Vegetables and Salads

One cannot overestimate the importance of vegetables in Italian cuisine. In part, this is because meat was historically too expensive for regular consumption; vegetables and grains have always been a staple of cucina povera. However, in Italian Cuisine: A Cultural History, historians Alberto Capatti and Massimo Montanari argue that vegetables have always held a special place in Italian culture. They note that the oldest Italian cookbook, Liber de Coquina, written in Latin at the end of the thirteenth or the beginning of the fourteenth century, begins with a chapter on vegetables. Since this cookbook was written for the Angevin court of Naples, a population that was certainly not confined to a diet of vegetables, the authors infer that even then and among all classes, vegetables have been uniquely esteemed.