Medieval Origins of Italian Food

Gone Medieval

History Hit

History

4.6 • 2.2K Ratings

🗓️ 8 March 2024

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

For a thousand years, Italy’s cities have been magnets for everything that makes for great eating: ingredients, talent, money and power. Italian food is city food, and telling its story means telling the story of the Italians as a people of city dwellers.

In this episode of Gone Medieval, Matt Lewis meets John Dickie, author of Delizia! The Epic History of Italians and their Food, in which he traces how the evolution of cities and trade in the Middle Ages, as well as taste and creativity, combined to make the world’s favourite cuisine.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval, I'm Matt Lewis. Food has always been everywhere, but my
0:08.7	guest today has a book for us that explores the emergence of Italian cuisine during the medieval period.
0:15.0	And you better believe I'm going to try and claim that at least some of my favorite dishes and perhaps yours are medieval culinary creations.
0:23.0	John Dickie is professor of Italian studies at University College London.
0:27.0	John's previous books include Kosenostra,
0:30.0	mafia brotherhoods, and mafia republic,
0:32.0	so I'm definitely going to show him some respect.
0:34.5	John joins us today to talk about Delizia, the epic history of Italians and their food,
0:40.1	which has a cover endorsement by Standycci no less which is very very cool.
0:44.0	You can also find an accompanying series on Amazon Prime
0:47.2	called Eating History, the Story of Italy on a plate.
0:50.6	Welcome to Gomedeevil John.
0:51.8	Hi, very nice to be here, Matt.
0:53.8	It's wonderful to have you.
0:54.8	I can't tell you how excited I am to talk about pizza and pasta and some of my favorite foods.
0:58.9	The question to start off with, something that you deal with in the book, kind of head on on is whether Italian food even exists or not?
1:05.4	Yes and no is the only answer. Not if you think of Italian food as a sort of single set classic menu of dishes. Italy is very
1:17.4	regionally diverse as everybody knows it only became a nation state in 1861, formerly that regional and
1:26.6	geographical diversity has imprinted itself on the Italian way of eating. But I'm also not one of those people who thinks that Italian food
1:37.8	doesn't exist in the sense that it's just a sort of collection of microquisines that aren't in contact with another.
1:45.0	Certainly there are certain common elements like the way of structuring a menu.
1:50.0	Even though for some Italians, pastor is a relatively recently acquired taste, it nonetheless does suggest it is a common thread in the history and reality of Italian food.
	...

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