your ingredients, prior to cooking will save time and help you to enjoy the cooking process.
Share your labor of love: Getting others involved in the cooking process, eating with others, or sharing your creations helps to make the experience more pleasurable, healthful, and worthwhile.
Chapter 2
Pizza, Pasta, and So Much More: Appreciating Italian Tradition
IN THIS CHAPTER
Much of what the world considers to be “Italian food” is either the food of Italian immigrants in foreign lands (which has been adapted to their new home countries) or regional dishes that Italians themselves would describe as being the food of a particular place in Italy instead of a national cuisine. Even Italy’s most ubiquitous dishes — such as pizza, pasta, and bread — have origins that can be traced to specific towns or regions even though they are now embraced by the nation as a whole. In this chapter, you learn how to master time-honored traditions, discover how menus are structured, familiarize yourself with a bit of Italian culinary history, and discover the role of culture in Italian cuisine.
The Role of Culture in the Italian Kitchen
Food is such an integral part of Italian culture — regardless of the region — that it is impossible to speak of one without the other. One of the reasons why Italian food is so appreciated internationally is that Italians understand and respect its place in culture. It has been said that food is art, nutrition, philosophy, diplomacy, spirituality, science, medicine, culture, joy, spirit, and entertainment. In the case of Italian food, this is especially true and realized by the locals.
No one in Italy is ever accused of speaking about food “too much” or called “a foodie.” Instead, a buona forchetta, or “good fork,” is used to describe a person who appreciates good food (as they rightly should), and it’s a compliment. Throughout history, we see the use of food in pagan culture, through antiquity, in Christianity, and now in our modern world with an almost sacred (and rightly so) appeal. The food we consume is one of the most powerful tools we have to affect our personal health and happiness. Prior to the 20th century, it was the philosophers and physicians who wrote about food, not the chefs themselves, which underscores the importance of the topic of cuisine. From Pythagoras’s teaching of nutrition in Kroton (Crotone), to Apicius writing the first Roman cookbook, to the scholars of the Middle Ages to Pellegrino Artusi’s 19th century writing classic, we can witness food being a highly appreciated form of culture.
Culture, in the Italian kitchen, is the knowledge that traditions were created for specific reasons (religious, seasonal, in commemoration of events); to recreate a recipe as it was customarily done is to promote the heritage of a particular region. In addition to the pleasure of eating mouthwatering specialties, this desire to uphold culture is the base of Italian cuisine. In many instances in the kitchen, shortcuts can be taken to save time and money. A true Italian cook, however, always opts for the traditional option, when possible, because they realize that losing customs is too great a price to pay and that spending a few moments to pass down heritage is time well spent.
Touring Important Events in Italian Culinary History
It’s important to understand that Italy’s long and varied culinary history deserves semesters of study. The overview in this section offers just enough info to whet your appetite for the history of Italian food and to enable you to appreciate just how diverse it is. Wheat and wine, for example, are two cornerstones of both ancient and modern Italian cuisine that originated in Mesopotamia, the area that is now modern-day Iran and Iraq. The Romans made the most significant contributions to the development and spread of viticulture, the study of grape cultivation, around the Mediterranean. Today, as a result, Italy is the largest producer of wine in the world. The Roman goddess of grain, Ceres, gave grains their common name today “cereal,” which in Italian are called cereali.
Most English-language history books begin discussing Italian history with ancient Rome. Prior to the Romans, however, there were native inhabitants and foreign powers in the various areas that now make up modern Italy. Each of those tribes, of which only some are mentioned here, already had laid the framework for the cuisine of their regions. The Lucani, for example, were from modern-day Basilicata, which is believed to be home to the first human settlements in Italy. Many of their agricultural practices, including animal husbandry and cheese-making traditions, are still being practiced today. Indigenous ingredients such as herbs, pulses, meat, seafood, and grains are still part of the daily diet in this region.
From the Celts in the extreme North, to the Etruscans in modern-day Tuscany and Lazio, the Samnites in what is now modern-day Abruzzo and Molise, the Apulians in Puglia, the Sicani in Sicily, the Umbrians in Umbria, some Carthaginians, in addition to the Greeks in Sicily, the Sardi in Sardinia, and the Itali and the Oenotri in my ancestral homeland of Calabria, even regional Italian cuisine has a multitude of ancient influence. The word Italy actually takes its name from the Itali tribe, and the word oenotria, or “land of trained vines,” was given to Calabria by the Greeks, who called the area’s inhabitants Oenotrians (vine cultivators). Calabrian wine, in fact, was so revered by the ancient Greeks that they served it during Olympic ceremonies in Greece.
How Romans and Greeks laid the foundation for Italian cuisine
The Greeks considered Southern Italy, from Naples south, to be the promised land. From the eighth to the fifth centuries B.C.E., they began populating the entire region, beginning with the Italian island of Ischia. For this reason, there are more Greek monuments in Sicily today than there are in modern Greece, and the regions of Southern Italy became known as Magna Graecia, or “Greater Greece.” The fertile land, access to additional trade routes, and beautiful terrain inspired the Greeks to set up polis, or city states, in Coastal Greek towns.
Napoli was one of the main cultural centers as were modern-day Reggio Calabria and Crotone, along with many others. The Greeks set up monuments to their gods. Even the Greek philosopher and Mathematician Pythagoras set up his school of mathematics, nutrition, philosophy, and music in Kroton, now called Crotone, Italy. An old adage says “When the Romans were still poor shepherds, Pythagoras was teaching in Crotone.” These Greek influences did leave a footprint on the cuisine of the Italian south. Pythagoras, for example, was a strict vegetarian and asked his disciples to give up meat in order to study with him. Greek herbs and spices such as oregano, anise, and eucalyptus became widely used. Manners of preparing meat and wine varieties, such as Greco and Aglianico, for example, came directly from Greece.
When the Romans came into power, they did not want to turn their backs on Greek cultural traditions, which they greatly respected, but rather build upon them. Many Romans went to Naples to experience the Greek way of life. The Roman philosopher Virgil was known for saying that Naples was, in fact, a city where one could live and die in the manner of the Greeks. Even Roman emperors and public figures recited plays in Greek when performing and presenting at amphitheaters in Naples, since it was a Greek speaking city at the time.
Romans improved upon Etruscan
