paperback last week on Doubleday) and is by an italian author called Livia Franchini. It centres around a 30 year old woman called Ruth, who works in a care home, and whose fiancé has just broken up with her. All she has left of him is their shopping list for the upcoming week. And so the book takes the form of this list, with each chapter being written under the title of an item on the list: 6 Eggs, Sugar, Whole Chicken, Strawberries, Pulses to name but a few. The book is an unsettling look at the breakdown of a relationship and the social expectations around women and relationships, and Livia uses food within the narrative to such great effect; it's not a novel about food, but it's a novel in which we often experience the characters through their interaction with the food around them. I've seen this mentioned in a few places so I know it's something that stayed with readers as a whole but the w hole chicken chapter in particular - which you'll hear more about in the episode - was incredibly striking, and I'll never look at a rotisserie chicken in quite the same way again.

Livia met me at the door of her flat in South London, and took me to Browns of Brockley, where she picked up the cime de rapa she needed for the orecchiette dish she was making. If you’re not familiar with it, cime de rapa (or broccoli rabe, as it’s known to US listeners) is a bitter leafy green that’s widely available and used in Italy.  As you'll hear, although this is how the dish would be made back home, Livia wouldn't often use it here as it's hard to get, and alternative greens can be used as well.. Once we were back in her kitchen she cracked a bottle of organic prosecco for us and got to work.

Livia reflects on how little traditions remind her of home, like sticking a spoon into the neck of the proscecco bottle and hearing the distinctive jangle. “It’s from the heart, it kind of bypasses rational thought.” The sound reminds her of Christmas, when whatever was left in the bottle would be put back in the fridge, spoon in place. It’s good to have something that’s a tradition to hold on to, she says, but that also allows room for subjectivity.

When I first got in touch with Livia for the podcast I was interested in the idea of doing something around shopping lists. I personally have a strong attachments to lists and as well as making my own I will often, to the great disgust of those around me (usually my husband), snaffle someone else's up when I find it lying on the floor in a supermarket or similar. This is a rarer and rarer occurrence these days, as those among us who are list-makers often use their phones instead of the traditional pencil and paper. One of the reasons I was so drawn to the book is that this is such a specific moment in Ruth’s life, and on the surface this list seems quite mundane. If someone else had seen it, what would they be able to tell about her life? Probably not that much, and I find that really interesting. Livia replied to my email saying she wasn't actually much of a one for shopping lists herself, but she was really interested in the prescriptiveness of some Italian recipes, and also in how much of that prescriptiveness was conscious, and how much just simply manifests itself in the feeling of doing something 'wrong' if you break convention.

In this case, specially sourcing the cime de rapa for her orecchiette dish was Livia’s concession to Italian recipe prescriptiveness. She usually uses broccoli, which is what you do “if you’re an Italian immigrant in this country”, and laughs that she might have to make some tweaks to her usual method to make it work.

I ask her whether this prescriptiveness is something she grew up with when she first learned to cook at home, and she replies that she’s been reflecting on this actually more with regards to the novel. If you’re someone whose identity doesn’t fit into the mould of the ‘ideal’ writer: white, old, male and often American, then you constantly get asked whether the fiction you write is actually memoir. This has happened a lot with Shelf Life: people think Ruth is meant to be Livia. “And the reality of it is, in my novel, that isn’t it at all.” She remembers a writing workshop where, after a reading she’d done, she was talking to a fellow participant about returning home to Italy to get married, as she did in March last year. When she commented that she had been with her partner for 10 years, he replied “oh yes, I could tell from your novel.” And yes, in the novel Ruth and her partner have been together for 10 years, but “it starts with a break up! And it’s quite a horrible break up, and I’ve just read from it.” It seems amazing that people make these assumptions: “Your willingness to assume that it’s about me goes beyond the very fact of what’s happening in my life that I’ve just told you about,” she says. 

How that relates to prescriptiveness in the novel, she says, is to do with how we’re trying to find a path forward where you feel legitimised by acting somewhat in a ‘correct’ way. She was thinking about this more this morning before the interview, and about how this connects with food. One of the ways in which many cultures can be viewed as being prescriptive about food is that food should be shared as a ritual among other people. “And one of the things that Ruth is missing in the novel is that connection with other people. So she has issues with food of her own but she also always eats alone. And that’s probably something to do with trying to do things the ‘correct’ way, but in isolation from others, kind of following processes rather than sharing those processes with other people.”

I find this really interesting. So much of food culture has previous come from a oral tradition where it’s passed down from generation to generation and now we’re moving more into an era where people are using new recipes rather than concentrating on maintaining these traditions; particularly in the UK where we don’t have a strong food culture of our own. And I wonder whether that leads to detachment from our eating experiences. Livia says she thinks in a sense it does. But speaking of her own traditions from her Italian identity, there are inbuilt rules that she would feel “quite uncomfortable” breaking. She wants to stress that this is without judgement - she’s eaten one herself and finds it delicious - but she just can’t get on board with a chip butty. Not because it’s a double carb, but simply because “potatoes don’t go in a sandwich.” Connected to this, it’s extremely easy to tell whether a restaurant is genuinely Italian, and that’s because “chicken should not be where it is in this country.” If there’s chicken in pasta, chicken on pizza, or chicken in a sandwich (unless it’s leftover chicken from the night before), then you know. Some of these are quite silly things to go by, she says, but it’s like an inbuilt code when you’re cooking. And that can actually help structure your life somehow. “I’ve been in this country nearly 15 years and if I’ve got leftover pizza, I really struggle eating it for breakfast. I want it, but I’m just like, oh, I should wait for lunch.” When you’re far away from the reality and the origin of these codes and tradition, it can be reassuring to keep that identity somewhere in the house. It’s not something she would wish for anybody to enforce, but for her it’s acknowledgement of the power that food has to bring you back to specific times and places. And when you’re an immigrant it helps to have that things to cling on to.

