Italy (and, hence, italian food history) has, possibly, the richest urban history of the whole planet and the enviable culinary habits of the Bel Paese are an indissoluble part of its traditions and habits.
Many of the most famous italian traditional dishes and recipes take their name from a city: bistecca alla fiorentina, spaghetti all'amatriciana, prosciutto di Parma to just name a few.
Friselle are a staple food that was produced and acclaimed for its long conservation period and was therefore a valid alternative to bread, especially in those periods when flour was scarce.
If you think about it, after all, it was a natural consequence.Cities were, in fact, the only places where everything that was needed to develop a great gastronomy concentrated: ingredients and culinary skills, naturally, but also power, richness, markets and social competition. Italian gastronomy gives its best in the urban markets, less so in the countryside farms.
A tradition for its consumption, from times past, was to dip freselle directly with sea water and with pure fresh tomato, which was squeezed to let the juices out.
This is a demonstration that italian gastronomy has nothing to envy to the one of other Countries.
When talking about italian food history, you might have sometimes heard the expression civilt della tavola (civilisation of the table).
This definition embraces the many and different aspects of a culture, which find their expression throughout the food: from agricultural economy to recipes for pickles, from family bonds to the right technique for spitting olive seeds. Food is fascinating, but indeed more fascinating still is who produces it, cooks it, eats it and talks about it.
Only a small portion of the total quantity was baked in softer bread to be consumed in the very first days, more often than not with the addition of ingredients like pumpkin seeds, olives, onion, is sliceable forms.
Malnourishment and hunger are fundamental elements of the italian food history and all our accounts proceed through the food habits of the dominators and of the dominated, through the daily alimentation and the meals of the higher classes.
Along with their hanging from a wooden beam on the ceiling, friselle were preserved in clay jars, called quartieri or capasoni.
This image has deeply contributed to the prominence that Italy has gained in the panorama of the worldwide gastronomy.
In the end, this is the beauty of this journey: we will not reach a destination, but will always find new starting points.
The Renaissance
Oven baked twice and cut after the first baking, they always come in pairs as they are nothing else that the two halves of the same form.
This sort of literature flourished between the XIII and the XIV centuries, all over Europe, and especially there were not only the arts of fine cooking were more sought-after, but where the economic (and, hence, the political and cultural) power pulsated.
Sizes are variable: friselles diameter and their holes diameter can vary from 5-10 centimeters to 20 or more.
Italian history and italian food history has long been marked by the lifestyle of the rural masses: especially in the northern and central regions, the mezzadra (sharecropping) partially preserved farmers from hunger and the hard and grueling fatigues that represented the standard way of living of the rural masses throughout Italy, up to the 1960's.
Indeed, these books were not covering eating habits, but gastronomic expertise: one thing is nutrition and alimentation habits of the common people, linked to their territories and products, another is a treatise on the art of combining the finest ingredients, from the different parts of the known world to satisfy even the most exigent of the palates.
And again, it is not a coincidence that the recipes described in these books were very similar to each other: if you think about it, this fact is hardly surprising.If it's true that these books were if not commissioned at least, certainly, endorsed by those who could afford gastronomy as opposed to a simple diet, then you will not fail to notice that the public to which the subject of these works appealed was neither too wide, nor disconnected.
Usually put in the oven in trays of no more than 6 to 8 pieces, after the first baking each single fresella is horizontally cut with a thread (a strozzo, choked), giving the surface the typical rough aspect.
Spices were not only a precious trading good (since ancient times), they were a real status symbol, back then. Many traders made fortunes by discovering or inventing new trading routes, to supply the ever increasing demand for spices among the higher classes and, as a result of this trend-setting, more and more among lower classes too.
In the past, the size of friselle measured the quantity of bread necessary to the nourishment of a worker and usually provided the major part of the calories in the meal.
This sauce has been one of the main ingredients of the farmers' diet throughout the past millennium and its recipe, thankfully, is only traceable in the memory: that sauce means hunger.
But from all this, we should not err, thinking that what we have today was created then and only from the customs of the noble classes.Those times most probably marked the birth of the Italian gastronomy as we could think of today: at the same time, they were leveraging numerous distinct habits that for centuries (or millennia) had characterised the Italian and other territories and that would later mark the borders of national vs regional cuisines.
As an example, think about the vegetable (especially olive) oils used in the southern parts of Italy (nowadays produced and consumed all over it) and the use of animal derivatives (like butter, lard and lardo) in the north.
