Colazione

Colazione is the Italian word for the morning meal, and in common usage it also names a midday meal, a double sense that reflects the long habit of the country of eating lightly at waking and taking the substantial meal later. Waverley Root, writing in The Food of Italy, treats the Italian day as one that begins with very little, and it is against that austerity that the later meals of the day are measured.

The Italian morning meal is, in Root's account, a slight affair compared with the breakfasts of northern Europe and America. It consists, for most Italians, of coffee taken with milk, or coffee alone, and a roll or a piece of bread, sometimes a sweet pastry, rather than a cooked dish. Eggs, bacon, porridge and the other apparatus of a northern breakfast have no established place in the traditional Italian morning. The meal is brief, often taken standing, and it is not expected to sustain the eater for long. The word colazione carries a second sense that the cook should keep in mind when reading older Italian sources. In many regions colazione may denote the midday meal, and the word is then paired with pranzo or with cena according to local usage, so that the same term can name quite different moments of the day. A reader of Italian recipe books and menus must therefore establish from context whether a colazione is a cup of coffee at waking or a full meal at noon. Where the sense is the second, the meal is the principal one of the day and is built of courses in the customary order. The light morning meal follows from the structure of the Italian eating day, in which the weight falls on the midday and evening tables. Root describes a country in which the principal meals are taken with some ceremony, and the early meal is by comparison a preliminary. Differences between regions exist in what accompanies the coffee, in the kind of bread or sweet roll preferred, and in whether milk is added, but the principle of lightness is common to the country as a whole. For the cook and the student of the table, colazione is a reminder that Italian meals are defined by their place in the day rather than by a fixed list of dishes. To understand the order of courses, the feast days and the customs that govern service, one begins from the restraint of the morning, which gives the later meals their proportion.

The taste of the Italian morning is that of coffee, usually with hot milk, set against plain bread or a lightly sweet pastry. The sweetness is modest and the whole is intended to wake the palate rather than to satisfy it, leaving appetite in reserve for the table at midday.