ITALIAN FOOD HISTORY - A Culinary Tradition Coming From The Cities
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Italian friselle (or freselle, frisedde, fresedde, frise) is a typical tarallo made essentially of durum wheat, combined in varying quantities with barley.
Like I wrote on the homepage of this site, Italy and italian people are not always just having food in their minds, despite what one may think.
This is not a coincidence. Since the beginning of the last millennium, the Cities throughout Italy have grabbed the products from the countryside to develop a rich gastronomic tradition and leave us accounts of a profound italian food history.
If you think about it, after all, it was a natural consequence.Cities were, in fact, the only places where everything that was needed to develop a great gastronomy concentrated: ingredients and culinary skills, naturally, but also power, richness, markets and social competition. Italian gastronomy gives its best in the urban markets, less so in the countryside farms.
It is in such places, in facts, that a number of people and friends (both italian and non) go to discover the roots and history of italian food and afterwards give accounts of their experiences with typical italian food.
If you're wandering why the circular shape, it was not for the esthetics: the hole at their center, allowed the friselle to be practically transported with a cord that was passed through them to form a sort of collier : that way they could either be hung for conservation or for comfortable transportation.
When talking about italian food history, you might have sometimes heard the expression civilt della tavola (civilisation of the table).
As it might have become a familiar image to you, also in the Salento tradition, bread baking was done according to a common schedule at shared ovens. Bread could be baked bi-weekly or with an up to more than quarterly frequency, so that the quantity of the dough that a single family (or more families together, even) could amount to up to 200 Kilograms.
There are even studies that want to prove that the italian way of cooking and eating brings benefits to people's health and that it is, therefore, to learn and adopt in some of its gastronomic lessons.
So, back on track: today's clich of the villa surrounded by olive trees, with salami and prosciutti everywhere and the farmer diligently looking after these products (I love this image!) have been accurately tailored on the (magnificent) Tuscan countryside.
Along with their hanging from a wooden beam on the ceiling, friselle were preserved in clay jars, called quartieri or capasoni.
It is like every single recipe or food has a history worth discovering and telling. Being exhaustive is going to be challenging, as this variety is sometimes disconcerting, the more if we start considering italian gastronomy outside Italy.
But, is this the reality?
The Renaissance
Oven baked twice and cut after the first baking, they always come in pairs as they are nothing else that the two halves of the same form.
Characteristic is also the surface, rough where it Is cut after the first baking, smooth where it is remaining form the original manual shaping of the dough.
It is not a chance that gastronomic literature found so many and so noticeable exponents in Italy: the economic development, civil, technical, humanistic and artistic advancement of the many Comuni (Commons), was not having any equal at the time (possibly not only in Europe).
Italian history and italian food history has long been marked by the lifestyle of the rural masses: especially in the northern and central regions, the mezzadra (sharecropping) partially preserved farmers from hunger and the hard and grueling fatigues that represented the standard way of living of the rural masses throughout Italy, up to the 1960's.
HOW THEY ARE DONE
Think about the typical crostini di fegato toscani (tuscan crostini with liver) or the bistecca alla fiorentina (florentine steak): these dishes are far from being poor, and the rural masses could only dream of such delicacies!
Nobility and the upper classes in general, were in contact with each other, in the various courts in Europe and exchanged people, arts, trends and tastes. Reading recipes from one of those book might seem, to a modern reader, like the exaltation of spices, or like their used was so common that people from near the Renaissance times would have put cinnamon, or cloves or pepper in their drinking water. Nothing could be more misleading and incorrect!
Spices were not only a precious trading good (since ancient times), they were a real status symbol, back then. Many traders made fortunes by discovering or inventing new trading routes, to supply the ever increasing demand for spices among the higher classes and, as a result of this trend-setting, more and more among lower classes too.
One of my favorites is La salsa di San Bernardo fa sembrare i cibi buoni (San Bernard's sauce makes the food taste nice).
Typically porduced in Apulia, it is widely known in Campania (fresella). In the italian language, thanks to the re-discovery of the local traditions, the term frisa is becoming more common.
But from all this, we should not err, thinking that what we have today was created then and only from the customs of the noble classes.Those times most probably marked the birth of the Italian gastronomy as we could think of today: at the same time, they were leveraging numerous distinct habits that for centuries (or millennia) had characterised the Italian and other territories and that would later mark the borders of national vs regional cuisines.
The typical way to taste this bread (alla barese) is covered in a layer of olive oil, water, tomato sauce and a drop of wine, then accompanied with small artichokes and lampascioni (tassel hyacinth). This culinary specialty is called in dialect from Bari cialldda (cialda in italian).
