The Ancient Traditions of Sardinia

Sardinian cuisine is a celebration of products that come mainly from the land. Rather oddly, given that it is an island, this cuisine is not widely represented by the bounty of the sea. The flavours of the island’s natural and traditional ingredients such as lamb, suckling pig and the huge variety of vegetables that flourish here are all profoundly enriched by the unmistakable aromas of Sardinia and the abundance of Mediterranean herbs and plants.

Among the many celebrated meat dishes, the most well-known is porceddu (suckling pig cooked on a spit or in a hole in the ground, using the aromatic wood of the Mediterranean scrubland). However, there are numerous other meat dishes, such as rabbit a succhittu, served in a sauce made from the liver, wine, capers and tomatoes; wild boar in Cannonau wine; or chicken wrapped in myrtle leaves. These days, fish and shellfish dishes are of course widely present on the Sardinian menu, but most of these are much more recent additions compared to the truly historical dishes of the island, when everything that came from or out of the sea seemed to represent danger and caused the original inhabitants of the island to genuinely fear it. Bottarga (salted or dried mullet or tuna eggs) is a favourite along the island’s south-west coast, and is often considered to be the caviar of Sardinia.