Mediterranean cuisine
Mediterranean cuisine is the food and methods of preparation used by the people of the Mediterranean basin. The idea of a Mediterranean cuisine originates with the cookery writer Elizabeth David's A Book of Mediterranean Food, and was amplified by other writers working in English.
Many writers define the three core elements of the cuisine as the olive, wheat, and the grape, yielding olive oil, bread and pasta, and wine; other writers deny that the widely varied foods of the Mediterranean basin constitute a cuisine at all. A common definition of the geographical area covered, proposed by David, follows the distribution of the olive tree.
The region spans a wide variety of cultures with distinct cuisines, in particular the Maghrebi, Egyptian, Levantine, Ottoman, Greek, Italian, French, and Spanish, although some authors include additional cuisines. Portuguese cuisine, in particular, is partly Mediterranean in character.
The historical connections of the region, as well as the impact of the Mediterranean Sea on the region's climate and economy, mean that these cuisines share dishes beyond the core trio of oil, bread, and wine, such as roast lamb or mutton, meat stews with vegetables and tomato, vegetable stews, and the salted cured fish roe, bottarga, found across the region. Spirits based on anise are drunk in many countries around the Mediterranean.
The cooking of the area is not to be confused with the Mediterranean diet, made popular because of the apparent health benefits of a diet rich in olive oil, wheat and other grains, fruits, vegetables, and a certain amount of seafood, but low in meat and dairy products. Mediterranean cuisine encompasses the ways that these and other ingredients, including meat, are dealt with in the kitchen, whether they are health-giving or not.
Geography
Various authors have defined the scope of Mediterranean cooking either by geography or by its core ingredients. Elizabeth David, in A Book of Mediterranean Food, defines her scope as "the cooking of the Mediterranean shores" and sketches out the geographical limits:Despite this definition, David's book focuses largely on Spain, France, Italy, and Greece.
She defines this region as coextensive with the range of the olive tree: "those blessed lands of sun and sea and olive trees." The olive's natural distribution is limited by frost and by availability of water. It is therefore constrained to a more or less narrow zone around the Mediterranean Sea, except in the Maghreb and in the Iberian Peninsula, where it is distributed more widely, and on the islands of the Mediterranean, where it is widespread.
The Tunisian historian Mohamed Yassine Essid similarly defines the region by the olive's presence, along with bread, wheat, and the grape as the "basic products of Mediterranean folk cuisine":
Other authors question that there is any such common core:
Some writers include the cuisines of the eastern Adriatic coast of Dalmatia—Albanian, Montenegrin, and Croatian, while most do not mention them. Some writers also include areas not touching the Mediterranean Sea or supporting olive cultivation, including Serbian, Macedonian, and Portuguese cuisine.
Key ingredients
Essid identifies the "trinity" of basic ingredients of traditional Mediterranean cuisine as the olive, wheat, and the grape, yielding oil, bread, and wine respectively. The archaeologist Colin Renfrew calls this the "Mediterranean triad".Olive
The olive appears to come from the region of Persia and Mesopotamia, at least 6,000 years ago. It spread from there to nearby areas, and has been cultivated since the early Bronze Age in southern Turkey, the Levant, and Crete. The ten countries with the largest harvests are all near the Mediterranean : together, they produce 95% of the world's olives.The olive yields bitter fruits, made edible by curing and fermentation, and olive oil. Some 90% of the fruit production goes into olive oil. The Mediterranean region accounts for the world's highest consumption of olive oil: in 2014, the highest-consuming country, Greece, used 17 kg per head; Italy, 12 kg, Spain, 13 kg; the United States for comparison used only 1 kg per head.
Wheat
Wheat was domesticated in the Fertile Crescent, in and near the Levant some 10,000 years ago. Its ancestors include wild emmer wheat; this was hybridised, harvested and sown to create domestic strains with larger grains, in ears that shatter less readily than wild forms. It was spread across the Mediterranean region as far as Spain by 5,000 BC.Wheat is a staple food in the Mediterranean region. Wheat bread was already critically important in the empire of ancient Rome, which included the entire region; at that time, around 2,000 years ago, North Africa was the "breadbasket" of the empire. Other staple wheat-based Mediterranean foods include pasta and semolina products such as couscous and bulgur. In turn, these are made into dishes such as the Greek dessert galaktoboureko, consisting of filo pastry parcels around a custard made with semolina. A widespread wheat dish from Turkey and the Levant to Iran and India is halva, a dessert of sweetened semolina with butter, milk, and pine kernels.
