Italy is considered to be the mother of European Latin cuisines, a fact which is very much contested by the French.   Nero, Tiberius, were considered the "gourmets" of their times. Recipes since Roman times were kept by monks in the middle ages. The first cookery book was put together by a librarian at  the Vatican called Bartolomeo Sicci, in 1474. During the Renaissance interest in gastronomy grew and wealthy families produced lavish banquets trying to outdo each other. This is still part of the character of Italian people.    The Medici of Florence were the leader in this field When Catherine De Medici travelled to France for her marriage to the Dauphin in 1533 she took her chefs with her and they passed their knowledge to the French who still to this day will not admit that there lie the roots of French culinary traditions. Italian cuisine have a strong regional character, because Italy did not become a kingdom until 1860. The first pasta factories were in the South, in Naples, and still much of Italy’s pasta comes from the southern regions

Italian dishes vary, of course, from region to region, but I will try to keep to the ones more common to the country as a whole. A dish like cappelletti (little hat-shaped pasta) served in capon broth makes me think straightaway of snow at Christmas time, together with roast turkey on the spit, torrone (nougat) and panettone (light fruit cake); while eel, mostly roasted, is a treat reserved for Christmas Eve, Lasagne for family celebrations, ravioli for Easter, and on a cold winter's day you may crave for a warming plate of steaming polenta.

Italian meals, no matter how ordinary, will always be a three-course affair. In everyday life there will be no antipasto.  but  the  meal  will  begin  either  with  a pastasciutta or a soup, then there will be a 'main' course, followed by fruit. As with everything else, customs differ from north to south. Northerners will tend to cook a big lunch, then have a more frugal evening meal, while in central and south Italy dinner in the evening will be more substantial than the midday meal. Colazione means breakfast, but, as breakfast usually consists of just a cup of coffee or very little more, in more refined circles colazione indicates lunch, while pranzo is an evening meal. Ordinary folk will call pranzo the midday meal and cena the evening one. Pranzo is also a celebration feast. A bit confusing, don't you think? But useful to know, just in case you are invited to colazione. You would find it a bit embarrassing to turn up at eight o'clock in the morning!

Apart from traditional recipes, I've included a range of dishes typical of my native land which I am sure will tempt Anglo-Saxon tastes also. They are all recipes which I have learned from my grandmother, my mother and my friends. They have had the approval and the praise of many very fussy Italian friends and very conservative British friends, so I hope I am providing good Italian recipes to suit everybody's taste.

I like to think of cooking as a pleasure not a chore. You may think that some of these dishes take long to make, but once you try them you will see that this is not so. Many can be prepared in advance, and most of them (marked with the symbol (F) freeze well, so you can make something special for your dinner parties with hardly any work on the day. I shall try to explain everything step by step in all my recipes, because there are always some points which are new territory, even for an experienced cook. Even men unaccustomed to cooking should be able to follow my instructions. My husband was my guinea pig, but only for the easiest recipes, because he is not a cook at all. I once went away for a few days and, as usual, left dinners in the freezer with every possible instruction for their use. When I came back he told me that one evening he wanted to cook some sausages from the freezer. His comment was, ‘I grilled them but they would not cook in the middle.' 'Did you not turn them on the other side?' I asked. 'Oh yes,' he replied, 'but they still would not cook.' He proceeded to show me how he had cooked his sausages: one whole packet under the grill, six sausages in a bundle, the way you buy them. Can you be more of a beginner than that?

Italians are very hospitable and they will be generous in excess towards guests and friends. Even in hard times, like during the war, when it was everyone for himself, they would make every effort to welcome unexpected visitors. It is part of Italian nature to show off and give more than they can afford. Italians never make portions, but always bring food to the table and, as my mother taught me, there must be some left over to be sure that there was enough to start with.

A peculiarity of Italian politeness is that they will Very rarely accept something you are offering for the first time. Italians will say 'No, thank you' to the first offer, and will only accept - if they want to - after the offer has been repeated. Before I got used to British ways, I would always say 'No, thank you' at first, and wait to be asked again - which of course I wasn't! I would not want to be accused of encouraging people to eat unhealthy food, with too much fat, when we are always being reminded of the hidden dangers to our well-being in so many gorgeous dishes. You can always substitute the type of fat I use in my recipes with whatever you feel your heart desires: polyunsaturated fats can take the place of ordinary margarine or butter or lard, and the same goes for frying oil. Bear in mind that it is a medical fact that people living in the poorer parts of Italy, in the south, where the diet consists mostly of pasta, olive oil, bread, lots of vegetables, little meat and hardly any butter, have a lower incidence of heart attacks than the population from the more affluent northern part of the country. A doctor also told me that a little wine lowers your blood cholesterol. So, let your common sense prevail, keeping in mind that we cannot starve our bodies of everything, and enjoy eating your Italian dishes without the sense of guilt that accompanies forbidden foods. By the end of the last war we had been so starved of fats for some years that we were craving for rich, fatty foods. One of my favourite snacks was a sandwich, made with a thick layer of margarine, which no one could mistake for butter, and slices of uncooked tinned bacon, both army issues, which the troops very gladly got rid of and which found their way to our tables through the flourishing black market of those days.

When the British troops were in my town, my family invited to dinner some officers who were billeted in the house next door and seemed to be very interested in Italian food. We managed somehow to produce a sumptuous meal, which surprised even us, because we did not know at first how we were possibly going to cope. The guests seemed to enjoy everything and thanked us profusely. Strangely enough, some of them were not very well the next day. We did not connect the event with the food when we heard this, because we had all eaten the same things and we were in perfect good health. In fact, better than usual, as we had not had a meal like that for a long time. Only a few years later, when I was living in London, my husband told me the secret of that strange malady. Thinking that 'the poor Italians' would give them a lousy meal, they all had a full officers' mess dinner, before coming to our house. Of course, then their eyes were bigger than their stomachs and they could not resist eating all the good food we had prepared. Hence the 'sick' feeling, a sort of unknown legionnaire's disease' with a difference!

My home town, Fabriano, is in central Italy, in the Marches region. I love talking about my birthplace, but I shall try to be careful that enthusiasm for my native land does not alter the truth. Fabriano is a well-known town, situated about 200km (150 miles) northeast of Rome. If you draw a straight line from Rome to Ancona (a port on the Adriatic Sea), you will find Fabriano just over  the Apennine mountain range. So the town has the Apennines to the west, and hills and other mountains of secondary ranges on the other sides, giving the impression that it is sitting in a bowl at 354m (1318 feet) above sea level. The countryside is of particular interest, with its mountains rising to 6000 feet, hills and gorges, its vegetation and remote mountain villages, typical of that part of Italy.   Fabriano also, because of its position, is an ideal centre from which to go on and visit lots of other interesting places:  Florence,  Rome,  Assisi,  Perugia,  Urbino and Ancona, for example.

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