Sale & Pepe is on sale: What is a recipe – Italian Cuisine

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They are so common that sometimes you don't notice. To have one recipe just turn on the computer and navigate between blog and sites, or buy one cooking magazine, ask a friend or consult a family cookbook if you have one.

182545But what is a recipe? A simple explanation of a dish, a small text that can never become literature, a mathematical formula made up of grams and deciliters or something more?

It is definitely a democratic text, because everyone can write one and pass it on or have access to it easily, but in any case that text indicates a type of cuisine, it tells something about us. Many times it has a precise cultural identity with its family or social identity facets, other times it is its innovation. The historian Massimo Montanari he compared cooking to language, as, like this one, he has the words (which are the ingredients) used according to the rules of a grammar (recipes) and a syntax, which is the menu.

However, it is known that grammar and syntax are used to write correctly but they do not make a writer who writes, just as the knowledge of cooking techniques does not produce a successful chef.

The recipes, according to a sentence of Gualtiero Marchesi, "Contain everything except the essential", that is, the interpreter, sometimes even the author, who creates them with care, ability and love, choosing the right and right ingredients, according to the seasons. An interpreter who many years ago somehow invented the kitchen and who with the passage of time and the birth of writing, put it black on white, or rather on a clay tablet, like the peoples of the Mesopotamia, who with cuneiform characters told elaborate dishes, or the Roman civilization who produced a complete recipe book like that of Apicius.

The transition from oral to written cuisine, even if it took time, allowed the transmission of culinary knowledge, customs and products of a territory and how people transformed them, following the seasons, the days of the week, the parties, lunches and dinners in a further subdivision between mountain or plain, sea or hill people, peasant or bourgeois houses.

But how many types of recipes are there? Many: from those that have made the history of our local cuisine, also coded in Chambers of Commerce or Municipalities, to family dishes, by the flashes of the star chefs to the ideas for cured pork butchers, to the processing of milk, rennet and cheese makers' salt, from secret recipes of some food companies to those swindlers of those who pass off to an unsuspecting tourist, for original, a preparation that is not.

Or from impromptu inventions but made with the heart, so good that they are shared with friends. Like the recipe that concludes this text, fast and ingenious. He passed it on my friend Rossana, greedy unrepentant, and to her her sister Marina, who invented it. An agile and small text that will not become part of the history of gastronomy but that will make the palate enjoy. What more do you want from a grammar pill? Of cooking means.

Laura Maragliano
on Sale & Pepe of June 2020

This recipe has already been read 183 times!

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