The Etruscans and Romans

The Etruscans lived in what we now know as Tuscany, and they were the first real people to develop what is now the history of Italian cooking, blended with some Roman and Greek influences. In fact, we know that Roman soldiers often ate polenta, just the way we eat it today, while they were away on military campaigns, so some dishes from the Italian table go way back in time to over 2000 years old.

Exploration Fed the Country

Italy was a country of explorers, and many of them brought home foods and culinary ideas to help boost their own home cooking. For example, it’s said Marco Polo brought pasta back to the region from his travels throughout Asia, but that’s been disputed. He did bring back discoveries like spices and such, though, and Christopher Columbus, who sailed for Spain but was actually Italian, brought back many items from the New World, like peppers, corn, tomatoes, and potatoes that have made themselves at home in Italian cuisine.

Climate, Climate, Climate

Think about Italy, and you probably think about the varied climates and regions of the country, and they have all had a big influence on the history of Italian cooking. The Northern area borders Austria, France, and Switzerland, and it shows influences from those countries. Northerners tend to eat more potatoes, cream sauces, and polenta, and truffle oil is produced in the Torino region, so it’s often a part of their cuisine.

The Central area includes Tuscany, and the cuisine is rich in seafood, tomato-based sauces, soups, and olives and olive oil, along of course, with wine.

The Southern region is sunny and warm, typical of a Mediterranean climate, and it boasts groves of olive trees, citrus, and many other plants associated with the history of Italian cooking. Seafood is popular, and Napoli is the home of real, Italian pizza. Pasta, meat sauces, and lots of cheese are popular in the area, as well.

A Blending of Regions

It’s easy to see that the regions of Italy produce some varied cuisines, but over the decades, they have all blended into what we call “Italian cooking.” Many of the ingredients, like olive oil, pastas, and wine are common no matter what the region, and many of the general cooking techniques, such as sautéing many dishes, baking bread, creating hearty soups, and hand making pasta from wheat flour are common to all the regions. Italian cooking is diverse and unique, and that’s one of the reasons it has become so popular throughout the world.

Historically, Italian cooking is really a blend of cultures, regions, and cuisines, including new ingredients from foreign lands, but today, it means good food, good wine, and good friends gathering together for hearty and delicious dishes that run the gamut from seafood to risotto and far beyond.

Olive oil and garlic
Staples of an Italian kitchen are olio d’oliva (olive oil) and aglio (garlic). Always choose extra virgin olive oil and fresh garlic. You will not see any garlic powder or garlic salt in a traditional Italian kitchen. Another common ingredient when in many Italian dishes is pomodori (tomatoes), which are used fresh in sauces, served in the antipasti or starter as a garnish over toasted bread, or in salads. Olive oil is used when Cooking Italian recipes for frying, sautéing, dressing on salads, and every other place where we would usually use shortening or vegetable oil.

Italians love their mealtime, and they take a long time to get through the entire meal. Dinner typically starts around 8:00 PM and is over around 10:00 PM. Family is key to Italians and you will often find children in the kitchen, learning to cook right along with the adults. The family comes together over the meal and large, boisterous meal times are not uncommon in an Italian household, with lots of shouting, laughter and good natured teasing accompanying the pasta. Cooking Italian recipes is something the Italians take very seriously.

The courses in an Italian meal
The antipasti, or starter course mentioned earlier comes to the table on platters family style. It can be something as simple as a bruschetta (toasted garlic bread) with a variety of toppings to a more sophisticated dish made with zucchini flowers and grated parmesan cheese. By the way, when pronouncing Italian words, the ‘ch’ sounds like a ‘k,’ so the word bruschetta is pronounced bru-sketta. To get the ‘ch’ sound in Italian, put two c’s together as in Gucci.

The courses in an Italian meal
Following the antipasti, the primi piatti, or first course is served. This is usually a pasta course, but can also be a soup, crepe, polenta, rice, or gnocchi. Pasta is also a staple in Italian recipes, and you will usually find a pasta dish set on the table for every evening meal. Explore the Italian cookbooks for your favorite pasta or other starchy dish for your primi piatti.

