La cucina povera delivers the fare we need to sustain us now

11-29-2022 • arclein

Ours was not a typical Italian Canadian household. We didn't live to eat, we ate to live. My parents had emigrated in the 1950s to Canada from Scotland, where they had grown up as children of Italian immigrants. They brought several cultural influences to their new home. While we certainly ate Italian food ?" pasta with homemade sauce being a staple ?" our meals included Scottish fare like black pudding, kippers, turnips, potatoes and store-bought pork pies. As if they could not shake off the effects of the Depression and war years, my parents' frugality not only guided their choices at the grocery store, but how much our family of four consumed at the table. 'Frugal' comes from the Latin fruges, the plural of frux, or 'fruit, resource'. The ancient Romans knew a thing or two about eating frugally (the myth of the vomitorium aside), subsisting largely on plant-based diets. Frugality connoted virtue, restraint, civility. A barbarian was anyone, particularly a foreigner,