Questo testo è frutto di una ricerca su svariati testi di cui è data ampia bibliografia. Contiene una panoramica die grandi cuochie dell'antichità ed in particolare dell'epoca medievale ma con riferimenti anche alla cucina dell'antica Roma e quella Rinascimentale. Si descrive anche l'evoluzione della tavola e delle abitudini alimentari degli antichi con riferimento alle stoviglie ai metodi di cottura e alla profonda differenza fra il mangiare dei poveri e quello dei ricchi per i quali il banchetto era anche una dimostrazione di fasto e di ricchezza. Si descrivono anche alcuni piatti legate a personaggi famori e la trascrizione di ricette originali più o meno modificate per renderle appetibili alle mutate abitudini culinarie del tempo attuale.
In his new history of food, acclaimed historian Massimo Montanari traces the development of medieval tastes—both culinary and cultural—from raw materials to market and captures their reflections in today's food trends. Tying the ingredients of our diet evolution to the growth of human civilization, he immerses readers in the passionate debates and bold inventions that transformed food from a simple staple to a potent factor in health and a symbol of social and ideological standing. Montanari returns to the prestigious Salerno school of medicine, the "mother of all medical schools," to plot the theory of food that took shape in the twelfth century. He reviews the influence of the Near Eastern spice routes, which introduced new flavors and cooking techniques to European kitchens, and reads Europe's earliest cookbooks, which took cues from old Roman practices that valued artifice and mixed flavors. Dishes were largely low-fat, and meats and fish were seasoned with vinegar, citrus juices, and wine. He highlights other dishes, habits, and battles that mirror contemporary culinary identity, including the refinement of pasta, polenta, bread, and other flour-based foods; the transition to more advanced cooking tools and formal dining implements; the controversy over cooking with oil, lard, or butter; dietary regimens; and the consumption and cultural meaning of water and wine. As people became more cognizant of their physicality, individuality, and place in the cosmos, Montanari shows, they adopted a new attitude toward food, investing as much in its pleasure and possibilities as in its acquisition.
Italians love to talk about food. The aroma of a simmering ragú, the bouquet of a local wine, the remembrance of a past meal: Italians discuss these details as naturally as we talk about politics or sports, and often with the same flared tempers. In Why Italians Love to Talk About Food, Elena Kostioukovitch explores the phenomenon that first struck her as a newcomer to Italy: the Italian "culinary code," or way of talking about food. Along the way, she captures the fierce local pride that gives Italian cuisine its remarkable diversity. To come to know Italian food is to discover the differences of taste, language, and attitude that separate a Sicilian from a Piedmontese or a Venetian from a Sardinian. Try tasting Piedmontese bagna cauda, then a Lombard cassoela, then lamb ala Romana: each is part of a unique culinary tradition. In this learned, charming, and entertaining narrative, Kostioukovitch takes us on a journey through one of the world's richest and most adored food cultures. Organized according to region and colorfully designed with illustrations, maps, menus, and glossaries, Why Italians Love to Talk About Food will allow any reader to become as versed in the ways of Italian cooking as the most seasoned of chefs. Food lovers, history buffs, and gourmands alike will savor this exceptional celebration of Italy's culinary gifts.
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.
This volume is the first to present all four extant manuscripts of the Viandier de Taillevent. The texts of the 220 recipes are in their original French and a complete English translation is provided. Variants between the four manuscripts represent more than a century of modifications in gastronomic tastes and culinary practices in French seigneurial life. The commentary and notes trace the significance of these modifications and indicate the influence the Viandier exercised on more recent cookery books throughout Europe. This critical edition also includes a glossary and a bibliography. In addition, selected recipes have been adapted for modern use and arranged in a menu for six people.
A Cultural History of Plants in the Post-Classical Era covers the period from 500 to 1400, ranging across northern and central Europe to the Mediterranean, and from the Byzantine and Arabic Empires to the Persian World, India, and China. This was an age of empires and fluctuating borders, presenting a changing mosaic of environments, populations, and cultural practices. Many of the ancient uses and meanings of plants were preserved, but these were overlaid with new developments in agriculture, landscapes, medicine, eating habits, and art. The six-volume set of the Cultural History of Plants presents the first comprehensive history of the uses and meanings of plants from prehistory to today. The themes covered in each volume are plants as staple foods; plants as luxury foods; trade and exploration; plant technology and science; plants and medicine; plants in culture; plants as natural ornaments; the representation of plants. Alain Touwaide is Scientific Director at the Institute for the Preservation of Medical Traditions, Washington, D.C., USA. A Cultural History of Plants in the Post-Classical Era is the second volume in the six-volume set, A Cultural History of Plants, also available online as part of Bloomsbury Cultural History, a fully-searchable digital library (see www.bloomsburyculturalhistory.com). General Editors: Annette Giesecke, University of Delaware, USA, and David Mabberley, University of Oxford, UK.
