Recipes

Food has always been, together with love, the one great philosophy upon which life is woven from one generation to another. Through the good and the bad times, in opulence or simplicity, food has given us a rich and interesting reservoir of culinary historical knowledge. A recipe, therefore, is not just an end to itself, but the outcome of many different cultural dynamics, such as how land is cultivated and adapted to a particular climate, or it may reflect a specific historical moment for a people that is expressed through cuisine.

Pasta and pizza are the two basic foods in Italy today that give Italy its cultural identity. The festive spirit and friendly sociality of Italians is represented perfectly by pizza which, in Italy, is eaten almost exclusively during social outings to the local pizzeria or restaurant. While pasta is usually cooked and eaten at home and is a unifying moment in the all-important family unit of Italy. Although pasta identifies Italy and Italians, it has been so only since the mid to late 1800s when Italy was unified by Garibaldi. Before that, pasta was a regional specialty that was considered a luxury, while the majority of the population ate peasant foods like polenta, rice, and soups. Italian explorers returning from the East, like Marco Polo, introduced soft, perishable pasta from China made with eggs and flour. Pasta obtained from durum wheat with a long shelf life comes to us from the Arabs that brought it to Sicily in the 1100s where it was widely eaten until the 1500s. From there, a culinary revolution in Naples in the 1600s made that region prime territory for the cultivation of durum wheat and consumption of “maccheroni” (short pasta). The Genovese sailors also in the 1100s helped diffuse pasta to Liguria from Sicily, but it was only with the unification of Italy that pasta was associated with all the other regions of Italy.

The recipes handed down to us are still today in Italy extremely simple, basing their excellence on the high quality of the basic food stuff used, rather than some complicated mix of ingredients to improve the taste of the dish. In Italy, the best and most popular dishes are those with few ingredients, as long as the extra virgin olive oil is of the highest quality, as should be the pasta, the tomatoes, the vegetables, the basil, and any other ingredient making up any particular dish.

The recipes listed below, like all written recipes, are a moment frozen in time. It is difficult to convey the cultural values of Italian cuisine, the atmosphere, the movements, the way preparation proceeds in the kitchen in Italy, in the same way that the subtleties of spoken language cannot be conveyed by learning only the grammar of any given language. Pasta and pizza are a frame of mind and can only really be portrayed on location in Italy. With the following list of recipes, we have attempted to collect the most typical foods that are eaten regionally by the vast majority of the population in Italy.