CUISINES BY REGION
soning. Meat dishes are plentiful, and often they come in the form of
whole birds in a sauce. Vegetables are usually cooked whole or fried as
fritters. Color and texture are important aspects in dishes, as are the
use of sugar, rice, rose water, and fruit such as pomegranates and or-
anges, all of which point to the influence of Arab cookery.149
Pasta is probably the specialty most commonly associated with Italy.
This was the case in the late Middle Ages and it still is today. Pasta was
prepared fresh in the home, or bought dried from merchants such as
the lasagnai, or pasta makers, who in those days even had their own
guild in Florence.150 Semolina was used to make lasagne and maca-
roni, and wheat flour for most other cheaper kinds. Vermicelli, fidelli,
and tria were other popular types of pasta that were sold commer-
cially. The word tria goes back to Greek itria, the earliest known word
for “noodle” in the Mediterranean. The Arabs introduced the term to
Catalonia where it appears as alatria. Gnocchi, too, were a form of
pasta that is found in Italian cookbooks as early as the fourteenth cen-
tury:
I gnocchi [Cheese Gnocchi]
If you want some gnocchi, take some fresh cheese and mash it, then take some
flour and mix with egg yolks as in making migliacci. Put a pot full of water on
the fire and, when it begins to boil, put the mixture on a dish and drop it into
the pot with a ladle. And when they are cooked, place them on dishes and sprin-
kle with plenty of grated cheese.151
In this case the pasta is cooked in boiling water, but more frequently
it was cooked in stock, or in water to which salt, butter, and oil were
added; sometimes it was cooked in almond milk or goat’s milk with
sugar. Many pasta dishes were served with spices or grated cheese, as
they still are today. An Italian invention is pasta filled with a meat, veg-
etable, or cheese and egg purée, cooked in broth and served with
grated cheese. These dishes were known under the names “ravioli,”
tortelli, or torteleti. But the terms ravioli and tortelli were also used for
fritters that contained similar fillings, and were normally served with
sugar.152
Rice was the basis for a variety of Italian dishes such as risotto which,
like pasta, was frequently cooked in stock. Some inventive pasta mak-
ers came up with a creation that was both: pasta and rice. Shaped like
grains of rice, this pasta was called orzo, meaning “rice.”153 With the
development of a tender, edible shortcrust pastry the art of pie mak-
ing reached new levels of sophistication in Italy.154 Traditional pies, for
which the Italians used the terms pastero, pastello, or coppo, consisted
127
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