Italian Cuisine: In The Heart Of Tuscany

When an American conjures up an idea of “Italian cuisine,” often what comes to mind is pasta, red sauce, and garlic bread. Pasta, no doubt, plays a large part in most traditional Italian regional cuisine, and few cultures know how to employ a tomato the way that Italians can. However, there are so many distinct styles and trademarks within the different regions of Italy that it is hard to lump together all Italian regional cuisine into one general type of cooking. In reality each region has a very distinct style and taste, and there is really no way to appreciate Italian regional cuisine without visiting restaurants and eateries all over the boot.

Tuscany is a region of Italy that takes up a small piece of the western coastline on the Tyrrhenian Sea. Since a large border of the Tuscan region is coastal, seafood plays a large role in the regional cuisine of Tuscany. A coveted destination for tourists, Tuscany is overflowing with cultural experiences, with roots stemming from the Renaissance. Florence, Pisa and the busy port of Livorno all lie within this modest region. Like it’s simple but beautiful landscape, Tuscan cooking keeps things simple. Tuscan bread, for example is a saltless crusted compliment to their judiciously spiced entrees.

While many people think of Italian cuisine as being very salty and filled with garlic, onion, and basil, Tuscan cuisine uses seasoning very sparingly to bring out the natural flavors of the vegetables, beans, and grains that make up their traditional regional cooking. Chefs of Tuscany are renowned for their rice dishes, and a fish or duck dish in Tuscany is often not complete without a risotto base. They also blend wine seamlessly into these dishes, evaporating the alcohol content and leaving the fruits to mingle with the grains and filled pastas that compliment the meat and fish entrees that bring the rich and famous from all over the world to Tuscany.

Along the coast, seafood plays an integral part of the cuisine. A trademark of the Tuscan coast is a soup called caccuccio. Caccuccio is a rich soup made from a tomato and fish base. The secret is to use many different types of fish, pureed bones and all directly into the base of the soup. This soup, served with a hearty Tuscan bread is filling enough to constitute an entire meal. While the coast of Tuscany is home to many a delicacy, it is the varied nature of the Tuscan landscape that provides such variety in the regional cuisine of Tuscany.

The cattle and boars that are particular to the region, for example, make for a taste that you cannot find anywhere else, in soups, grilled dishes, and hams. While Tuscany is responsible for only four percent of Italy’s overall olive oil production, Tuscan olive trees can live to be hundreds or even thousands of years old. So while each tree produces less of an oil yield than trees customarily found in other regions of Italy, the trees have a much more rich history. This simplicity grounded in a rich tradition is only appropriate for the Tuscan region.

Bars in Tuscany – a Gastronomic Experience

A small town in Tuscany, ancient red brick and stone, narrow cobbled streets winding around the contours of the hill upon which it is built, a few shops, all closed now, as it is siesta time. The only sign of life comes from the doors of a bar, an appetising aroma of espresso coffee wafting out to give hope of food and sustenance to the tardy traveller. If you’re lucky it will be one of those bars that provide a fine array of freshly made sandwiches and pastries.

Italian bars are not primarily about drinking…alcohol that is. Coffee is their staple, the reputation of the barista stands or falls on the espresso he produces. (A fine, literary example is provided in ‘The Food of Love’ by Anthony Capella. Set in Rome, the barista is forever tinkering with his coffee machine in pursuit of the perfect coffee, cannibalising his van to add parts to the machine to build up ever-higher pressure.) Bars provide a social function: most of the neighbourhood will pass through the bar during the day, for a breakfast cappuccino and brioche (pastry), mid-morning espresso and regular doses of the same throughout the day. Even today most people stop work at lunchtime for a two or three hour siesta break, then work until 7 in the evening.

Anyone with any respect for their digestion would take a leisurely lunch either at home or in a restaurant or trattoria, but for those in too much of a hurry, wanting food on the go, the bar provides the equivalent of ‘fast-food’: tramezzini (sandwiches made with sliced bread, usually intended to be toasted), panini (filled rolls of all sorts), pastries both sweet and savoury, ice-creams. Of course quality varies – at worst a sad selection of curling-edged tramezzini, at best an enormous variety of breads and fillings, tantalisingly displayed and beautifully wrapped, if you intend to take away.

My memories of the best include: Nannini’s in Siena, where it can take hours just to choose; the bar in the main square of Colle di Val d’Elsa (Bassa), where you could get a slice of flaky-pastried pie filled with spinach, ricotta, egg and more that melted in the mouth and ice-cream that kept you there all day, just to try all the different flavours; a simple bar on the main road below Monteriggione, which would make you up a panino fresh, with a crusty roll and ample slices of prosciutto, carved straight from the ham, as you waited; a bar on the Via di Citta in Siena near the Duomo, which had the best breakfast brioches ever, tempting you beyond the sensible ‘just one’, into the realms of second cappuccino, second brioche and beyond!

It is eight years since I was last in Tuscany, (having children put a halt to travelling for a while), but I am sure that those bars still endure, serving coffee and food, the same mouth-watering treats: Tuscan ‘fast-food’ at its best.

Copyright 2006 Kit Heathcock