Like I wrote on the homepage of this site, Italy and italian people are not always just having food in their minds, despite what one may think.
This is not a coincidence. Since the beginning of the last millennium, the Cities throughout Italy have grabbed the products from the countryside to develop a rich gastronomic tradition and leave us accounts of a profound italian food history.
If you think about it, after all, it was a natural consequence.Cities were, in fact, the only places where everything that was needed to develop a great gastronomy concentrated: ingredients and culinary skills, naturally, but also power, richness, markets and social competition. Italian gastronomy gives its best in the urban markets, less so in the countryside farms.
It is in such places, in facts, that a number of people and friends (both italian and non) go to discover the roots and history of italian food and afterwards give accounts of their experiences with typical italian food.
If you're wandering why the circular shape, it was not for the esthetics: the hole at their center, allowed the friselle to be practically transported with a cord that was passed through them to form a sort of collier : that way they could either be hung for conservation or for comfortable transportation.
When talking about italian food history, you might have sometimes heard the expression civilt della tavola (civilisation of the table).
As it might have become a familiar image to you, also in the Salento tradition, bread baking was done according to a common schedule at shared ovens. Bread could be baked bi-weekly or with an up to more than quarterly frequency, so that the quantity of the dough that a single family (or more families together, even) could amount to up to 200 Kilograms.
There are even studies that want to prove that the italian way of cooking and eating brings benefits to people's health and that it is, therefore, to learn and adopt in some of its gastronomic lessons.
So, back on track: today's clich of the villa surrounded by olive trees, with salami and prosciutti everywhere and the farmer diligently looking after these products (I love this image!) have been accurately tailored on the (magnificent) Tuscan countryside.
Along with their hanging from a wooden beam on the ceiling, friselle were preserved in clay jars, called quartieri or capasoni.
It is like every single recipe or food has a history worth discovering and telling. Being exhaustive is going to be challenging, as this variety is sometimes disconcerting, the more if we start considering italian gastronomy outside Italy.
But, is this the reality?
The Renaissance
Oven baked twice and cut after the first baking, they always come in pairs as they are nothing else that the two halves of the same form.
Characteristic is also the surface, rough where it Is cut after the first baking, smooth where it is remaining form the original manual shaping of the dough.
It is not a chance that gastronomic literature found so many and so noticeable exponents in Italy: the economic development, civil, technical, humanistic and artistic advancement of the many Comuni (Commons), was not having any equal at the time (possibly not only in Europe).
Italian history and italian food history has long been marked by the lifestyle of the rural masses: especially in the northern and central regions, the mezzadra (sharecropping) partially preserved farmers from hunger and the hard and grueling fatigues that represented the standard way of living of the rural masses throughout Italy, up to the 1960's.
HOW THEY ARE DONE
Think about the typical crostini di fegato toscani (tuscan crostini with liver) or the bistecca alla fiorentina (florentine steak): these dishes are far from being poor, and the rural masses could only dream of such delicacies!
Nobility and the upper classes in general, were in contact with each other, in the various courts in Europe and exchanged people, arts, trends and tastes. Reading recipes from one of those book might seem, to a modern reader, like the exaltation of spices, or like their used was so common that people from near the Renaissance times would have put cinnamon, or cloves or pepper in their drinking water. Nothing could be more misleading and incorrect!
Spices were not only a precious trading good (since ancient times), they were a real status symbol, back then. Many traders made fortunes by discovering or inventing new trading routes, to supply the ever increasing demand for spices among the higher classes and, as a result of this trend-setting, more and more among lower classes too.
One of my favorites is La salsa di San Bernardo fa sembrare i cibi buoni (San Bernard's sauce makes the food taste nice).
Typically porduced in Apulia, it is widely known in Campania (fresella). In the italian language, thanks to the re-discovery of the local traditions, the term frisa is becoming more common.
But from all this, we should not err, thinking that what we have today was created then and only from the customs of the noble classes.Those times most probably marked the birth of the Italian gastronomy as we could think of today: at the same time, they were leveraging numerous distinct habits that for centuries (or millennia) had characterised the Italian and other territories and that would later mark the borders of national vs regional cuisines.
The typical way to taste this bread (alla barese) is covered in a layer of olive oil, water, tomato sauce and a drop of wine, then accompanied with small artichokes and lampascioni (tassel hyacinth). This culinary specialty is called in dialect from Bari cialldda (cialda in italian).
About the Author:
Many food enthusiasts wanted to know about the history of Italian food. This is because most of them do not simply eat different kinds of foods. They also find some information about them.
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