So how does one cook like an Italian?  By traveling to Italy and eating Italian food in the best restaurants?  By going to the markets in Italy and seeing what is on offer in them?  By purchasing Italian ingredients from a trusted source and utilizing them in Italian recipes?  By taking cooking classes from an Italian or an authority on Italian cuisine?  I suggest that yes and no to some or all of these options is the best answer.

While a certain(albeit limited) sensibility about Italian food can be developed from those sources I think cooking “like” an Italian, or like a member of any foreign culture, requires much more than ingredients and technique.  The interplay of history, food and culture is rich and understanding the importance of any one of those on the others is crucial to learning about and appreciating them and their impacts on the cuisines they represent.  An understanding of any of them singularly, or collectively, can not happen in a vacuum.  The interplay between them is always happening and changing but we can learn about them by exploring the past and the present and we can also have some sort of grasp on the future by looking inside and outside of a culture.

In order to “cook like an Italian”, then, one must investigate the relationship of history, food and culture through texts, memories, traditions, stories, photographs and agricultural data.  The tools involved in cooking, eating and farming are also relevant to constructing a historical context in which one could learn to “cook like an Italian”. If all of this seems a bit daunting it is because it IS daunting.  It is where I come from as a chef who has been cooking the cuisines of Italy, traveling and studying olive oil harvests, trade routes, agriculture and Italian history in the broad sense for over twenty years. The Italian cuisines and the beauty they represent is, at heart, a simple thing.  It is a justified glorification of growing good stuff, preparing it simply and appreciating it in a relaxed fashion.  Buried in that simplicity is a lot that is not so simple but it is the stuff that forms the taken for granted background of their cuisines.