Regional Variations Of Italian Recipes

Did you know that some people believe pasta was first invented in China? Whether it was or not, Italian recipes for pasta go back a long, long time, so obviously if they didn't invent this food, they adopted it as soon as traders introduced it to them.

They really ran with the concept too, which is why we associate so many pasta recipes with Italy. Countless fish and meat recipes for pasta, as well as their sauces, will forever be associated with Italy in most people's minds.

The Italian Made website (http://www.italianmade.com/regions/home.cfm), discusses both Italian recipes as well as the wines associated with different regions of Italy.

It talks about the variations of local cultures in the north, and how they produced a wide variety of culinary influences, while the south produced mostly what is known as the "Mediterranean diet," using ingredients that flourished in the bright sun.

An example of the latter is the "Bucantini with Sardines" pasta dish, which adds raisins, pine nuts and saffron, while a northern recipe might be "Pansuuti con la Salsa di Noci," with pasta envelopes stuffed with ricotta cheese, with walnut sauce.

People may not be aware that tomatoes didn't appear in Europe until well after the initial explorations of the western hemisphere, so Italian recipes didn't feature tomatoes until the early 1800s. Even after tomatoes appeared in Europe, it took a long time before people believed they were really edible.

But the foods that were already prominent in Italy were rich in other delicious ingredients. When you choose vegetable recipes for your pasta, with cheese sauces and without tomatoes, you may well be choosing foods that reflect an earlier era in the country, when Germanic or even Byzantine or Arab influences were most prevalent.

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