Snippets from the Italian Scene
More on Meats in the Italian
Diet
I've also been thinking more about my reply (last time) to the question regarding vegetarian cuisines in Italy. While it is true that there were (and are) no regions with strictly vegetarian cuisines, it's also true that there are a great many Italian dishes that qualify as vegetarian, and some regions did in the past display a fondness for greens that left those from other regions nonplussed. For example, before the widespread availability of commercially produced dry pasta (mid-late 1800s), Neapolitans were referred to by their neighbors as "mangia foglie," which means leaf-eaters, because of the leafy vegetable soups they consumed in great quantity. The wealthy also included meat in their versions, making things like the Neapolitan Easter soup, but for many it was just the leaves, and one can be quite certain the soups were good. Things were similar further north; writing in the 1890s Artusi says, " Tuscans, and in particular Florentines, whose love of vegetables is such that they'd willingly stuff them into everything, put beet greens into this dish, where they seem to me to go as well as baked bread goes with the Creed (Artusi's variation on a Tuscan saying, that something "goes as well as Pilate with the Creed"). This excessive use of greens is no doubt one of the reasons, and certainly not the least, behind the flaccid constitutions of some groups of people who bear up poorly under the stress of illness, and fall as thick as the leaves in late autumn."
Back in Artusi's day people firmly believed in the restorative powers of meats, and even now Elisabetta (who's an MD) occasionally encounters elderly people, especially out in the country, whose first response to a debilitating illness is to buy the victim a steak. Returning to the problem of Italian vegetarian cuisine, you will find a great deal of it, primarily in first course dishes -- either meatless pasta sauces, which are especially nice in summer, when a rich meat sauce would be way too much, or vegetable based soups of one sort or another. There are also lots of vegetarian antipasti, and if you are looking for a slightly different vegetarian main course, why not grilled vegetables, with some fried vegetables on the side (or a good Roman-style salad)? For the more traditionally inclined, there are stuffed vegetables too. You'll find lots of recipes through the onsite recipe index.
More on meats and vegetables in the diet.
A presto,
Kyle Phillips
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