The cooking of poor recipes – Italian Cuisine


Many of our best recipes are born almost by chance, in very distant times, from daring experiments, done in home kitchens to avoid wasting food

Before tradition, cooking is experimentation. This does not mean that a great many recipes are today considered by us to be representative of our history and considered an integral part of our tradition (Italian and / or regional). But we must not forget that there was a time when what is tradition for us today was then a novelty. This is why there are no taboos in the kitchen (see the recent and ridiculous controversy over the sovranista tortellino): the kitchen is always in flux.

Tradition is the daughter of experimentation

The great chefs experiment as experimentally, as a conscious choice, as a study of individual ingredients, searching for new combinations and flavors. But there is also a "poor" experimentation, made by necessity. And many dishes and recipes that today we consider "tradition" are sons of the Latin saying: "Facis de necessitate virtutem". In short, in times when food was scarce and recycling was not a habit, but the only possible solution to fill the bellies of a whole family, and often numerous, in the kitchen bold combinations were made, strongly linked to the season and the territory .
We do not know how many of these culinary experiments have been lost over time and therefore we do not know how many good dishes have not reached us. We can only imagine (and hope) that many of these lost recipes were unsuccessful experiments and therefore not handed down. We know, instead, which dishes have come down to us, sometimes maintaining the original characteristics of a poor but exquisite recipe; other times undergoing local variations; still others turning into important dishes to be ordered not only in the trattoria, but even in starred restaurants, where they may have undergone some "modernization" or some mixing with foreign cuisines.

Special: poor dishes, but good. The recipes of the origins
New vaccinara tail.

If we went to see the individual stories of these "origins" recipes, we would discover beautiful narratives, full of joy, sadness, effort; but always full of that human doing that comes from below, made up of women and men who fight for survival and often win. And these dishes are their legacy, their legacy, their teaching: having respect for food, which should not be wasted. Never!

Our poor recipes

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