The Adriatic Sea and Its Fisheries

The Adriatic is the long, narrow arm of the Mediterranean that lies between the Italian peninsula and the Balkan shore, and it washes the coasts of Friuli Venezia Giulia, the Veneto, Emilia-Romagna, the Marche, Abruzzo, Molise and Puglia. Gosetti della Salda arranges her regional recipe collection by region, and the Adriatic regions accordingly appear in her pages as a sequence of coastal kitchens, each shaped by the same sea, and by its own shoreline and hinterland.

The northern Adriatic is shallow, and it is fed by the Po and by the rivers of the Veneto and Friuli. Its lagoons and brackish waters, among them the lagoon of Venice and that of Grado and Marano, support a cookery of small fish, crustaceans and molluscs, which the regional chapters of Gosetti della Salda treat in the form of fried mixed fish, risotto made with fish and shellfish, and grilled or stewed catches. Southward the coast becomes sandy and open along Emilia-Romagna and the Marche, and the sea there is a source of the flatfish, the small shoals and the bivalves that appear in the cookery of those regions. The central coast gives the fish stew its best-known form. Along the Marche, Abruzzo and Molise the dish is called brodetto, and the name and the composition of the pot change from one port to the next, as the regional chapters of the collection show. In general the principle is the same: several kinds of fish cooked together in a single vessel with oil, tomato and a little vinegar or wine, served with bread. The cook does not follow a fixed list of species, but takes what the boats have landed that day, and this is the reason the recipes name varieties and leave the proportions to the cook's judgement. In the south, along Puglia, the sea is deeper and clearer, and the cookery turns to shellfish eaten raw or lightly cooked, to octopus and cuttlefish, and to fish baked or grilled with oil, herbs and lemon. The shellfish of Taranto belong to the Ionian sea rather than the Adriatic, and the distinction matters when the coast is described, so the Adriatic proper ends at the heel of the peninsula, near Santa Maria di Leuca. What unites these coasts is the discipline of the fresh catch. The recipes in the regional collection assume fish bought on the day, cooked simply, and seasoned to support rather than cover the flavour of the sea. A reader who comes to them from the inland kitchens of the same regions will notice that the fish dishes are shorter in method and fewer in ingredients, and that oil, salt, pepper, parsley and garlic carry most of the work.

The table of the Adriatic is one of clean, direct flavours: the brine of bivalves, the sweetness of small crustaceans, and the firmer taste of the flatfish and the larger fish of the open sea. Oil, parsley, garlic and lemon are the usual companions, with tomato and a little vinegar in the stews of the central coast. The wines and breads served alongside are plain, so that the fish remains the centre of the meal.