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When was cuisine born? Massimo Montanari - full professor of Medieval History at the University of Bologna, where he also teaches History of Food - answers this question by stating that cuisine is born with man or, perhaps, it is the opposite: it is man who is born with cuisine.
Cuisine uses an indispensable tool which is fire. And throughout the history of human culture and, also, in ancient mythology - one need only think of the Myth of Prometheus, who steals fire from the gods to give it to men - man who conquers the use of fire finally becomes master of nature. Among the various uses made of fire there is also that of cooking food, this is the moment when man abandons the feral state, differentiating himself from other animals, since no other animal cooks its own food. Therefore, in this sense, cuisine is born with man and man is born with cuisine.
Cuisine soon becomes an activity strongly linked to the cultural factor, when with the birth of agriculture and pastoralism, man learns to "construct" his own food, and it is precisely then that food also takes on a symbolic function.
Bread, with the complex technological process needed to make it (from sowing wheat to harvesting, from flour to dough, from baking to preservation), becomes the symbol of civilized man; for example, in Homeric poems the expression "bread-eaters" is synonymous with "men," while in the Epic of Gilgamesh, the hero Enkidu frees himself from his primitive and savage state only when he learns of the existence of bread.
Together with bread, wine, oil and other products become true symbols of specific civilizations. That of the Mediterranean is the civilization of wheat and therefore of bread, just as Asian ones are civilizations of rice, African ones civilizations of sorghum or millet and those of the American continent are inextricably linked to the consumption of corn.
Eating soon passes from being a mere mechanical gesture to assuming specific cultural, philosophical, religious and economic functions, through which the social complexity of a given civilization is expressed; for example, the choice of food is often linked to certain taboos, just as occupying a certain position at the table and having a particular piece of the cooked animal depend on the social role one holds.
Food also becomes an object of identity, through the consumption of which one recognizes oneself as belonging to a certain group or people.
If in the ancient and multiethnic Mediterranean dominated by Rome, oil, wine and bread were the identity foods of Latin culture, in the Middle Ages, when the concept of Europe was born, understood as a fusion between Roman culture and that of the Germanic populations, composed of tribes, partly nomadic, who drew their sustenance from the forest and from raising livestock left in the wild, it is meat that becomes the central food.
Game takes on a cultural and symbolic value; in the mythology of these peoples it is told, for example, of an enormous pig that in the paradise of the righteous feeds the hosts of heroes who died in battle. The mixture of these two cultures will give birth in the Early Middle Ages to the Romano-barbarian kingdoms and will contribute to the definition of the diet we still know today: alongside the products of the earth, bread, oil and wine, the consumption of meat is introduced.
Christianity, by transforming Roman-Mediterranean foods into its own ritual symbols (bread and wine are incorporated into the liturgy, while oil assumes a central function in the administration of sacraments), will facilitate the fusion of the two food models: the Roman and the Germanic.
Furthermore, starting from the 5th century AD, Christianity will impose through the liturgical calendar some dietary norms, such as the alternation of lean and fat days: Lents in which the consumption of meat was forbidden, and Carnivals in which the consumption of meat assumed, instead, a central role. In this way, liturgical regulations deeply influenced the unification of the food customs of Mediterranean peoples with those of Nordic peoples within European Medieval society.
A further factor that deeply influenced the definition of European food culture was the Islamic conquest between the 8th and 9th centuries, which from the Mediterranean coast of North Africa extended into the European continent with the conquest of southern Spain and Sicily.
In this historical phase, a fracture is created within the Mediterranean, which from an "internal lake," as it was considered until then, becomes a border sea where two different civilizations also confront each other from a food perspective. If bread and wine were sacred foods within the Christian world, Islam had declared the consumption of alcohol and, therefore, wine unlawful. Because of this, vine cultivation retreats in all territories under Arab domination; just as the consumption of bread, an element certainly present in Islamic food culture but not central, gives way to the consumption of flatbreads, pastas and couscous. Another element of rupture is represented by the consumption of pork, a distinctive element of European food culture of Germanic derivation, which is forbidden by Islam, as it is considered an impure animal.
This opposition of Christian Europe of bread, oil, wine and pork, compared to a non-Christian world, in which some of these foods are excluded or do not have the same importance, causes a geographical dislocation of the production and consumption of these foods.
Bread and wine, which were born on the shores of the Mediterranean, become strictly continental foods. Even today, when speaking of wine, one thinks of the great German, French or Italian vineyards, and not of the Middle Eastern areas where this cultivation originated.
In the same way, Islam brings into Europe new food traditions or ones that had been lost over the centuries: citrus fruits, already partly known to the Roman world, in particular: bitter orange, lemon, sweet lemon.
It introduces sugar, with the introduction in Spain and Sicily of sugarcane cultivation; eggplants, artichokes and spinach and the related irrigation techniques, without which their production would have been impossible. And then, it introduces rice and, above all, pasta, which will become a distinctive food of Europe and Italy.
Pasta is an ancient product that the Romans already knew, but it is thanks to the Arabs that the constituent elements of this food begin to be defined, characterized by a multiplicity of shapes compared to the Roman lasagna and by codified gastronomic uses.
In particular, the Arabs introduced to Sicily the practice of drying, which allowed the commercialization of pasta, and the consumption of long pastas, for example vermicelli or spaghetti. Furthermore, the mixture between the tradition of filled pies and pasta gives rise to a new food family, that of stuffed pastas, composed of ravioli or tortelli.
Islamic Sicily will be the driving center of these food innovations that, passing through Italy, will conquer Europe.
To be continued…
A. Vincenti
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