“Strawberry” Helps Make History

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 834, 30 November 1929, Page 18

“Strawberry” Helps Make History

Mussolini’s Milk Diet And Its Purveyor . . . The Cardinal’s Pipe. . . Royal Dinner Without Dessert

I ■ , GL l * le newspaper, movie and talkie photographers in Rome, native and MT-lcfr-mfi foreign, are engaged in M a determined and intensive hunt for a certain Swiss cow, name unknown, with a white chest spotted with black. She belongs to Signor Mussolini. Her special importance, aside from her aristocratic Swiss lineage, is the fact that she provides him with the milk for his self-imposed milk diet. She thus plays a big part in keeping him lit for his job of running Italy. In other words, she's very important in the scheme of things, and It’s not her fault if the poor camera-men spend hot Roman days peering through fences for a sight of her, and nights wondering how to beat their fellow-camera-men at placing her bovine features before a waiting world. Mussolini on Milk Diet The Duce's stomach rebelled four years ago, as stomachs will do when a careless eater approaches middle age. His doctor put him on a milk-soup-cheese regime. He followed it rigidly and got over his illness. But having had the experience of eating scientifically, he found it advantageous and decided to keep it up, save for letting down a little now and then in favour of occasional chicken, veal and light dishes with slight seasoning. As to wine, he doesn't drink it anymore. Many an Italian will wink slyly and add, "and so he has laid a heavy tax on wine.” At any rate, the chief item in the Mussolini cuisine nowadays is ntilk. Two police sergeants escort it mornings and evenings in a special milk can from the Duce’s special cow barn somewhere in South Rome to his residence. As for the cow’s immediate valets, their identity or rank are not so interesting. But they would likely be just as firmly noncommittal as to the name aud address of their charge as the police sergeants are. Pope Pius XI. has his half quart of red Rarolo wine from the Piedmont ; district every day with his frugal ; meals.

As for the Pontiff’s meals he insists on the traditional Milanese cuisine, which runs heavily to rice soups and cutlets with fried potatoes. He never eats spaghetti, which Americans usually lump as an Italian dish, but which is, strictly speaking, a Neapolitan delicacy. The cooking is plain. Augustine monks prepare the food, aud also taste it before it goes to the Pontiff’s table. It is said that when he was stationed in Warsaw, some time before arriving at the present high office, the Pope taught his Polish cook how to prepare his favourite Milanese dishes. The Pontiff smokes, too, his preference being for fine Havana cigars. But his smoking is sparing. He may go a whole week without a single whiff of nicotine. Not so his Secretary of State, Cardinal Gasparri, who has a decided weakness for pipe smoking. He has racks and racks of pipes of all descriptions, which have been presented to him by relatives, friends and admirers from all over the world. They are mostly birthday presents. Among them all. long and short, big and little, curved and straight, briar

■hnd clay, he prefers a certain short, well-browned meerschaum. And he smokes a cheap domestic tobacco. That fact, aud the age of his favourite pipes, used to bother the late Pope Benedict XV. so much —it made him positively ill—that whenever the cardinal conferred with the Pontiff lm had to let his pipe lie idle in the pouch that is always tucked away under his cassock. \

Sometimes these conferences lasted for hours, and such occasions were a torture to the cardinal. Pope Benedict quickly realised this. So he fell into the habit of bringing a box of mint candies to the conferences to soothe the cardinal’s nerves. Every now and then, when the cardinal became fidgety, indicating a longing for his pipe, the Pope would gravely take a mint from the box at his elbow-, and then offer one to the cardinal. It is recorded that at one unusually lengthy conference they finished a -whole box of mints.

The present Pope does not object to the cardinal’s pipes at all, and nowand then gives him a box of cigars from his own stock. After the Pope took office, it is said Cardinal Gasparri’s first request was for permission to smoke at the afternoon conference. The Pope smilingly said he might, provided he would promise to use better tobacco. Then, to show there was no hard feeling about the matter, he offered the cardinal a cigar. The latter accepted the de luxe smoke, promptly crumbled it, and stuffe# it into his stubby meerschaum pipe. King Victor's Neapolitan Tastes The Neapolitan spaghetti industry is popular with the Neapolitan-born King, t Victor Emmanuel, who loves it, and has it nearly every day. The King leans heavily toward Neapolitan cooking, and would have no other, probably, did he not feel that his kitchen ought to preserve some degree of impartiality between the cuisine of the various Italian sections.

The burden of eating non-Neapolitan foods, however, he places largely on his Queen and the princes and princesses. So while the King, for instance, eats his beloved Neapolitanstyle spaghetti and chicory salad heavily doused in olive oil, the Crown Prince goes in for fettucine, a Roman variety of paste, and the Queen and princesses range around quite impartially among the north, south, and middle Italian cooking. The comparative simplicity of the Royal meals may he gathered from the fact that dessert appears only on Sundays and Thursdays. Even then the King never tastes it.