Many of the most famous italian traditional dishes and recipes take their name from a city: bistecca alla fiorentina, spaghetti all'amatriciana, prosciutto di Parma to just name a few.
Friselle are a staple food that was produced and acclaimed for its long conservation period and was therefore a valid alternative to bread, especially in those periods when flour was scarce.
If you think about it, after all, it was a natural consequence.Cities were, in fact, the only places where everything that was needed to develop a great gastronomy concentrated: ingredients and culinary skills, naturally, but also power, richness, markets and social competition. Italian gastronomy gives its best in the urban markets, less so in the countryside farms.
A tradition for its consumption, from times past, was to dip freselle directly with sea water and with pure fresh tomato, which was squeezed to let the juices out.
This is a demonstration that italian gastronomy has nothing to envy to the one of other Countries.
When talking about italian food history, you might have sometimes heard the expression civilt della tavola (civilisation of the table).
This definition embraces the many and different aspects of a culture, which find their expression throughout the food: from agricultural economy to recipes for pickles, from family bonds to the right technique for spitting olive seeds. Food is fascinating, but indeed more fascinating still is who produces it, cooks it, eats it and talks about it.
Only a small portion of the total quantity was baked in softer bread to be consumed in the very first days, more often than not with the addition of ingredients like pumpkin seeds, olives, onion, is sliceable forms.
Malnourishment and hunger are fundamental elements of the italian food history and all our accounts proceed through the food habits of the dominators and of the dominated, through the daily alimentation and the meals of the higher classes.
Along with their hanging from a wooden beam on the ceiling, friselle were preserved in clay jars, called quartieri or capasoni.
This image has deeply contributed to the prominence that Italy has gained in the panorama of the worldwide gastronomy.
In the end, this is the beauty of this journey: we will not reach a destination, but will always find new starting points.
The Renaissance
Oven baked twice and cut after the first baking, they always come in pairs as they are nothing else that the two halves of the same form.
This sort of literature flourished between the XIII and the XIV centuries, all over Europe, and especially there were not only the arts of fine cooking were more sought-after, but where the economic (and, hence, the political and cultural) power pulsated.
Sizes are variable: friselles diameter and their holes diameter can vary from 5-10 centimeters to 20 or more.
Italian history and italian food history has long been marked by the lifestyle of the rural masses: especially in the northern and central regions, the mezzadra (sharecropping) partially preserved farmers from hunger and the hard and grueling fatigues that represented the standard way of living of the rural masses throughout Italy, up to the 1960's.
Indeed, these books were not covering eating habits, but gastronomic expertise: one thing is nutrition and alimentation habits of the common people, linked to their territories and products, another is a treatise on the art of combining the finest ingredients, from the different parts of the known world to satisfy even the most exigent of the palates.
And again, it is not a coincidence that the recipes described in these books were very similar to each other: if you think about it, this fact is hardly surprising.If it's true that these books were if not commissioned at least, certainly, endorsed by those who could afford gastronomy as opposed to a simple diet, then you will not fail to notice that the public to which the subject of these works appealed was neither too wide, nor disconnected.
Usually put in the oven in trays of no more than 6 to 8 pieces, after the first baking each single fresella is horizontally cut with a thread (a strozzo, choked), giving the surface the typical rough aspect.
Spices were not only a precious trading good (since ancient times), they were a real status symbol, back then. Many traders made fortunes by discovering or inventing new trading routes, to supply the ever increasing demand for spices among the higher classes and, as a result of this trend-setting, more and more among lower classes too.
In the past, the size of friselle measured the quantity of bread necessary to the nourishment of a worker and usually provided the major part of the calories in the meal.
This sauce has been one of the main ingredients of the farmers' diet throughout the past millennium and its recipe, thankfully, is only traceable in the memory: that sauce means hunger.
But from all this, we should not err, thinking that what we have today was created then and only from the customs of the noble classes.Those times most probably marked the birth of the Italian gastronomy as we could think of today: at the same time, they were leveraging numerous distinct habits that for centuries (or millennia) had characterised the Italian and other territories and that would later mark the borders of national vs regional cuisines.
As an example, think about the vegetable (especially olive) oils used in the southern parts of Italy (nowadays produced and consumed all over it) and the use of animal derivatives (like butter, lard and lardo) in the north.
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