Vegetables

As a cucina rustica (‘rustic cuisine’), Sardinian cooking features a lot of vegetable dishes. In peasant cultures, animals were kept to provide milk, wool and eggs, or to help pull ploughs, and so were only killed for meat at the end of their working life or for special occasions. Meat was a luxury food and vegetables and grains were typically added to dishes to help make a little go a long way. Predominantly vegetable dishes are often flavoured with just a little meat in the form of cured pork, such as guanciale, or seasoned with Sardinia’s famous bottarga (dried mullet roe). Meat stocks, leftover from boiling a chicken or a piece of mutton, are also used to add depth of flavour to simple vegetable dishes.