L'Italo-Americano

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 18, 2018 www.italoamericano.org L'Italo-Americano 2 A tasty plate of spaghetti alla carbonara, or M i c h e l a n g e l o ' s Moses? A steamy pizza margherita or Leonardo's Mona Lisa? A yummy and refreshing gelato al pistacchio, or Caravaggio's Bacchus? The answer comes only apparently as a surprise: it's always art! Cooking is one of the symbols of our country. We're famous in the world for our dishes and for the pleasure we enjoy when sitting together around the table, just as much as we are for the many, invaluable masterpieces filling our - and other countries' - museums. Chefs like Massimo Bottura, Davide Scabin, Nadia Santini, Carlo Cracco, only to name the tiniest drop in the sea, are rightly considered artists, nonconformist creative minds who managed to revolutionize the culinary language, renovate preparation and regenerate the ingredients of our most classic menus. They are champions of flavors, who know how to set trends, and they are famous influencers, who know all about traditional cooking techniques; but they also abound in inspiration and exuberance. They earned Michelin stars, international fame and world awards for their unequalled ability to project art into a plate. Art, because there is invention, aesthetics, creative power, suggestion, innovation, genius. In their way of cooking we find research, study, novelty, freshness, but such contemporaneity always goes hand in hand with the wisdom inherited from regional recipe books, hand in hand with our great national culinary tradition. Being able to revisit our most notorious preparations and to give them a future through evolution, through a progress that keeps up with the times and with international cuisines means knowing well what came before us. Only after this, we can aim higher and export our dishes into the rest of the world, making people who are not used to tricolored flavors and to our habits love them. In this sense, Italian cuisine and its chefs become ambassadors of Italian culture in the world. But we shouldn't underestimate the difficulties of rising above the rest within our national borders: being able to amaze the public with food in Italy is just as hard as conquering proselytes internationally. When playing home, our chefs must reinvent a sensory memory tied to dishes we are accustomed to, with the aim of convincing us to prefer their novel version over our mom's tried and tested one, of not making us say immediately "my grandma would make it better." Today, Italian cuisine is no longer made of recipes. To say it better, Art, culture and the evolution of Italian cuisine: chefs' research From the director it's not simply a list of ingredients, mixed following well-consolidated practices to produce recognizable, reassuring flavors. Because today, between pans, saucepans, lids and ovens, we talk especially of culinary culture. And culture, just like art, walks on two feet: one is history, the other is evolution. Because the type of creativity that truly leaves a mark is the one which "digested" canonical teachings and can, as a consequence, move forward. The artist who breaks established schemes is the one who knows them so well he or she can transcend them. In the kitchen, traditional dishes must be edited, thought again, recreated. The ability to invent, however, doesn't come out of a magic top hat, but out of the products of Italy's great gastronomic tradition, out of the knowledge of recipes and their organoleptic qualities and out of a chef's ability to regenerate them. When compared to many foreign chefs, ours have the advantage to work with the cream of the crop, with true agricultural, gastronomic and oenological excellences: the variety of flavors and terroirs, of bio- diversities and cru, the quality of our basic products make a real difference. The very fact Italy is the European leader when it comes to protected denominations and that, everywhere in the world, Made in Italy is synonym with quality, is an advantage we cannot underestimate. At the same time, it's also true that a second is sufficient to ruin a dish, a pinch too much of salt enough to lose a perfect balance, an optimal equilibrium of flavors. To each advantage corresponds an ulterior level of difficulty: variety and quality need to be handled well and exalted. In this context, the demarcation line traced by Italian cuisine's guru, Gualtiero Marchesi, remains fundamental. He used to explain the importance of subtraction: a dish can improve greatly if we manage to subtract elements and to concentrate on the essential. If Italian cuisine can count on extremely good produce and raw materials, on a culture of shopping at the market and buying fresh, on the simplicity inherited from tradition and on the knowledge of the territory and its history, it's definitely our gastronomic culture that makes the difference. Reflection, in-depth analysis, harmony of form and taste. Because, according to Marchesi, food mustn't only be good, it has to make you think and, it may be useful to make it clearer, it has to have thought behind it, an explosion of flavors, a series of techniques, and stories to tell between a mouthful and the other. Because this is art: not the child of chance, of a lucky combination of flavors and colors, but the result of passionate, meticulous, original work, which places under the spotlight our enormous cultural inheritance, along with its very own modern reading. This is how Italian cuisine produces today dishes that taste like modernity, but could become, tomorrow, the most quintessential of Italian recipes. Simone Schiavinato, Director NEWS & FEATURES TOP STORIES PEOPLE EVENTS

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