If you agree with Milton that the culinary reminder is one which has great evocative powers, you will be pleased with the following recipe that gives details for a typical north-Italian dish. Needed ingredients are: Round steak, two or three inches thick; salt; pepper; small box of macaroni; small can of tomatoes; two small onions; and, if you want to be truly Italian, a clove of garlic.
Beat the steak, adding pepper and salt and a small amount of flour. Sear both sides of the steak and then brown onions in the remaining fat. Then cover the meat and the onions with boiling water and let it cook slowly for about two hours. In the meantime prepare the macaroni in another vessel, being careful to have enough water, so that it should not stick together. Well done, drain, mix the macaroni with the tomatoes and the finely chopped garlic, add to the meat, and let the whole mixture simmer for another ten or fifteen minutes.
Perhaps no other country has so universal an appeal as Italy. It is an appeal which is sensuous as well as spiritual. On the one hand, there is the deep blue sky, the caressing air, the hills and woods, the lovely plains, and — north and south—the sea with all its mystery and allure, and on the other hand there are the old historical associations, the consciousness that in the Mediterranean basin European culture was born and has flowered, that here is one of the loveliest cradles of art and civilization.
No wonder, then, that he who has once visited Italy always desires to return to its fairer skies, or—if circumstances forbid this—at least cherishes everything that reminds him of his sojourn in this noble country. Milton, the great English poet, was only as a young man and for a short time in Italy, but his affection for this beautiful southern land was so deep and so lasting that until the end of his days he ate daily a dish of olives, to remind his tongue and his taste of the delights he had once known.
Liebmann Adler, who died in Chicago in 1892, was rabbi of the Kehillath Avshe Maarabh at the time of his death.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
