Easy Italian Recipes

THE ROLE OF REGIONALITY

The key to understanding much of what defines Italian food and culture is recognizing the importante of regionality. Italy is less than three-quarters the size of California, yet its cuisine is among the world's most diverse, due in large part to the peninsula's unusually varied geography.
Think about the differences in food and culture between Switzerland, which borders Italy to the north, and Tunisia, which lies less than a hundred miles (160 km) south of Sicily, and you will begin to grasp the scope of Italian cuisine. Fitting together like a jigsaw puzzle of flat plains, rolling hills, valleys, and mountains, bounded by rivers, lakes, and seas, Italy's twenty regions are as distinctive as individua] countries. And indeed, unti! the unification of the Italian republic in the 1860s, each functioned as an independent nationstate, separated from its neighbors by its dialect, the unique ethnic characteristics of its population, its traditions, and its food.
An hour's journey by car or train in Italy can mean a dramatic change of scene and climate. The boot-shaped peninsula is bounded by more than four thousand miles (6,500 km) of Mediterranean and Adriatic coastline. Yet it is the foothills and mountains of the Apennines that form the backbone of most of the peninsula, defining its landscape and delineating its regions. For centuries, the widely varying microclimates and geographic features of each region have given its cooks a unique market basket of materie prime, or "raw materiale," with which to work.
In the flat expanses of the north, for example, ampie dairy land yields a ready supply of butter, milk, cream, and cow's milk cheeses, such as Parmigiano-Reggiano and Fontina. Corn and rice grow in abundance, and until relatively recently, polenta and risotto overshadowed pasta here. In centra! Italy, the rolling terrain is better suited to growing olives and grazing sheep, so olive oil is the cooking fat of choice and sheep's milk cheeses, such as pecorino romano, are more prevalent. Some of the world's most prized tomatoes grow in abundance in the rich volcanic soil of the south, where they are featured in everything from pizza and pasta to meat and seafood.
While factors such as industrialization, education, migration, and the mass media have eroded Italy's regional diversity, the simple reality of the lay of the land still gives the regions their distinctive identities. And when it comes to food, it is the differences, far more than the similarities, that distinguish the many microcuisines of Italy, even those of cities and towns separated by only a few miles. In restaurants and home kitchens alike, local specialties remain the pride of cooks and the preferred choice for everyday eating.

CULINARY ROOTS

In many ways, Italy is the birthplace of European cuisine. It was here that the Etruscans, as early as the twelfth century Bc, turnedfarro (emmer wheat), rye, barley, and other grains into bread and pasta. The ancient Romans took full advantage of the peninsula's bounty, elevating cooking to unparalleled levels of sophistication, with seasonings and ingredients from all over the empire.
In the second century AD, the vast Trajan's Forum was Rome's supermarket, a booming food emporium stocked with everything from local produce, meat, seafood, and wine to wheat from Egypt and spices from Asia. The Romans pioneered new techniques for cultivating and foraging all things edible, a legacy that stili shapes the way Italians cook. Then, as now, ingredients, gathered and prepared with exacting care, were everything. It is no accident that the word recipe is a Latin imperative meaning "procure."
In the ninth century, the occupation of southern Italy by the Moors brought pastries, confections, and ices and such new ingredients as almonds and spinach to the Italian menu. In subsequent centuries,
the crusaders brought back sugar, buckwheat, and lemons, and Venetian and Genoese traders spiced up the mix with ingredients from Asia and the Middle East. Columbus's voyages to the New World gave Italian cooks corn, peppers, and, most important, tomatoes.
All this and more made its way to France in the 1500s, when Catherine de' Medici arrived from Florence to marry Henri II. With her carne legions of expert chefs with unrivaled expertise in ingredients and culinary technique. French cooks would ultimately evolve this culinary foundation into their own highly refined haute cuisine. But in Italy, cooking would remain simpler and more direct—less about artifice and more about coaxing out and celebrating the essential flavors of materie prime.

A CUISINE FOR ALL SEASONS

From the 1600s until as recently as the 1960s, the agrarian economy of much of Italy was based on sharecropping. Contadini (peasants) ingeniously made the most of what they could grow or gather, creating a rich menu of dishes that used relatively few ingredients. Today, much of the Italian food the world reveres comes from this tradition of cooking. Dishes like pasta e fagioli (pasta with beans), panzanella (a salad made from stale bread), and salumi (cured meats) are examples of the Italian ability to make much from little.
Making the best of what is at hand is at the root of another pillar of Italian cooking: seasonality. The use of fresh, seasonal ingredients is a national obsession. When a locally produced food, be it artichokes, olive oil, or strawberries, comes into season, its arriva! is celebrated with boisterous food fairs known as sagre. Italians even have a terra, scorpacciata, for the custom of feasting on copious amounts of a single food, often for days on end, when its peak season arrives.
Seasonality is at the heart of another
film-lamentai nrincinle nf Italian gastronomy:
foods produced together should be enjoyed together. In October, chestnuts are eaten with mosto, the barely fermented new wine from the recent grape harvest. Prosciutto, now available year-round, was traditionally cured from autumn until the following summer, just in time to eat with the season's first ripe figs. The earliest tender fava (broad) beans of spring are eaten raw with shavings of delicate marzolino, a spring sheep's milk cheese.

THE ART OF SIMPLICITY

Regionality, a rich history of diverse cultural influences, and seasonality—each of these has played an important role in shaping Italian cuisine. But they are all linked by
a single overarching principle: simplicity. The true art of Italian cooking—from the refined richness of the north to the robust directness of the south—is restraint. The formula is straightforward: start with the highest-quality ingredients available, prepare them with care to bring out their best, season and taste as you go, and add only what you need. Embrace that culinary philosophy and you will enjoy the true essentials of Italian cooking.