Mediterranean Vegetarian Cooking. Paola Gavin

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      At the height of the Renaissance, Florence had the most sophisticated cuisine in Europe. In 1533, when Catherine de Medici married the Dauphin who became Henry II of France, she took her Florentine cooks to the French court. They taught the French the art of making fine pastries and cakes such as frangipane, macaroons and cream puffs. They also introduced the French to a variety of vegetables including artichokes, broccoli, Savoy cabbages and tiny peas, which the French quickly adopted as their own.

      Gradually new food stuffs appeared from the New World. The first sack of corn was brought to Venice in the sixteenth century via Turkey. The Venetians, thinking the new grain was Turkish, called it granturco, which corn is still called in Italy today. Haricot beans soon took preference over broad beans – especially in Tuscany where they became so popular that Tuscans became known as mangiafagioli (bean eaters). Both the potato and the tomato were initially thought to be poisonous and were not widely used in cooking until the eighteenth century.

      Italian cooking today is regional cooking. Each of Italy’s nineteen regions has its own style of cooking. The elegant cuisines of Emilia and the Veneto are very different from the rustic cooking of Apulia and Sardinia. Foreign influences, too, are still apparent – French in Lombardy, Piedmont and the Val D’Aosta, Austrian in Trentino and the Alto Adige, Central European in Venezia Giulia, Spanish in Naples and the south, and Arab in Sicily.

      There is also a dichotomy between the cooking of the north and that of the south. In the north there is a liking for soft, flat ribbons of pasta rich in eggs, while hard, tubular factory-made pasta predominates in the south. Traditionally, olive oil was the main cooking medium of southern Italy, while pork fat was used in the centre and butter in the north, where the land was more suited to cattle rearing than the growing of olives. Today, less pork fat is eaten and the use of olive oil has become more widespread. Tomato sauces strongly flavoured with garlic, basil, oregano, chilli, olives and capers, so fundamental to the cooking of the south, are seldom used in the north. In some regions of northern Italy, especially Lombardy and the Veneto, rice and polenta are eaten more than pasta.

      Vegetables, too, play an important role in the cooking of every region of Italy. Vegetables are stuffed, made into fritters, all kinds of frittate (omelettes), delicious gratins and pies. Each region has its own repertoire of vegetable specialities such as la torta pasqualina of Liguria (an elaborate pie filled with beet greens, soft white cheese, cream and whole eggs), tortino di carciofi (a kind of baked omelette) from Tuscany, and timballo di melanzane (a layered pie made with fried aubergine, Scamorza cheese, beaten egg and grated pecorino from Abruzzo).

      Italy produces some of the finest cheeses in the world: Gorgonzola, Bel paese, and dolcelatte from Lombardy, fontina and robiole from Piedmont, pecorino from Sardinia, Rome and the south, provolone from Campania and Apulia. The king of Italian cheeses is, of course, Parmegiano Reggiano, which is made in specified areas of Parma, Reggio Nell’Emilia, Modena, Bologna and Mantova.

      Many Italian desserts are world famous: zabaione (a frothy mixture of eggs, sugar and Marsala) from Piedmont, panforte (a rich flat cake made with chopped nuts, honey, sugar, dried and crytallised fruit, cocoa and spices) and tiramisù (a chilled pudding usually made with layers of sponge cake soaked in coffee and liqueur, a mascarpone and egg cream and grated chocolate, which is a fairly recent invention from Treviso). There are so many regional cakes and pastries in Italy that it would be impossible to mention them all. Some of the most notable include: castagnaccio, a flat cake from Tuscany made with chestnut flour, sultanas, walnuts, pine nuts and fennel seeds; pastiero, a Neapolitan pastry filled with a mixture of ricotta, crytallised fruit, eggs, spices and grains of wheat that have been softened in milk; and gubana – a rich pastry roll from Friuli that is filled with a mixture of chopped nuts, sultanas soaked in rum, dried figs, prunes, candied orange peel and chocolate.

       The Middle East

      Syria Lebanon Israel Egypt

       Concerning the spices of Arabia let no more be said. The whole country is scented with them, and exhales an odour marvellously sweet.

      – Herodotus, The Histories

      

      The Middle East

      The Middle East has been called the Cradle of Civilization. The fertile crescent of Mesopotamia and the Valley of the Nile are thought to be the sites of the world’s first cultures. Jericho, which was built around 7000 B.C., is one of the oldest cities in the world. The Middle East lies on the crossroads of three continents – Europe, Asia and Africa. It is also the birthplace of three religions – Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

      The cooking of Islam extends beyond present day boundaries. It has a shared heritage that, at its height, was the most influential in the Mediterranean world. Little is known of the diet of its ancient inhabitants (Assyrians, Babylonians, Aramaeans, Phoenicians etc), although there is no doubt that these prosperous kingdoms had highly developed cultures and culinary traditions. From the Bible we know that the Israelites ate a variety of beans, chickpeas, lentils, dates, figs, raisins, grapes, nuts, olives, capers, ‘wild leaves’ and ‘bitter herbs’ – which are still eaten for Passover today.

      In 539 B.C. the Persians conquered much of the region, followed by the Macedonian Greeks, Romans and the Byzantines. After the death of Mohammed in A.D. 632, the newly converted Arab Muslims defeated the Persians and the Byzantines and took control of Antioch, Damascus, Jerusalem and Alexandria. The Arabs, who were used to a frugal diet based on cereals, dates, milk and small amounts of mutton, quickly assimilated the Persian love of good eating. From the Persians they learnt the subtle use of spices, to add dried fruit and nuts to savoury dishes, and new, more sophisticated methods of preserving foods with salt and vinegar or lemon juice and honey, as well as the crystallisation of fruit. The seat of the Caliphate was set up first in Damascus and then in Baghdad. Foodstuffs from all over the Middle East, as well as exotic spices from India and China, found their way into the markets of Baghdad and the tables of the Abbasid Caliphs. Over the following 100 years the Arabs swept across the whole of North Africa into Spain, Sicily and south-west France – introducing new foods and cooking techniques to more than half of the Mediterranean world.

      The next great culinary influence in the Middle East was the Ottoman Empire. Although both Ottoman and Arab cuisines had much in common, there were some differences, The Ottomans had adopted many recipes from the Balkan lands under their control such as stuffed vegetables and vegetable moussakas. The Ottomans also introduced the Arabs to yoghurt, burghul and börek (savoury pastries), as well as sweet pastries such as ba’lawah (baklava) and k’nafeh (shredded wheat pastry).

      After World War I, the Ottoman Empire was broken up and Syria and Lebanon became independent states under French mandate until the end of World War II when they, as well as Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, finally regained their independence.

      Syria and Lebanon lie along the east coast of the Mediterranean between Turkey and Israel. They were once part of one country called Bilad al-Sham (the Land of Greater Syria) and have shared a long history of invasions and occupations by Hittites, Canaanites, (who later became known as the Phoenicians), Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans and Ottoman Turks.

      The cuisines of both countries are virtually identical, although the names of some dishes are different. However, Lebanese cooking is more diverse, with a wider selection of vegetarian recipes. Before the Civil War, Beirut claimed to have СКАЧАТЬ