Del Conte - Gastronomy of Italy

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The 20th-century Chinese scholar Lin Yu Tang said, We are, in the end, loyal to the food of our youth: perhaps this is what patriotism means. If that is so I am certainly patriotic, even to the extent of hoping that this book will breed many traitors among non-Italians, who may come to love Italian food for all the fascinations it offers, as well as for the eating of it. Although the food itself is in the foreground of this book, it is my hope that reading it will light up the background, to give a clear picture of the whole scene of Italian gastronomy, so much of which has never before been described in English.

I have included recipes in order to give a fuller understanding of particular entries. Some are classics, and others are little known, but all are for dishes I love and feel to be representative of the huge variety of Italian cuisine.

One cannot understand a cuisine and its development without seeing it in relation to the history of the country in question. The cooking of Italy is based on two civilizations that first flourished there: the Greek and the Etruscan. They established the foundations of Italian cooking in two different fields. The Greeks brought the cuisine of the sea, with their unerring knowledge of all sea creatures, while the Etruscans turned towards the land and its produce. These characteristics still, to some degree, divide the cooking of the South, which was Magna Graecia, and of Sicily, from that of the more northerly regions whither the Etruscans went from their original settlements between Siena and Rome.

The chief role of the Romans was to develop and improve, rather than to create something new. They were extremely knowledgeable about agriculture, about the raising of animals and birds, about fishes and about food. All these subjects were exhaustively studied and written about. There followed the Dark Ages, when almost all that had been known was lost, the flame of culture and civilization being kept alive only in the monasteries. When the Saracens occupied Sicily and southern Italy in the late 8th century, they brought civilization back in all its forms, from medicine to philosophy, music and cooking. They came with foods that are now an intrinsic part of the Italian cuisine and, as well as new foods and flavourings, they also brought new techniques and ideas. These the Italians made their own.

With such a rich background, it is not surprising that in the 14th century the Italian cuisine emerged as the one that influenced the whole of Europe. This was the Renaissance, the most extraordinary chapter in the history of Italy. For some 250 years this divided country gave the rest of Europe most of what we still regard as among the supreme achievements of western civilization. One element of this rebirth was the foundation of European cooking as we know it, with a flourish of cookery books published between the 15th and 17th centuries.

The first cookery books to be printed in Italy are slightly later than Le Viandier by the French cook Taillevent (c.131095), and while a great deal is known about Taillevents life, nothing is known of the early Italian authors, not even their names. They are simply referred to as Anonimo Veneziano and Anonimo Toscano, and their ricettari recipe books are thought to have been written at the end of the 14th century. It is thanks to the humanist philosopher Platina that we can study the food of the period, a time when the important Arab influence was grafted onto the medieval cuisine, and the foundations laid for most of the developments that have since taken place.

Our ancestors preferred birds, game and small animals to the larger breeds; these meats were usually parboiled with flavourings before being roasted or grilled, or they were used for making the fashionable pies, tarts and pasticci. Spices, being a symbol of wealth, were used in abundance often to create an impression and sugar was a constant flavouring in savoury dishes, since the tastes of sweet and salty were not kept apart as they are today. The greatest contributor to the gastronomic renaissance was the 16th-century writer Bartolomeo Scappi who, in his Opera, covered a vast range of subjects in the greatest detail. At that time the heavy spicing began to give way to lighter flavourings in a balanced harmony characteristic of the High Renaissance, thus heralding the changes that took place during the next century, when the leadership of European gastronomy moved over the Alps into France.

The swansong of the great period of Italian gastronomy took the form of a book of great merit, LArte di Ben Cucinare by Bartolomeo Stefani. This was published in Mantua in 1662, 11 years after Le Cuisinier Franois by the French chef La Varenne. Yet Stefani totally liberated himself from the flavourings used by his contemporaries, which were vestigial relics of the late Middle Ages. His tastes are fresh, his hand light and his recipes simple. He was also the first cookery writer to write recipes and menus for ordinary people, and to take into consideration the cost of food and its value.

During the 17th and 18th centuries, two important foods, the potato and the tomato, were becoming established in European cuisines. While the potato was adopted by the French, the tomato found two great exponents in the next important cookery writers to appear on the Italian scene. Vincenzo Corrado and Francesco Leonardi, both Neapolitan, established tomatoes as a vital ingredient in the haute cuisine of Europe just at the time when dried pasta began to be produced on a large scale, and the union of these two foods formed a pillar of southern Italian cooking that remains in place to this day.

In northern Italy, however, the acceptance of the golden apple was much slower, no doubt due to the fact that it could not be grown there with the same success as in the south. Rice, butter, polenta, veal and beef are the mainstays of traditional northern Italian cooking, and their virtues were never sung to greater effect than by Artusi, who wrote his bestselling cookbook in the late 19th century, after the political unification of Italy.

However profound the effects of that political event, which occurred a century and a half ago, it has not yet resulted in the gastronomic unification of Italy. I cannot emphasize too strongly the degree to which, with regard to its cooking, Italy is still a collection of regions with their different traditions, their different cuisines and even a problem that haunts this encyclopedia their different terminologies.

The other source that sustains the variety, the appeal and above all the quality of Italian cooking must surely be the intense concern the Italians have, from early childhood, with what they eat and how it should be cooked. I certainly have a passionate interest in the subject, and it is my hope that in this book I may share the fruits of this passion with my readers. It is not and was never intended to be the ultimate bible of Italian food; it is a distillation of my personal reflections on the many recipes I have cooked, foods I have tasted, books I have read and regions I have visited.