For junediamanti...

[fpb]

...who loves to post about food, and once or twice has more or less asked me to. Well, I do not have much to say about food except that I enjoy it; but recently I have made myself what my parents used to call "wartime fish", and I thought, perhaps JD might like to know about this.

I have only just begun to realize what a traumatic event the Second World War was for several members of my family, especially my father. (My mother was born a few months after the final surrender of Germany.) As children, they rarely ever spoke of their and their parents' memories. The war was something we saw in American movies and school textbooks. It did once happen that my father, hearing a harmless and indeed pacifist song on the TV, did practically lose his head and start shouting "What the Hell is this, a Nazi song? That is how Nazis used to sing!" I was a child at the time, and it did not occur to me to think that my father was six when the Nazis were driven from Rome - what must a child of six have gone through to remember Nazi singing all his life, and remember it with horror? That is not the only point I could make; let me just say that the horrors of the War were the invisible elephant in the room throughout my childhood, and that only now I can understand certain facts.

The only war memory that my parents enjoyed, and whose enjoyment they passed to us, was what we called "pesce de guera" (Roman dialect: wartime fish). Of course, one of the things that wartime was associated with were shortages and hunger; and wartime fish was one of the most effective ways to fight it. It is made with boiled potatoes, tinned tuna (the only kind of fish that was available in the dark days), some oil, and small amounts of mayonnaise, olives and any other garnish that will fit. You simply smash and mix together the potatoes, tuna and oil, shape it in the form of a fish, and use mayonnaise to outline the shape of a fish and the olives for eyes. It is delicious, cheap and filling, and its bulky and colourful aspect manages to make this produce of hunger and shortage look like a feast. As I recall it, it was a particular favourite of us children (we always, of course, fought over the "head" because of the olive "eyes"). I made it recently for myself, and it really is as good as I recalled it; only, since it is practically impossible to make a small amount of it - and it does not keep very well - it really is better to make it for a family meal or a group of friends.

Comments

[zoepaleologa.livejournal.com]

That sounds seriously good - I'd feed it to small children who are fussy, but would like that sort of thing!

The British wartime fish was Shnoek. It may be the reason that so many brits will not eat fish... My father who served througout and around the Med was very fond of fish - the odder the better. My mother, who stayed at home had the most conservative tastes in food I've ever encountered.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

What is Shnoek?

Snoek

[camillofan.livejournal.com]

Calvin Trillin wrote about snoek for The New Yorker in this article. It's evidently a South African, er, delicacy; Britain's post-WWII relationship with the fish is addressed in the second and third paragraphs of the piece.

Re: Snoek

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Thanks. That was fun and interesting. I knew about biltong, of course. And I knew about the miseries of the British post-war period. Astoundingly, rationing ended in Britain a good deal later than in the defeated countries, Italy and Germany - in 1954, even! It gives you a sense of where the rebellious generation of the sixties were coming from: all their childhoods must have been spent in uniform grey and genteel or proud-working-class poverty.

[super-pan.livejournal.com]

Wow, fpb, that sounds tasty and fun, and I think I will try it (especially since it also sounds kind of fast and easy, because I somehow don't seem to have time to cook anymore).


You know, my father was in the Korean war, and growing up with him had some similarities to your life. He never spoke of his experience until we were much older, and I never realized until I was an adult that his life had been very, very different from the life that he provided for me and my brother.

But he did like to watch war movies, which I hated. I remember asking him why he watched such depressing movies, and he told me, "because this really happened, and these movies are a way to remember that. If we don't remember what happened in the past, then it will happen again".

[fpb.livejournal.com]

The thing is, I think there was fear and shame mixed together. One of my father's uncles was arrested by the Germans and murdered in Dachau; another was a die-hard Fascist - and the strangest thing is that there seems to have been no family split over the issue. I cannot altogether make it out. At any rate, bear in mind that Rome was occupied by the Germans for less than a year (8/10 September 1943-6 June 1944, the same day as the Normandy landings) and my father was six at the time. What the atmosphere must have been like during those nine months, to leave scars like that on a six-year-old, just does not bear thinking about. No wonder that the Romans went hysterical with relief when Mark Clark's Americans appeared in the streets.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Both my grandfathers had fought in World War One, and terrible though that had been, neither of them were unwilling to speak of it or ashamed of it. It was a horrible thing, but it was as clean and honourable as war can very well be, and both of them showed with pride their military medals and the certificate of membership in the Order of Vittorio Veneto, for those who had taken part in the final victorious battle. The Second World War was an altogether different thing: one gets the feeling that, especially on my father's side, it was a horror that did not quite fade away even with the final victory, that lingered in the memory, and perhaps may have had something to do with other issues in my father's upbringing.