Anna Del Conte - Classic Food of Northern Italy

History and geography have both played their part in making the cooking of Italy so strongly regional. For all the hundreds of years between the fall of the Roman Empire and 1861, to be precise, the Italian peninsula was divided into independent, sovereign and often hostile states. That these states were frequently under foreign domination was another factor that pitted one state against another.

The degree to which this regionality still exists today can hardly be exaggerated. Where are you from? is the first thing one Italian asks another on meeting for the first time. Before my husband had grown used to this campanilismo , he was struck by hearing me say, in surprised tones, Shes from Florence but shes very nice. The Florentines have never been bosom friends of the Lombards!

It is only natural that this regionality and foreign domination, should have had a profound effect on Italian cooking. After the Napoleonic dbcle, the Spanish Bourbons returned to Naples and Sicily, the Vatican continued to govern central Italy, and the Hapsburgs were sitting happily all over Veneto and Lombardy. Meanwhile the Dukes of Savoia (the future kings of Italy) were becoming more and more powerful in Piedmont, and the charming Grand Duchess Marie Louise, Napoleons widow, was teaching her subjects in Parma how to make cakes lAutrichienne .

So it is that, to this day, Parma boasts some of the best dolci in Italy, Venetian cooking has strong Hungarian and Eastern influences, the cooking of Lombardy prides itself on some of the best dishes of braised meat which the Austrians brought south, while the French taught the Milanese the use of butter and cream.

Although the same basic ingredients are used throughout northern Italy, they are cooked in different ways in each region. A fish soup from Ancona on the Adriatic, delicately flavoured with saffron, would be very different from the fish soup of Tuscany, a fiery