A short dissertation on Italian food

I’ll happily confess to knowing next to nothing about Italian food but here are a few observations that I have made recently. I might add to this as we get more experience …

Italians eat Italian food. Though we have seen McDonalds in the cities, there don’t appear to be many foreign chain or ethnic restaurants anywhere else. Getting a slice of pizza from one of the many small pizzerias take care of the quick fill-up, elsewhere local food is to be savoured. Slowly.

I can’t comment on breakfast as we have been staying with non-Italians so far and keep to our fruit-and-muesli staple, though recently the fruit has been fresh figs off the tree. Lunch appears to be the main meal as everyone stops work and goes home for lunch. Most shops shut from between 12 till 1pm and don’t reopen till 4pm. That’s an 'Italian' 4pm, i.e. when they get round to it. And those lunches can really take three hours as we have found out!

The evening meal may not be such a big meal, maybe just some pasta, unless you go out, in which case it might be huge! But both lunch and dinner include wine which is probably another reason a siesta before returning to work is a good idea.

A couple of things that normally happen in Italian restaurants outside of Italy but not here (except some tourist ones) is the serving of bread sticks and the coming around with the big pepper pot. Also, garlic bread is slices of bread, slightly toasted, served with a clove of garlic for you to rub into it.

A typical meal would be a course where you help yourself to cold meats (salamis, prosciutto), followed by a pasta dish, followed by the cooked meats. If there is a salad then it is eaten separately, not everything loaded on your plate at once. Fresh bread too, just in case the pasta wasn’t providing enough carbohydrates.

As I write this we are lucky enough to be in a wine-growing area so wine is plentiful and cheap and you can fill your own five litre bottles. A local delicacy is vino cotto. This is wine that has been reduced by boiling, often to one third of the original volume, which makes it stronger in alcohol and flavour. You only need a very small amount and I can’t say I liked it, usually.

A new friend, Jean, invited us to her Italian husband’s family home for lunch.  He makes his own vino cotto (and normal wine). He has a large barrel and, once it is drunk down to halfway, they top it up with a new brew. In that way there are traces of every previous year’s vintage. His one has traces from 250 years ago, though in homoeopathic quantities! The barrel gets handed down through the generations. It certainly tasted better than the restaurant brews, and it was a real privilege to be offered it. Candido also makes world-class salamis and prosciutto; he came second in all of Italy for his prosciutto and it has been served at Buckingham Palace. The family lives in a converted convent with numerous floors, containing a shop, his business, cool stores (with lots of security as the product is so valuable), living apartments, and floors in various states of decay. The foundations are Roman, the rest slightly newer. Next door is the Count’s “palace” – we saw him looking very scruffy getting into his beaten up Fiat to go and see his farm workers … but I digress. 

Top quality prosciutto hang, covered in fat to stop the weevils getting in, for up to 3 years before they are ready to sell. So a typical lunch with this family (three generations) was a selection of his top quality meats, his own wine, fresh bread, followed by a simple pasta dish, then pieces of veal and mutton chops. Then a homemade tart for dessert, plus one we’d picked up from a patisserie. And the special vino cotto.

We haven’t seen a lot of livestock in the fields apart from the local sheep with shepherd and dogs in tow. I suspect a lot of them are kept inside. It may explain why meat isn’t that cheap in Italy when other food items tend to be.

Vicki would like to add a bit about sausages.  Up until the time we left home I avoided eating sausages.  In England I found they could be pretty good - certainly very edible.  But in Italy the sausages are fabulous!  They're tasty and meaty.  A gourmet treat compared to the rubbish we usually find at home.