Grape
The grape was domesticated between 7,000 and 4,000 BC between the Black Sea and Persia; archaeological evidence shows that wine was being made there by 6,000 BC, reaching Greece and Crete in the fifth millennium BC and Spain by the last millennium BC. Winemaking started in Italy in the ninth century BC, and in France around 600 BC.Grapes are mostly grown for making wine and vinegar as basic components of the Mediterranean diet, as well for drying as raisins or for eating as table grapes. Raisins and table grape varieties are chosen for their flavour.
History
Concept
The concept of a Mediterranean cuisine is very recent, probably dating from the publication of David's A Book of Mediterranean Food. David herself did not use the term, speaking instead of Mediterranean "food", "cookery", or "cooking". The usefulness of the concept is disputed. Carol Helstosky, author of the book Food Culture in the Mediterranean, is among the authors who use "Mediterranean cuisine" interchangeably with "Mediterranean food". In the preface to her book she writes:Essid acknowledges that "geographical differences and the vicissitudes of history" have affected the food of different Mediterranean lands, but nonetheless asserts that:
File:Cristoforo munari-bodegon.JPG|thumb|upright|One of several Mediterranean cuisines: Spanish kitchen still life by Cristoforo Munari,
On the other hand, Sami Zubaida argues in his book Culinary Cultures of the Middle East that:
The cookery author Clifford A. Wright wrote in 1999: "There really is no such thing as 'Mediterranean cuisine'. At the same time, we seem to know what we mean when we use the expression ..." Wright argued that David's book itself was largely about specifically French Mediterranean food, pointing out that "only 4 percent of her recipes come from North Africa or the Levant", so that the focus was on an aspect of European cuisine, largely omitting coverage of Middle Eastern cuisine.
Since David's time, a variety of books on Mediterranean cuisine have been written, including Abu Shihab's 2012 book of that name; Helstosky's 2009 book; books by other cookery writers include S. Rowe's Purple Citrus and Sweet Perfume: Cuisine of the Eastern Mediterranean ; and Mari-Pierre Moine's Mediterranean Cookbook. There are many more cookbooks covering specific cuisines in the Mediterranean area, such as B. Santich's The Original Mediterranean Cuisine: Medieval Recipes for Today, on Catalan and Italian recipes; and H. F. Ullman's, on the cooking of Tunisia, Spain, and Italy, each one subtitled "Mediterranean Cuisine".
Origins
The ingredients of Mediterranean cuisine are to an extent different from those of the cuisine of Northern Europe, with olive oil instead of butter, and wine instead of beer. The list of available ingredients has changed over the centuries. One major change was the introduction of many foods by the Arabs to Portugal, Spain, and Sicily in the Middle Ages. Those foods included aubergines, spinach, sugar cane, rice, apricots, and citrus fruits, creating the distinctive culinary tradition of Al-Andalus.Another major change was the arrival of foods from the Americas in early modern times, notably the incorporation of the potato into Northern European cuisine, and the eager adoption of the tomato into Mediterranean cuisine. The tomato, so central now to that cuisine, was first described in print by Pietro Andrea Mattioli in 1544. Similarly, many of the species of Phaseolus beans now used around the Mediterranean, including P. vulgaris, were brought back from the Americas by Spanish and Portuguese explorers.
In mountainous areas of the Mediterranean, wheat was often replaced by chestnuts as a staple food, earning the chestnut tree the name "bread tree".
Cooking
David's introduction to her 1950 book characterises the cooking of the Mediterranean countries as "conditioned naturally by variations in climate and soil and the relative industry or indolence of the inhabitants". She identifies "the ever recurring elements" in the food of this extensive region as olive oil, saffron, garlic, "pungent" local wines, as well as the "aromatic perfume" of herbs, especially rosemary, wild marjoram, and basil, and the bright colours of fresh foods in the markets, "pimentos, aubergines, tomatoes, olives, melons, figs" and "shiny fish, silver, vermilion, or tiger-striped". She includes cheeses of "sheep's or goat's milk", "figs from Smyrna on long strings" and "sheets of apricot paste which is dissolved in water to make a cooling drink".With common ingredients including the olive, wheat, and grape; a shared climate; and a long period for cultural exchange, it might be expected that a single, pan-Mediterranean cuisine would have developed. Certain items, such as olive oil, bread, wine, roast lamb, or mutton, bottarga, and stews of meat with vegetables and tomato, are indeed found all around the Mediterranean. Seafood including sea bream and squid is eaten, often in stews, stuffed, or fried, in Spanish, French, and Italian dishes. Despite this, however, the lands bordering the Mediterranean sea have distinct regional cuisines, from the Maghrebi, Levant, and Ottoman to the Italian, French, and Spanish. Each of those, in turn, has national and provincial variations.