Italy, the country with a hundred cities and a thousand bell towers, is also the country with a hundred cuisines and a thousand recipes. Its great variety of culinary practices reflects a history long dominated by regionalism and political division, and has led to the common conception of Italian food as a mosaic of regional customs rather than a single tradition. Nonetheless, this magnificent new book demonstrates the development of a distinctive, unified culinary tradition throughout the Italian peninsula.
Alberto Capatti and Massimo Montanari uncover a network of culinary customs, food lore, and cooking practices, dating back as far as the Middle Ages, that are identifiably Italian:
o Italians used forks 300 years before other Europeans, possibly because they were needed to handle pasta, which is slippery and dangerously hot.
o Italians invented the practice of chilling drinks and may have invented ice cream.
o Italian culinary practice influenced the rest of Europe to place more emphasis on vegetables and less on meat.
o Salad was a distinctive aspect of the Italian meal as early as the sixteenth century.
The authors focus on culinary developments in the late medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque eras, aided by a wealth of cookbooks produced throughout the early modern period. They show how Italy's culinary identities emerged over the course of the centuries through an exchange of information and techniques among geographical regions and social classes. Though temporally, spatially, and socially diverse, these cuisines refer to a common experience that can be described as Italian. Thematically organized around key issues in culinary history and beautifully illustrated, Italian Cuisine is a rich history of the ingredients, dishes, techniques, and social customs behind the Italian food we know and love today.
- CONTENTS
- Series Editor’s Preface
- Introduction: Identity as Exchange
- CHAPTER ONE: Italy: A Physical and Mental Space
- Mare Nostrum
- From the Mediterranean to Europe
- From Europe to Italy
- The Fifteenth-Century Definition of the “Italian” Model
- “Lists of Things . . . Generally Used in Italy”
- Itineraries
- Toward Regionalization
- Municipal Recipe Collections
- Artusi and National-Regional Cuisine
- The Mediterranean Again
- CHAPTER TWO: The Italian Way of Eating
- Flavors and Fragrances from the Vegetable Garden
- Polenta, Soup, and Dumplings
- The Invention of Pasta
- Torte and Tortelli
- The Pleasure of Meat
- Eating “Lean” Food: The Liturgical Calendar and the Cooking of Fish
- Milk Products
- Eggs
- Cooked Food and Preserved Food
- A New Sense of Typicality
- CHAPTER THREE: The Formation of Taste
- Flavor and Taste
- The Culture of Artifice
- The Legacy of Rome
- The Arabs: Innovation and Continuity
- Spices
- Sweet, Sour, and Sweet-and-Sour
- The Triumph of Sugar
- The Humanists, Antiquity, and “Modernity”
- The Flavor of Salt
- Oil, Lard, and Butter
- The Italian Model and the French “Revolution”
- “Waters, Cordials, Sorbets, and Ice Creams”
- Can One Cook Without Spices?
- Toward the Development of a National Taste
- CHAPTER FOUR: The Sequence of Dishes
- The Galenic Cook
- “The Things That Should Be Eaten First”
- The Meager Repast
- Organizing and Presenting the Banquet
- The Choice of Wine
- The Bourgeoisie Cuts Back
- The Death of the Appetizer and the Resurrection of Cheese
- The Single Dish
- CHAPTER FIVE: Communicating Food: The Recipe Collection
- The Book
- Dedications and Tributes
- The Organization of Contents and Indexes
- The Recipe
- The Menu
- CHAPTER SIX: The Vocabulary of Food
- A Chronological Outline
- Latin
- The Vernacular
- Franco-Italian
- Order and Cleanliness
- Linguistic Autarchy
- Italian in the Kitchens of Babel
- CHAPTER SEVEN: The Cook, the Innkeeper, and the Woman of the House
- Recorded Lives
- The Kitchen “Brigade”
- Costume and Custom
- The New Innkeeper
- From Housewife to Female Cook
- CHAPTER EIGHT: Science and Technology in the Kitchen
- Tradition and Progress
- The Pope’s Saucepans
- A Virtual Discovery: The Pressure Cooker
- Artificial Refrigeration
- Appert in Italy: The Flavor of Preserved Foods
- The Oven, the Sorbet Maker, and Simple Machines
- Metal Alloys and Ice Cubes
- The Magic Formula
- CHAPTER NINE: Toward a History of the Appetite
- The Hearty Eater
- To Stimulate the Appetite
- “Indigestion Does No Harm to Peasants”
- The Diet of the Literary Man
- The Bourgeois Belly
- Down with Pasta!
- The Repression of the Body and the Virtual Dish
- NOTES
- Bibliography
- Index
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