The Venetian Lagoon

The Venetian Lagoon is a shallow body of brackish water on the northern Adriatic coast of the Veneto, separated from the open sea by a long chain of sandy barrier islands, the lidi, and opened to the tides through a small number of inlets. Within it lie the islands on which Venice was built, and Nino Zoccali's Venetian Republic treats the lagoon as the setting that shaped both the city's power and its table.

The lagoon is neither sea nor river, and the cooking of Venice takes its character from that condition. Fresh water from the rivers of the mainland meets the salt water admitted by the tides, and the result is a mixed environment of open channels, shallow flats, mud banks and salt marsh, the last known in the Venetian dialect as barene. Each of these supports its own produce, and the Venetian kitchen has long distinguished between what comes from the channels, what comes from the flats, and what comes from the gardens of the islands. The fish and shellfish of the lagoon are the clearest expression of this. The soft-shelled green crab, Carcinus aestuarii, is taken as moeche when it has just shed its shell, and as mascarete when the female is carrying roe. The cuttlefish, Sepia officinalis, gives the black ink for risotto and for sauces, and the spider crab, Maja squinado, is dressed in its own shell. Small fish such as the goby, Zosterisessor ophiocephalus, known as go, are the base of the risotto di go, a dish of the lagoon rather than of the sea. The authority of these dishes rests on the water that produces them, and the cook who knows them treats the seasons of moulting and spawning as the governing calendar. Zoccali places the lagoon at the centre of the Republic's history, since the same waters that supplied the table also protected the city and gave it a harbour. The management of the lagoon, its channels, its silting and its tides, was a matter of state, and the city's survival depended on keeping the balance between river and sea. The cooking of the Republic grew from this closeness to the water, and from the trade by which spices, rice and other goods reached the city, so that a local larder of fish and vegetables was set beside ingredients brought from far away. The islands of the lagoon also served as gardens. Sandy, slightly saline soils suit particular vegetables, and the artichoke known as castraura, taken as the first small bud of the plant, is the best known of them, associated with the island of Sant'Erasmo. Such produce reaches the city by boat, and the markets of Venice remain organised around that arrival. In the kitchen these vegetables are cooked simply, often with the fish of the same waters, so that the table of the lagoon reads as one landscape. The dishes of the lagoon therefore depend on a place that is fragile and changing. The tides, the salinity and the condition of the flats determine what can be caught and grown, and the cook who works in this tradition does so with a clear sense that the ingredients are seasonal and local in the strictest sense. Understanding the lagoon is the first step to understanding why Venetian cooking tastes as it does.