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 he Renaissance uplifted Italy's culinary arts, evident in the banquets of Rome's papal court, the Venice of the doges and perhaps most elegantly in the Florence of the Medici. That family's epicurean tastes were transferred to France when Caterina de' Medici wed King Henry II, bringing with her the cooks and recipes that reputedly put the haute in cuisine.
But perhaps the most significant Italian contribution to European cooking, if indirect, was Christopher Columbus's discovery of America. In the centuries that followed, the New World endowed the Old with the potato, beans, squash, novel breeds of fowl, chili peppers, corn for northern Italy's massively popular polenta and, above all, the tomato, which after posing for a time as an ornamental plant burst forth in the south in the most Italian of sauces. |
| Italians have a knack for making plants thrive in their Mediterranean climate, but even things that don't grow there have reached new heights in their hands. Consider coffee, imported from the tropics since Venetians introduced the raw beans to Italy in the 1600s, but elevated to the sublime in this century through the ingenious roasting, blending and steam pressure processing of espresso.
After ages of foreign domination had fragmented Italy, the country pieced itself back together in the Risorgimento with a new spirit of unity that inspired notions of a national cuisine. The chief advocate was Pellegrino Artusi, whose "La scienza in cucina e l'arte di mangiar bene," first published in 1891, collected nearly 800 recipes from around the country. That was no small feat, since Italian cooks have always relied more on personal tastes and intuition than written recipes with precise measures and steps. But today, despite attempts to standardize cooking from the Alps to the Mediterranean isles, la cucina italiana stands as a model of diversity to be savored in the proudly traditional dishes of each region. |
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