L'Identità Golosа: La Cucina Italiana Come Sistema

Italian cooking is rooted in its regions and localities, and the national table is the sum of local practices rather than a single codified repertoire. Pellegrino Artusi, in La Scienza in Cucina, gathered dishes from many regions of the peninsula into one volume, and Anna Gosetti della Salda's Le Ricette Regionali Italiane is arranged region by region, so that the national cuisine appears in both books as an assembly of local ones.

Italian cooking is best understood as a system in which the region and the locality come first. The dish belongs to a place, to its soil, its waters, its animals and its seasons, and the cook's task is to serve that place faithfully. A national cuisine exists as the sum of these local practices, and what the nation shares is a manner of reasoning rather than a fixed canon of recipes. The authorities of the book bear this out in their arrangement. Pellegrino Artusi, in La Scienza in Cucina, brought together the dishes of many regions in a single volume, and Anna Gosetti della Salda's Le Ricette Regionali Italiane presents the national table region by region. Both treat Italian cooking as a gathering of local kitchens rather than a hierarchy descending from a centre. What allows this diversity to be read as one cuisine is a small set of shared principles that recur from the Alps to Sicily. The ingredient is chosen for its quality and its season, the preparation is restrained, and the technique serves the product rather than disguising it. Marcella Hazan, in Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, builds her teaching on this ground, giving the cook a handful of dependable methods and trusting the ingredient to carry the dish. The system is one of habits and priorities, learnt in the kitchen. For the cook, the consequence is practical. A dish cannot be judged apart from its place of origin and its season, and a recipe from one province is not corrected by the practice of another. The same name may describe different preparations in neighbouring valleys, and each is correct within its own territory. To cook in the Italian manner is to learn the local answer first and the shared principle beneath it second.