The next course is the main course, or the secondi piatti. This is a meat course, served with a contorni or side dish. Beef, pork, veal, fish and poultry are all served and eaten with relish in Italy. Side dishes, or contorni, are sometimes salads, but often are starchy dishes like potatoes or beans.

Desert is not to be forgotten as a sweet, but not too sweet, end to your cooking Italian recipes experience. One of my favorite Italian deserts is contuccini. Contuccini is a small version of the popular Italian cookie called biscotti. These sweet, but hard, little almond cookies are served after a typical Italian meal with a sweet desert wine. Set shot glasses in front of your guests, fill each one with the desert wine and instruct them to dunk the contuccini in the wine before eating it. Delicicio!

Traditional Italian Minestrone Soup

½ lb dried cranberry beans

2 ½ quarts of water

½ lb fresh green beans, broken into halves

3 oz diced salt pork

½ lb peeled and diced potatoes

1 ½ Tbs extra virgin olive oil

½ lb peeled and diced onions

12 oz can diced tomatoes, or 1 cup peeled and diced fresh ripe tomatoes

2 mashed cloves of garlic

¼ tsp fresh ground black pepper

½ tsp salt

1 small carrot, peeled and diced

1 stalk celery, diced with leaves

1 pork hock, or hambone

8 oz spaghetti

1/8 Cup butter

Soak and drain beans according to package directions. Add beans to the water and bring

to a boil. Lower the heat to a simmer and add all the other ingredients (except the spaghetti and butter). Cover and cook for two hours.

When the beans are finished cooking boil a second pot of water to which add spaghetti broken into 1 ½ inch pieces. When the spaghetti is cooked drain it and add the butter. Place 1 oz cooked spaghetti in the bottom of each bowl.

Ladle one scant cup soup on top of spaghetti. Serve piping hot. ( I have found with this particular meal that about the time the soup is served people beginning to get full. So I stick with small portions which works very well. You want people to enjoy the entire meal. My father in law is the only person who has ever picked at this meal, but, by the end he says this is better than that stuff out of the jar.)

Shauna Hanus is a gourmet cook who specializes in creating gourmet recipes. She has extensive experience cooking with easy to find grocery items to create delightful gourmet meals. She is also the publisher of a no cost bi-monthly gourmet newsletter. Her newsletter is always fun and informational packed with tips and trivia you can use everyday. http://www.gourmayeats.com Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Shauna_Hanus

Turn on any food show today and you’ll find a huge assortment of ethnic offerings. From Chinese and other Asian cuisines to French, German and even British cooking, every corner of the globe where people put food to fire is represented. Most of these are relative newcomers to the global food scene, whereas Italian food has been on every cook’s slate for decades. This explains why there are so many free recipes for Italian desserts around: they’re delicious, and there is a dizzying variety available.

Cheesecake, of course, is by far the most popular Italian dessert. That’s curious, as it actually is not terribly Italian in its composition. It’s an American invention, although Italian-Americans are most often credited with both finding and perfecting the recipe and preparation methods. No reputable Italian restaurant would ever be caught without at least one cheesecake on the menu, and very often you’ll see competitions within a city between the top-tier Italian joints to build the highest, richest and best creations. It’s no surprise that some of these recipes make it into the vaults of free recipes for Italian desserts available online.

The true heart of Italian desserts, however, are the gelatos, those ice cream-like creations that come in an insane variety of flavors and top the finest efforts of frozen treat confectioners from around the world. In Italy, gelato shops are almost as common as Starbucks coffee houses are here in United States, and the sweets they purvey are like no others. From the classic hazelnut or chocolate to more exotic flavors like mango, lime and graham cracker, you’ll find something for every palate.

My personal favorite Italian dessert, however, is the cannoli. There’s a reason why “Leave the guns, take the cannoli,” is one of the most identifiable quotes from the “Godfather” movies. This mystical synergy between a crunchy pastry shell and a lightly sweet pastry cream, sometimes with nuts or a drizzle of chocolate added, is simply unbeatable to many Italian food connoisseurs.

