"Italian Cuisine: A Cultural History" by Alberto Capatti, Massimo Montanari

Thematically organized around key issues in culinary history and beautifully illustrated, Italian Cuisine is a rich history of the ingredients, dishes, techniques, and social customs behind the Italian food we know and love today. This magnificent book demonstrates the development of a distinctive, unified culinary tradition throughout the Italian peninsula.

The authors focus on culinary developments in the late medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque eras, aided by a wealth of cookbooks produced throughout the early modern period.
They show how Italy's culinary identities emerged over the course of the centuries through an exchange of information and techniques among geographical regions and social classes.

Authors uncover a network of culinary customs, food lore, and cooking practices, dating back as far as the Middle Ages, that are identifiably Italian:
• Italians used forks 300 years before other Europeans, possibly because they were needed to handle pasta, which is slippery and dangerously hot.
• Italians invented the practice of chilling drinks and may have invented ice cream.
• Italian culinary practice influenced the rest of Europe to place more emphasis on vegetables and less on meat.
• Salad was a distinctive aspect of the Italian meal as early as the sixteenth century.

Contents
Series Editor’s Preface
Introduction: Identity as Exchange
chapter one. Italy: A Physical and Mental Space
Mare Nostrum
From the Mediterranean to Europe
From Europe to Italy
The Fifteenth-Century Definition of the “Italian” Model
“Lists of Things . . . Generally Used in Italy”
Itineraries
Toward Regionalization
Municipal Recipe Collections
Artusi and National-Regional Cuisine
The Mediterranean Again
chapter two. The Italian Way of Eating
Flavors and Fragrances from the Vegetable Garden
Polenta, Soup, and Dumplings
The Invention of Pasta
Torte and Tortelli
The Pleasure of Meat
Eating “Lean” Food: The Liturgical Calendar and the Cooking of Fish
Milk Products
Eggs
Cooked Food and Preserved Food
A New Sense of Typicality
chapter three. The Formation of Taste
Flavor and Taste
The Culture of Artifice
The Legacy of Rome
The Arabs: Innovation and Continuity
Spices
Sweet, Sour, and Sweet-and-Sour
The Triumph of Sugar
The Humanists, Antiquity, and “Modernity”
The Flavor of Salt
Oil, Lard, and Butter
The Italian Model and the French “Revolution”
“Waters, Cordials, Sorbets, and Ice Creams”
Can One Cook Without Spices?
Toward the Development of a National Taste
chapter four. The Sequence of Dishes
The Galenic Cook
“The Things That Should Be Eaten First”
The Meager Repast
Organizing and Presenting the Banquet
The Choice of Wine
The Bourgeoisie Cuts Back
The Death of the Appetizer and the Resurrection of Cheese
The Single Dish
chapter five. Communicating Food: The Recipe Collection
The Book
Title, Frontispiece, and Portrait
Dedications and Tributes
The Organization of Contents and Indexes
The Recipe
The Menu
chapter six. The Vocabulary of Food
A Chronological Outline
Latin
The Vernacular
Franco-Italian
Order and Cleanliness
Linguistic Autarchy
Italian in the Kitchens of Babel
chapter seven. The Cook, the Innkeeper, and the Woman of the House
Recorded Lives
The Kitchen “Brigade”
Costume and Custom
The New Innkeeper
From Housewife to Female Cook
chapter eight. Science and Technology in the Kitchen
Tradition and Progress
The Pope’s Saucepans
A Virtual Discovery: The Pressure Cooker
Artificial Refrigeration
Appert in Italy: The Flavor of Preserved Foods
The Oven, the Sorbet Maker, and Simple Machines
Metal Alloys and Ice Cubes
The Magic Formula
chapter nine. Toward a History of the Appetite
The Hearty Eater
To Stimulate the Appetite
“Indigestion Does No Harm to Peasants”
The Diet of the Literary Man
The Bourgeois Belly
Down with Pasta!
The Repression of the Body and the Virtual Dish
Notes
Bibliography
Index