Long neglected by scholars, medieval and Renaissance Bologna is now recognized as a center of economic, political-constitutional, legal, and intellectual innovation, as the city that served as the cultural crossroads of Italy. The city’s distinctive achievements and its transition from medieval commune to second largest city of the Renaissance Papal State is illuminated by essays that present the work of current historians, many made available in English for the first time, from the broadest possible perspective: from the material city with its porticoes, the conflicts that brought bloodshed and turmoil to its streets, the disputations of masters and students, and to the masterpieces of artists who laid the foundations for Baroque art. See inside the book.
Ranging from the imperial palaces of ancient China and the bakeries of fourteenth-century Genoa and Naples all the way to the restaurant kitchens of today, Pasta tells a story that will forever change the way you look at your next plate of vermicelli. Pasta has become a ubiquitous food, present in regional diets around the world and available in a host of shapes, sizes, textures, and tastes. Yet, although it has become a mass-produced commodity, it remains uniquely adaptable to innumerable recipes and individual creativity. Pasta: The Story of a Universal Food shows that this enormously popular food has resulted from of a lengthy process of cultural construction and widely diverse knowledge, skills, and techniques. Many myths are intertwined with the history of pasta, particularly the idea that Marco Polo brought pasta back from China and introduced it to Europe. That story, concocted in the early twentieth century by the trade magazine Macaroni Journal, is just one of many fictions umasked here. The true homelands of pasta have been China and Italy. Each gave rise to different but complementary culinary traditions that have spread throughout the world. From China has come pasta made with soft wheat flour, often served in broth with fresh vegetables, finely sliced meat, or chunks of fish or shellfish. Pastasciutta, the Italian style of pasta, is generally made with durum wheat semolina and presented in thick, tomato-based sauces. The history of these traditions, told here in fascinating detail, is interwoven with the legacies of expanding and contracting empires, the growth of mercantilist guilds and mass industrialization, and the rise of food as an art form. Whether you are interested in the origins of lasagna, the strange genesis of the Chinese pasta bing or the mystique of the most magnificent pasta of all, the timballo, this is the book for you. So dig in!
Buon appetito! Everyone loves Italian food. But how did the Italians come to eat so well? The answer lies amid the vibrant beauty of Italy's historic cities. For a thousand years, they have been magnets for everything that makes for great eating: ingredients, talent, money, and power. Italian food is city food. From the bustle of medieval Milan's marketplace to the banqueting halls of Renaissance Ferrara; from street stalls in the putrid alleyways of nineteenth-century Naples to the noisy trattorie of postwar Rome: in rich slices of urban life, historian and master storyteller John Dickie shows how taste, creativity, and civic pride blended with princely arrogance, political violence, and dark intrigue to create the world's favorite cuisine. Delizia! is much more than a history of Italian food. It is a history of Italy told through the flavors and character of its cities. A dynamic chronicle that is full of surprises, Delizia! draws back the curtain on much that was unknown about Italian food and exposes the long-held canards. It interprets the ancient Arabic map that tells of pasta's true origins, and shows that Marco Polo did not introduce spaghetti to the Italians, as is often thought, but did have a big influence on making pasta a part of the American diet. It seeks out the medieval recipes that reveal Italy's long love affair with exotic spices, and introduces the great Renaissance cookery writer who plotted to murder the Pope even as he detailed the aphrodisiac qualities of his ingredients. It moves from the opulent theater of a Renaissance wedding banquet, with its gargantuan ten-course menu comprising hundreds of separate dishes, to the thin soups and bland polentas that would eventually force millions to emigrate to the New World. It shows how early pizzas were disgusting and why Mussolini championed risotto. Most important, it explains the origins and growth of the world's greatest urban food culture. With its delectable mix of vivid storytelling, groundbreaking research, and shrewd analysis, Delizia! is as appetizing as the dishes it describes. This passionate account of Italy's civilization of the table will satisfy foodies, history buffs, Italophiles, travelers, students -- and anyone who loves a well-told tale.