All of these have made it into the archives of free recipes for Italian desserts. With a little hunting, you can find whatever you seek!

This is one of the quickest Italian pasta recipes and, as it is made with tomatoes and eggplants only, is very low on fats content!

It comes from my grandmother’s cookbook and I remember that all of my family was really happy when we saw this incredible pasta for lunch or for dinner.

It’s great even if your fridge is completely empty (mine often is, especially when I work a lot) and you still want to enjoy what you eat, or you discover by surprise that you have someone for dinner.

Ingredients (4 people):

320 g durum wheat pipe pasta (be careful to buy durum wheat pasta, not soft wheat one: real Italian pasta recipes need this kind of pasta!)

300 g eggplants

200 g mature tomatoes

extra virgin olive oil

a bit of oregano

salt

How to do it!

Put on fire a medium-sized pot with abundant water and half a hand-cup of sea salt.

Wash eggplants, peel them and cut them into small cubes.

In a pan, put some olive oil. When it’s hot, pour in the cubes.

Cut your tomatoes into big cubes and in the meantime fry eggplants adding more olive oil. Mix them well and add oregano.

Add tomato cubes, a cup of the boiling water and a bit of salt. Turn fire to its minimum and go on cooking it for 5 minutes.

When water is boiling, pour in your pasta. When it’s nearly cooked, drain it and pour pasta into the pan. Mix it all for a couple of minutes and… eat!

When it comes to Italian cooking I love to use the word rustic quite a bit. This Italian lamb stew is just that, rustic. Hearty and delicious, you’ll have no problem filling your stomach with this one.

Just get a large pot and place it over the wood burning fireplace in your kitchen and get ready to taste one of the most delicious Italian dishes you could imagine.

You don’t have a wood burning fireplace in your kitchen? Mmmm! Well neither do I that’s why I use a large pot and my kitchen stove to make this wonderful stew.

If you have a wood burning fireplace in your kitchen then go for it. That’s about as rustic as you can get unless your outdoors.

This recipe calls for a little vino as in most of my recipes. Either it goes in the dish or it goes down my throat. .Either way is fine with me.

Also like most of my recipes, serve this Italian lamb stew with a nice fresh loaf of Italian bread.

INGREDIENTS

Let’s talk pizza! Here’s one of my best free Italian recipes, that of pizza Margherita, which is the easiest of pizzas. Using this recipe as a base, you can add whatever you want on it!

What you need (1 serving):

125 g 00 flour

1 teaspoon brewer’s yeast

1 mozzarella

canned tomatoesor tomato sauce (NO ketchup!)

water

salt

sugar

extra virgin olive oil

basil

Let’s do it!

Melt yeast in two fingers of warm water, then add just a bit of sugar and 2 teaspoons of flour. Mix it all and leave it for 15-20 minutes.

Pour the remaining flour in a bowl, adding half a teaspoon of salt, then 1 teaspoon of extravirgin olive oil, and in the end the previously prepared yeast. Work it all with a wooden spoon, then pour oil on your hands and use them to mix the dough. When your knuckles leave a dent and it rises again in no more than half a minute, than the dough is ok.

Let it rest for 3 hours, covered with a cotton or linen cloth.

Pre-heat your oven at 200°. Make a dish with your dough. It should be no higher than 2 or 3 mms. Pour tomato sauce on it, making sure you leave a white border. Ease yourself with a spoon. Cut mozzarella in small cubes or thin slices and add it on the tomato sauce. Add some extravirgin olive oil (be careful: it shouldn’t be too much!) and cook it in your oven.

When your pizza is ready (it should take no more than 20 minutes if the oven was pre-heaten), add some basil leaves and eat!

