UNDERSTANDING ITALIAN COOKING

Ask an Italian about Italian cooking and, depending on whom you approach, you will be told about Bolognese, Venetian, Roman, Milanese cooking or Tuscan, Piedmontese, Sicilian, Neapolitan. But Italian cooking? It would seem no single cuisine answers to that name. The cooking of Italy is really the cooking of regions that long antedate the Italian nation, regions that until 1861 were part of sovereign and usually hostile states, sharing few cultural traditions and no common spoken language—it was not until after World War II that Italian began to be the everyday language of a substantial part of the population—and practicing entirely distinct styles of cooking.

Take, for example, the cuisines of Venice and Naples, two cultures in whose culinary history seafood has had such a major role. Just as Venetians and Neapolitans cannot speak to each other in their native idiom and be understood, there is not a single dish from the light-handed, understated Venetian repertory that would be recognizable on a Neapolitan table, nor any of Naples’s vibrant, ebulliently savory specialties that do not seem exotic in Venice.

Four hundred and fifty miles separate Venice and Naples but there are unbridgeable differences between Bologna and Florence, which are only sixty miles apart. In crossing the border between the two regional capitals, every aspect of cooking style seems to have turned over and, like an embossed coin, landed on its reverse side. Out of the abundance of the Bolognese kitchen comes cooking that is exuberant, prodigal with costly ingredients, wholly baroque in its restless exploration of every agreeable contrast of texture and flavor. On the other hand, the canny Florentine cook takes careful measure of all things and produces food that plays austere harmonies on unadorned, essential themes.

Bologna will stuff veal with succulent Parma ham, coat it with aged Parmesan, sauté it in butter, and conceal it all under an extravagant blanket of shaved white truffles. Florence takes a T-bone steak of noble size, grills it quickly over the incandescent embers of a wood fire, adding nothing but the aroma of olive oil and a grinding of pepper. Both can be triumphs.

The contrasts of Italian food’s regional character are further sharpened by two dominant aspects of the landscape—the mountains and the sea.

Italy is a peninsula shaped like a full-length boot that has stepped up to the thigh into the Mediterranean and Adriatic seas. There it is fastened to the rest of Europe by an uninterrupted chain of the continent’s tallest mountains, the Alps. At the base of the Alps lies Italy’s only major plain, which spreads from Venice on the Adriatic coast westward through Lombardy and into Piedmont. This is the dairy zone of Italy, where the cooking fat is butter and the staple cereals are rice for risotto and cornmeal for polenta. It was only when the industries of the north began to attract labor from the south that spaghetti and other factory-made pasta appeared on the tables of Milan and Turin.

The plain ends its westward trek just before reaching the Mediterranean shore, cut off by the foothills of Italy’s other great mountain chain, the Apennines. This chain stretches from north to south for the whole length of the country like the massive, protruding spine of some immense beast. On the eastern and western flanks, gently rounded hills slope toward the seas that surround the country. At the center, the land rises to form inhospitable stone peaks. Huddled between peaks and slopes are countless valleys, isolated from each other until they were connected by modern roads, giving birth, like so many Shangri-las, to wholly separate people, cultures, and cuisines.

Climatic zones, astonishing in their numbers and diversity for a country relatively small, have added their contributions to the variety of Italian food. Turin, capital of Piedmont, standing in the open plain at the foot of the windswept Alps, has winters more severe than Copenhagen, and one of the most robust cuisines of the nation. The coast just ninety miles to the west, sheltered by the Apennines’ protecting slopes and bathed by soft Mediterranean breezes, enjoys the gentle weather synonymous with the Riviera. Here flowers thrive, olive groves flourish, fragrant herbs come up in every meadow and abound in every dish. It is no accident that this is the birthplace of pesto.

On the eastern side of the same Apennines that hug the Riviera coast lies the richest gastronomic region in Italy, Emilia-Romagna. Its capital, Bologna, is probably the only city in Italy whose name is instantly associated in the Italian mind not with monuments, not with artists, not with a heroic past, but with food.

Emilia-Romagna is almost evenly divided between mountainous land and flat, with the Apennines at its back and at its feet the southeastern corner of the great northern plain rolling out to meet the Adriatic. The Emilian plain is extraordinarily fertile land enriched by the alluvial deposits of the countless Apennine torrents that have coursed through it toward the sea. It leads all Italy in the production of wheat, the same wheat with which Bologna’s celebrated handmade pasta is produced. Italy’s greatest cow’s milk cheese, parmigiano-reggiano, is made here, taking its name from two Emilian cities, Parma and Reggio. The whey left over from cheesemaking is fed to hogs who, in turn, provide the hams for Parma prosciutto and meat for the finest pork products in the world.

Northern Italy stops at the southern border of Emilia-Romagna and, with Tuscany, Central Italy begins. From Tuscany down, the Apennines and their foothills in their southward march spread nearly from coast to coast, so that this part of Italy is prevalently mountainous. Two major changes take place in cooking. First, as it is simpler on a hillside to plant a grove of olive trees than to raise a herd of cows, olive oil supplants butter as the dominant cooking fat. Second, as we get farther away from Emilia-Romagna’s fields, its homemade pasta of soft-wheat flour and eggs is replaced by the factory-made, hard-wheat and eggless macaroni of the south.

However much we roam, we shall not be able to say we have tracked down the origin of Italy’s greatest cooking. It is not in the north, or the center, or the south, or the Islands. It is not in Bologna or Florence, in Venice or Genoa, in Rome or Naples or Palermo. It is in all of those places, because it is everywhere.

It is not the created, not to speak of “creative,” cooking of restaurant chefs. It is the cooking that spans remembered history, that has evolved during the whole course of transmitted skills and intuitions in homes throughout the Italian peninsula and the islands, in its hamlets, on its farms, in its great cities. It is cooking from the home kitchen. Of course there have been—and there still are—aristocrats’ homes, merchants’ homes, peasants’ homes, but however disparate the amenities, they have one vital thing in common: Food, whether simple or elaborate, is cooked in the style of the family. There is no such thing as Italian haute cuisine because there are no high or low roads in Italian cooking. All roads lead to the home, to la cucina di casa—the only one that deserves to be called Italian cooking.

Written by Marcella Hazan in "Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking", Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2010. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.