History of Italian cooking

The history of Italian cooking is very interesting to find out about.

"Tracing down the culinary history of Italy we find that it started to make its mark during the Roman Empire movement more than 2000 years ago. The Italians even have a cookbook dating back to the first century B.C which shows how important a place food had in society. The structure of Italy as a country underwent a huge change after the fall of the Roman Empire" (Country facts and information, 2004).

"Italy may be home to the world’s oldest known cookbook. This suggests the potential for unifying characteristics within such diversity. Sometimes attributed to the famous epicure Marcus Gavius Apicius of the first century A.D., the cookbook De re coquinaria (On Cookery) is a collection of hundreds of ancient Roman procedures for preparing dishes. The collection was not so much recipes in the modern sense as they were basic directions for the preparation of ingredients intended for the experienced chef. Apicius, a name generally associated with the love for food, likely accounts for the majority of the cookbook, though the damaged manuscripts preserved from a later century are actually a collection of recipes from numerous sources assembled sometime in the fourth or fifth century A.D. (Internet Source). Other ancient Roman writers--including Cato, Pliny, and Horace--identified early place names and their famous goods, from the wild boar of Tuscany and the onions of Pompeii to the cultivated asparagus of Ravenna and the semolina wheat of Campania (Capatti and Montanari 2003). The lists are extensive and are a clear antecedent of famous regional products that define regions within Italy and are available at specialty import markets internationally today.
The cuisine that developed in Italy during the Middle Ages had a number of cultural origins. These influences were deeply rooted in the peninsula such that by the time the recipes and ideas were circulated in humanist texts and other cookbooks in multiple languages across the continent, Italy was beginning to truly distinguish itself from the other political entities that were also emerging at the time. The manuscripts of Roman writers found their way back into Italy in the middle of the fifteenth century, during the Renaissance’s humanist revival of antiquity. But the field of gastronomy may have borrowed less from antiquity than did other intellectual and artistic pursuits of the Renaissance. Renaissance works in gastronomy such as Bartolomeo Sacchi’s De honesta voluptate et valetudine (On Honest Pleasure and Good Health, about 1470) built as much upon the immediate foundations of the Middle Ages as it did classical sources (Capatti and Montanari 2003)".


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References:

Capatti, Alberto and Massimo Montanari. 2003. Italian Cuisine: A Cultural History. Aine O’Healy, transl. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

Grout, James. 2007. "Apicius" in Encyclopaedia Romana. Accessed: March 14, 2008.

Country facts and information (2004). History of Italian cooking. Retrieved from Country facts : the world at your fingertips: http://www.kwintessential.co.uk/articles/italy/history-of-italian-food/1299
May, Tony. 2005. Italian Cuisine. New York, NY: St. Martin's Press. Redon, Odile, Francoise

Sabban and Silvano Serventi. 1998. The Medieval Kitchen: Recipes from France and Italy. Edward Schneider, transl. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.