While it cooks, you could wonder on where this Pizza found its name…

In about 1889, Queen Margherita took an inspection tour of her Italian Kingdom. During her travels around Italy she saw many people, especially the peasants, eating this large, flat bread. Curious, the queen ordered her guards to bring her one of these Pizza breads. She summoned Chef Raffaele Esposito from his pizzeria to the royal palace and ordered him to bake a selection of pizzas for her pleasure. To honor the queen who was so beloved by her subjects, Raffaele decided to make a very special pizza just for her. He baked it topped with tomatoes, mozzarella cheese and fresh basil, to represent the colors of the Italian flag: red, white, and green. This became Queen Margherita’s favorite pizza and when word got out that this was one of the queen’s favorite foods, she became even more popular with the Italian people. She also started a culinary tradition, the Pizza Margherita, which lasts to this very day in Naples and has now spread throughout the world.

There is a pleasure that has never known, and will never do, a decline or a negative trend: the pleasure for good food and good drinks.

Over the centuries men tried to improve their aliments sometimes reaching extremely high levels. For the most part of history, and most of the people, food was only something necessary and they tried to improve it in order to better chew and digest it.

But for luckier people, food was not only a matter of nourishment but a pleasure to indulge in.

In our present culture, for a great part of the world population, food unfortunately is still only synonym of survival. No matter how the food tastes and even if it really do any good to your body, as long as you finally have something in your stomach.

On the other hand, millions of people have the opportunity to get really much more food they can reasonably eat. Due to our eating habits, our younger loved are often obese or, in better cases, a little over weight. Poor populations cannot enjoy a proper meal, but funny enough also people who have too much food do not enjoy it and often their meals are partaken quickly, without any real need or desire.

In the middle of these two categories of humanity, there is a smaller group of people, wealthy enough to be able to afford whatever they want, who do not consider food just as a relieve valve to their rage or frustration or sadness, but a matter of culture.

In this environment, curiosity can originate luxury recipes for a very choosy and demanding taste.

One of the ingredients which concurs in creating luxury meals in Italian food is the balsamic vinegar of Modena which can be used with almost everything giving to the meal an unforgettable flavour.

This thick and aromatic vinegar is produced by the fermentation of Trebbiano grapes, which grow around Modena, and is left for at least 10 years in chestnut tree wood barrels.

Balsamic vinegar from Modena is nowadays known worldwide, but you might not known that two of its most exciting uses are as a topping for strawberries or for vanilla ice cream. Eating them with balsamic vinegar of Modena is an experience you should really not miss.

So you’ve decided you’re going to start doing some more Italian cooking. You’ve found a great database of Italian recipes and you’re excited about wading into the world of pasta, pesto and parmagiana.

It would be helpful to have on hand some staple ingredients that are found in a lot of Italian cooking. That way, you’ll be able to get your fix of Italian food any day, without extensive grocery shopping. Let’s look at some of them!

Garlic: It may sound like a cliché, but this humble bulb has a place in just about all Italian cooking. Keep it in a cool, dry place such as a root cellar or pantry. When buying garlic, look for bulbs with no dark discoloration on the bottom. This may indicate age or molding.

Tomato sauce: Don’t go expensive here. The house brand at your local grocer and the national brands will be impossible to tell apart if you put them in a bowl. Avoid the “preseasoned” blends, as you’ll be adding your own herbs and spices to your recipe.

Pasta: Don’t buy a huge amount of any one specific noodle. Rather, keep a small amount of the most common types, such as spaghetti, linguine, elbow macaroni, small and large shells and wide egg noodles. For storage, it helps if you can keep long noodles in a long container. Most plastic ware makers have a “pasta keeper” of some sort available.

Parmesan cheese: While it may not always be an ingredient, freshly ground Parmesan is almost always a welcome addition on top of a pasta dish. Kraft has a new “fresh shreds” product with a block of cheese in a container with its own grater. It works very well, and the price is not exorbitant.

Olive oil: One mistake many Italian-food rookies make is using expensive extra-virgin olive oil for things like pan-frying. Use standard olive oil, which will be yellow in color and as much as 50 percent cheaper, for these purposes. You’ll still get all the health benefits!

Keep your pantry properly stocked, and you’ll be prepared to cook any Italian recipes you wish!