Enhance the flavor of every single ingredient: don’t let one overcome the other.

Always opt for fresh and seasonal ingredients.Listen to your suppliers – butcher, greengrocer, fishmonger… -: they’re an inexhaustible source of knowledge and inspiration.Take your time: for evaluating and selecting ingredients, for cooking, for setting the table, for letting red wine decant, for intensely savoring the food….You’ll understand Italy when you understand Italian food, and you’ll understand food when you’ll interiorize the lifestyle.Īfter 30+ years of cooking Italian and living, in Italy I can share with you a few fundamentals of the Italian food culture, the basics you’ll need before diving into the books: We finally understood what we hadn’t captured until then: Italian cuisine is not a technique or a few recipes: Italian food is the center of Italian culture. Where we would be eternal newbies, with the excitement and the sensibility that comes with it.

A city where everything would’ve been an adventure, where we would forever be half and half (mango-lovers and pasta-devourers). We packed, learned the basic vocabulary ( fame, mangiare, buono ), and settled in Rome. Then, the time to redeem our palate came, time to experience authentic Italian cuisine in loco. My mother had learned everything she could from my Sicilian grandmother’s cooking lessons.īut there was something we missed, something we didn’t understand… Our parents had instituted homemade gnocchi or pasta nights and made us part of the process. Every time they visited, Nonna and Nonno packed their suitcases with the finest chocolates, pasta, anchovies, olives, etc. But let me say they didn’t capture Venezuela’s adventurous spirit either – just to be fair.Įveryone had made an effort.

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