Prescriptiveness comes into the novel in other ways too. Ruth’s relationship with food is quite strange, and the only time you see her with her mum, we see that their relationship exists on the basis of denying themselves the opportunity to come together and share something that could potentially bring them closer. And yet they are brought closer by that choice. This is the aforementioned Whole Chicken chapter and I ask Livia to give an overview to anyone not familiar with it. It’s the only time in the narrative we see Ruth interacting in the present with someone she’s very close to who knows her intimately. And that’s her mother. She goes to see her bearing a traditional gift of a roast chicken that she buys from Sainsbury’s. And they’re supposed to eat it together as their kind of Sunday lunch and Ruth’s very upset because of something to do with her ex, where she’s discovered that he lied to her when he left her telling her he was going to join a commune. They ‘eat’ this chicken together in a really bizarre way.

I ask Livia what it was about this scene that felt so meaningful to her. The chicken is important in itself, as one of the things shared in Italian and British food culture, although in Italy they’re regarded as junk food. Livia remembers her family buying them from the market in Pisa, where they’re sold with fried cubes of polenta, as a treat for them all to share on a Saturday. She reinstated this as a tradition herself a few years ago in London, adding non-Italian elements to the meal such as coleslaw. Livia says that whenever she thinks about that scene she thinks about a writers workshop she was part of a few years ago, where one of the other writers in the group (Sarah Leipciger, whose book Coming Up For Air is coming out this year) said she thought the scene was really interesting, but asked whether the characters were sacrificing something and said that if they are, then we have to know what it is. For Livia this had to involve some sort of body; the title of the chapter is Whole Chicken and the idea of wholeness is important because it’s something you can take apart. The book itself is a breaking down of an experience into its component parts, but she wanted to have a moment where that is turned on its head and women are actively seen breaking something apart. “I was also thinking about communication modes,” Livia says. As a writer working in her second language, she feels that her work can feel like it’s written from a great distance rather than instinctive, as she’s so hyper-aware of making herself understood clearly. “When people ask me if I write from life, I don’t in terms of content. But I think it’s quite telling that the first book of a writer who’s operating in a language they didn’t grow up in is so composite, you know, there’s so many different external perspectives, because that’s the way I experienced the culture here.” She says she thinks there is compassion in that scene, it’s just that neither of them has much power or knows how to claim power so they end up murdering a chicken from the rotisserie that they should probably eat.

Livia spins the washed cime de rapa in a salad spinner, and then adds anchovy paste to garlic and oil in a frying pan. She’s a big fan of anchovy paste and finds it funny that a lot of the fancy Italian brands that have made it over here are very much ‘grandma’s pantry’ types back home. Balena, where her anchovy paste is from, is one of these. Her grandma swears by Mutti tinned tomatoes, and refuses to use anything else. The cime de rapa is blanched and then added to the pan; the smell of the garlic and anchovy frying with the leaves is mouthwatering. Livia likes to keep the water she’s blanched the veg in and use it to cook the pasta, as it retains some of the flavour. She lives with two other Italians (as well as a food-obsessed British friend) and they all have their different ways of cooking things. “They’re much more prescriptive than me, they set timers on their phones and everything!” They also make fun of her for using ‘too much’ olive oil, which Livia attributes to growing up with her grandmothers: “incredible cooks” who were both very poor during the war, and afterwards as soon as they could readily access things like butter and oil, used them in abundance. One of her grandmas even used to make tomato sauce and add a wedge of butter just before serving. The richness in the food was, for her, symbolic of the love in making it.

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It's soothing to watch someone cooking by instinct: the gentle crunch and snap of the cime de rapa being prepared, the click and hiss of the gas hob and the sizzle as oil and anchovy paste are heated together and the greens are sautéed, and how the water rumbles as it's brought to the boil for the orecchiette. Livia cooks pasta without timing it. She laughs about her fellow Italian housemates setting timers on their phones to cook pasta, saying that it makes them far more prescriptive than her, but as a British person and therefore a very late adopter to the notion of al dente, I'm eternally impressed by her cooking perfect pasta by sight and experience.

The one thing that is autobiographical in Shelf Life is the character of the old woman who used to be a singer. She has a different story, but one of Livia’s grandmas was a jazz singer, although the facist regime banned jazz along with all overseas imports, so it wasn’t described as that. They would rewrite lyrics of jazz standards, and translate them into Italian to circumvent the restrictions. She met Livia’s grandpa when she performed in a military hospital that he was recovering in. He was a primary school teacher, which was considered upward mobility to her grandma’s very working class family, and so their marriage was strongly encouraged after an initial reservation due to him being injured. The book is dedicated to her grandma, Gesuina Bolis, and included in the dedication is the word Freguj. In the Lombardian dialect that her grandma spoke growing up, Freguj means the sweet leftover crumbs or misshapes that bakers would sell cheaply in mixed paper bags. On the way home, her grandma and her friends would open up their bags and compare what they had. Livia’s family has a strong tradition of writing their own memoirs, and her grandma did this too, and used the word Freguj as a title. I don’t think I’ve ever heard such a perfect title for a memoir, particularly one that is itself in fragments. 

You can find the recipe for cime de rapa with orecchiette here.

Listen to the full episode here. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you usually listen.

Livia can be found on Twitter, and on Instagram.

Shelf Life came out in paperback on Doubleday in January 2020 and is available from all good booksellers (I like Hive).

Lucy Dearlove