WE ARE ITEAT ACADEMY

ITALIAN FOOD IN THE PLURAL

“Cooking” is a noun which should more easily be able to accompany the adjective that refers to our country. By overemphasizing, we can say that good cooking is either Italian or non-existent at all.
Italian cooking, however, does exist; it is both renowned and recognized throughout the world, because Italians, as everyone knows, are all pizza and spaghetti!
Yet, if Italian cooking is taken as a fixed unitary model, classified with precise rules, and valid in the north and south, in the east and west, in the countryside and in the city, throughout social classes, cultural groups and, above all, throughout history, we can then realize it has never really existed. Though it is obvious to say that a variety of cuisines, linked to the territory, availability and demands, has developed and will continue to develop throughout Italy, even if it only has to do with their raw materials.
If considered as a network of know-how and activities or a knowledge of products and recipes coming from different cities and regions, then an Italian culinary style has actually existed since the Middle Ages. It developed in the cities which focused on and re-elaborated the food culture found in the countryside.
At that time, it started circulating thanks to markets and the movement of people, goods, and books. Bread, wine and oil, symbols of the Roman agricultural civilization, were combined with meat, milk, lard and butter, symbols of the ‘Barbarian’ civilization, resulting from the forest more than from agriculture. Italian cooking was the final result of this.

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* University of Turin Department of Historical Studies