Regional Variations Influencing Italian Cuisine

There is more to Italian cuisine, than pasta and pizza. When you visit an Italian restaurant and look at the menu, you will see it contains a variety of different dishes, desserts and beverages.

Different Italian regions are influenced by different histories, with a different specialty cuisine depending on the dominant local ingredients.

For example, Roman cuisine is dominated by offal and Pecorino, which is a cheese made from sheep milk. Simple food, like white beans and meat dominate the cuisine of Tuscany. Their range of spices include parsley, basil and thyme.

Lasagna and tortellini is the food of Emilia-Romagna. While pastries and mozzarella cheese dominate the local cuisine in Naples. The island of Sardinia is known for its saffron and fennel spiced seafood and meat dishes. Calabria is famous for its salami.

Abruzzo's cuisine relies on chili peppers. The cuisine from the island of Sicily relies heavily on fish including tuna and swordfish. Sardinian cuisine features lamb.

Specific types of rice are grown in Piedmont and Lombardy. As a result, these areas are popular for their rice dishes.

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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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Italian Cooking With Traditional Italian Food

Traditional Italian food is available in restaurants specializing in Italian food cooking. There are many fast food restaurants serving Americanized Italian food, lacking the original cooking styles and even some of the original ingredients have been changed.

For example, traditional Italian pizza is made with flat bread, containing herbs and topped with olive oil, Mozzarella cheese, sliced tomatoes and basil. Can you compare this pizza with a Hawaiian or a Supreme? For one, I have never tasted basil on a pizza, until I went to an Italian restaurant and noticed basil was one of the ingredients on the pizza.

There are many restaurants selling Italian food, but there are very few selling traditional Italian food, just like mamma used to make in the mother country.

If you take a cooking tour to Italy and taste the foods in many regions, you will taste the original taste of traditional Italian food. In some towns in America, where Italian food is not mass produced, you can taste authentic Italian cooking in Italian American restaurants.

There is an Italian restaurant, not far from my home, where they cook authentic Italian meals and I take many of my friends there, whenever I want to show them real Italian food. Although their prices are a little higher than fast food restaurants, the food may take a little longer to cook, but it is much more delicious and the flavours are unforgettable.

Whenever we want to hold a special family event, we always hire a few tables to entertain our family friends. Many of our friends, always ask if we will be having our family event at the same restaurant.

I have requested many of the recipes and the chef was obliging, to help expand my repertoire of cooking with traditional Italian food.

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