Fashionable feasts & feisty flavours
Italians love their food – that’s no secret and for anyone walking through their doors, that love translates to sitting at a table and becoming part of the family. The zesty laughter and feisty flavours are all embraced within an epicurean platter woven into a gourmet tapestry featured through a unique art form.
Italy’s food history, is steeped in legacy but has evolved to reflect another facet that Italy is famed for – style! Italian cuisine has taken on the shapes and silhouettes of being a fashionable gastronomic journey to explore, indulge and form memories about. The flavours are guaranteed to dance on your senses but the presentation is simply eye candy on a plate. Eating Italian means eating fashionably and that’s where Italians have created transformative journeys to their palates and their plates, while remaining true to their gourmet roots.
That magical Italian pot is stirred with freshness, stepped in healthy eating and added to with ladels of love. Italian cuisine has manifold influences. There are the merchants and conquerors, some of who gave Italy the two Bs
of butter and beer. The Arabs who brought in spices, nuts, agrodolce and the two culinary dimensions which remain ubiquitous to Italy – coffee which evolved into espresso and dried pasta, which was easily transportable from the ports of Sicily through Naples, Genoa and into France and Spain as well. Manuscripts intone that Venetian explorer Marco Polo introduced spaghetti to Italy although the Italians themselves eschew that legend, preferring the tale that Italy had the ‘Noodles of Italy” as far back as the Chinese had the ‘Noodles of Asia’. Queen of France Catherine of Medici, who is ascribed to being an ambassador for Italian cuisine, who introduced a plethora of Italian ingredients including truffles, frozen desserts, lettuce and artichokes to the French court in the 16th century. Sailors added potatoes, maize, peppers, coffee, tea and sugar cane.
Extravagent banquets heralded a surfeit of garlic, honey, nuts and even more imported spices, rushing through the portals of Florence, Siena, Milanand Venice. Aristocratic Romans indulged in great feasts of exotic meats, wines and honey flavoured dishes, interspersing intricate flavours with complex preparations. Liber, the god of wine was held in high esteem as thousands of earthenware jars of wine accompanied roasted ostrich, stuffed game and fish. In fact, the oldest traces of wine was discovered in caverns in Monte Kronion in Sicily dating back 6000 years, which as history pens, has seen Italian wine-making become a powerhouse among the wine makers of the world.
And this combination of influences is probably why It Italians li h have espoused d th the tenets of the Mediterranean in their cuisine ensuring high intakes of vegetables, fruit, legumes, nuts, beans, cereals, grains, fish and of course olive oil. A low intake of meat and dairy foods adds to the dynamic of a nation with one of the healthiest eating habits in the world. This is a legacy that reverts to ancient Etruscan and Roman civlisations who ate off the land and sea, popularising wild game and fish accompanied by beans and grains. But that’s not all; the Italian way of cooking is totally sustainable. With everything being fresh and cooking methods being very sustainable, there is little waste which means the nation’s carbon footprint continues to decrease.
When it comes to food identity, each region has its own unique flavours. The culinary wonder of air-cured ham the world knows as Parma ham holds a recipe that reverts to 5 BC with origins in the Etruscan Po river valley. Spaghetti and pizza have origins in central Italy and the northern Italians love their fish, potatoes, rice, sausages, pork and cheese. Surprisingly, tomatoes only made an appearance in Italian cuisine in the 19th century and this too in the south, where lots of olive oil, olives, garlic, capers, eggplant, ricotta cheese and peppers were added to the now famed Italian cauldron of amazing recipes, as was the famed stuffed pasta, we know as ravioli.
Into this equation, add those
Italian cheeses, with an ancestry deeply rooted in the Cistercian monks, an order founded in the first century and whose diet of bread, cheese and fruit influenced what we know today as Parmigiano Reggiano, the King of Italian Cheeses. Platters laden with cheeses denoted the pizzazz needed at any banquet with varieties going up to a few hundreds of diverse flavours, each denoting a particular method of production unique to a particular region.
Italy is renowned for its unceasing romance with art and fashion which translates into its culinary catwalk too, with even pasta taking on varied shapes, sizes and silhouettes. Penne, linguine, fusili and lasagne are cases in point.
And what better way than to end an Italian feast with some stylish desserts which narrate sheer decadence ramped up in the style stakes. Whether it is that coffee and rum flavoured mascarpone rich Tiramisu which originated in Lombardy, the delectable frozen ice cream Gelato with its roots in the Middle East or almond infused marzipan which probably saw the invention of Cassata, Italian desserts are about sensationalistic elegance.
Step into style on a plate, fashion on a platter and glam in a pot! The hallmarks of freshness, simplicity and seasonality resonates a typical Italian meal but it is that trendily chic ability to add panache to great Italian gastronomy that makes Italy’s flair of flavours absolutely tasteful.
Italy is renowned for its unceasing romance with art and fashion which translates into its culinary catwalk too, with even pasta taking on varied shapes, sizes and silhouettes.