Italy first country to win Unesco recognition for national cuisine
Italy is one of those places which doesn’t have a national cuisine. There is a series of highly distinct regional ones. And they really are distinct too.
So, an amusement then…..
Italy first country to win Unesco recognition for national cuisine
Italy is one of those places which doesn’t have a national cuisine. There is a series of highly distinct regional ones. And they really are distinct too.
So, an amusement then…..
In fact all countries with any size or heritage ascribe to that model.
A lot if ‘tasty’ food in Europe really only dates from the discovery of the New World in any case.
What did the ‘Italians’ eat before tomatoes and peppers ?
What did the ‘Italians’ eat before tomatoes and peppers ?
It is interesting. I have a book on medieval English cuisine. I’ve cooked some of the dishes. For a start the modern concept of a plate with meat & 2/3 veg didn’t exist.* Everything is separate dish eaten separately. And there’s little division between what we’d regard as savoury & sweet. So meat gets served sweetened with fruit & there’s a “dessert” of ground chicken breast, cream honey & spices closely resembles custard.
*I don’t think it existed anywhere before the late C19th. Is it some entirely Brit thing that spread? When I first came to Spain the “placa combinada” was mostly a tourist thing. In restaurants for the Spanish, if you asked for meat, you just got the meat.
I think it is a Northern Europe and industrialisation thing. More energy required, often less time to eat it. So it all goes on one plate.
I think it probably all would have gone on one plate. One of the factors is the expense of cooking utensils. If you can only afford one pot, everything gets cooked together.
In medieval cookery, pies & puddings are cooking utensils. You wrap the ingredients in dough, bake in the oven or wrap in cloth & boil in a cauldron. They’re then opened & the contents served. The pastry covering is discarded or thrown to the peasants.
Not really… It’s something that came into being when potatoes were introduced and replaced the then “standard” stews and porridges that had everything + dog ( sometimes literally ) tossed in and served in a bowl with bread.
Potatoes, especially the early varieties, aren’t suited for that style of cooking. so you end up with one plate, a stack of potatoes, and veggie “sides” in Season, with a slice of meat if you could afford it.
It’s only later, when they managed to breed the more starchy varieties that you got the mashes, but by that time it was the mash that got piled on your plate, topped with bone-broth gravy, next to the cooked-to-death veggies.
And meat on Sunday, if you were lucky.
Definitely not “more energy required”…. Even early “indutrialisation” was aimed at expending *less* effort to get things done.
There’s no better Fitness Regime than Working the Land. Manually…
Or loading/unloading/moving things… Manually…
Or….
….digging for coal or digging a canal… But working in a mill still required great physical effort. What industrialising a process meant was that there was a huge increas in productivity and the product was (mostly) the same every time and thus of the same quality.
The point really, that I was failing to make, was that there were now more set mealtimes because of the factory/mine/building site hours. Also for the first time the poor could routnely afford some kinfd of meat. You are quite right about spuds, they made a huge difference to the diet and health of the working population.
France has a huge variety of cuisines. Growing things in Normandy is a bit like growing things here, but Provence can do almost everything.
I shall be sure to break the spaghetti before cooking it.
But as everything UN-related… Applause for devalueing another thing that *may* have had some actual use in protecting things that are actually worthwile to preserve.
Parkinson again. They have to keep finding ‘heritage’ crap to justify their existence.
I bet it took years and millions in bribes for the UN to come to this conclusion.
Last year I ran an event at Japan House celebrating the 10th anniversary of Washoku (Japanese cuisine) registration as UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage. Jap ambassador was there, an’ all.
So I think the wops have something wrong, here.
We used to enjoy going there for lunch as part of a monthly day out to try to educate our teenage son – gallery or museum in the morning, lunch and then a play in the afternoon.
Did the education work?
If you judge it by the fact he doesn’t go to many, galleries, museums or plays now, 25 years later, no. But then again that’s not the point, he was introduced to them and can make up his own mind afterwards.
TBF, he now lives in Blandford Forum so there aren’t as many opportunities as when we lived in the Chilterns.
“aren’t as many” opportunities for culture in Blandford? Are there any, once you’ve strolled around looking at the architecture?
I used to go there three times a year for my haircut (sadly Mary, the Glaswegian barber who gave you a tin of beer if you had to wait, did a midnight flit), and I’m told it’s where the small dealers get their drugs wholesale. But is there any other reason for going?
Funnily enough it’s where I go for a haircut, the one next to M&S is often open at 8:30 or earlier. We also prefer shopping there rather than Dorchester.
I’ve absolutely no idea about the drugs scene, anywhere.
Open letter to Trump:
“You can defund UN now.”
Yours truly,
Gamecock
This is on par with winning “Yard of the month.”