Mediterranean cuisine
[5][2] 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":[6] Mediterranean cuisine is defined by the presence of fundamental elements which are said to play a more important role than others, reflecting a community of beliefs and practices which transcend religions, languages and even societies.
Essid identifies the "trinity" of basic ingredients of traditional Mediterranean cuisine as the olive, wheat, and the grape, yielding oil, bread, and wine respectively.
[20] 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.
In the preface to her book she writes:[26] Mediterranean food is incredibly popular: pasta, pizza, sausage, wine, gyros,[b] kebab, and falafel can be found just about everywhere.
They offer both stability, continuity and reproduction of a specific pattern of eating which resists conquest, invasion, colonisation, social change, industrialisation and urbanisation.
[38] Those foods included aubergines, spinach, sugar cane, rice, apricots, and citrus fruits,[39] creating the distinctive culinary tradition of Al-Andalus.
[38][42][43][44] 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".
[2] David 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".
[2] 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,[6] bread,[6] wine,[6] roast lamb, or mutton[45] (such as Maghrebi méchoui, Greek kleftiko and souvlaki, and Turkish shish kebab), bottarga,[46][47] and stews of meat with vegetables and tomato (such as Spanish andrajos, French estouffade à la provençale [fr],[48] Italian ciambotta, and Turkish buğu kebabı), are indeed found all around the Mediterranean.
[49] Seafood including sea bream and squid is eaten, often in stews, stuffed, or fried, in Spanish, French, and Italian dishes.
[50] 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.
The dish is ancient, mentioned by the Medieval traveller Ibn Battuta,[51] and found for example also in the Western Sicilian cuisine, especially in the province of Trapani, where it was re-introduced after 1600.
[53] Falafel are small fried croquettes of bean or chickpea[d] flour, currently also eaten across the Levant and the West, but originating in Egypt's Roman era; they are claimed as theirs by Coptic Christians.
[59][60] Tabbouleh is a dish of bulgur cracked wheat with tomatoes, parsley, mint, and onion, dressed with olive oil and lemon juice.
[61][62] Baba ghanoush, sometimes called "poor man's caviar", is a puree of aubergine with olive oil, often mixed with chopped onion, tomato, cumin, garlic, lemon juice, and parsley.
Börek are made of thin sheets of filo pastry, filled with mixtures such as meat, caramelised onion and sweet peppers.
In its Greek variant, well known outside the region, it includes layers of aubergine and minced meat with custard or béchamel sauce on top, but that version is a relatively recent innovation, introduced by the chef Nikolaos Tselementes in the 1920s.
[69] Greek cookery makes wide use of vegetables, olive oil, grains, fish, wine, and meat (white and red, including lamb, poultry, rabbit, and pork).
Some more dishes that can be traced back to ancient Greece are: lentil soup, fasolada, retsina (white or rosé wine flavoured with pine resin), and pasteli (sesame seeds baked with honey); some to the Hellenistic and Roman periods include: loukaniko (dried pork sausage); and Byzantium: feta cheese, avgotaraho (bottarga), and paximadhia (rusk).
Variations among Veneto risottos include additions of fish and white wine; chicken; eel; mushrooms and grated Parmesan cheese; quails; small pieces of beef; courgettes; clams; ragù; beans; mussels; prawns; cuttlefish; and asparagus.
[78][75] Although the toppings in Italian pizzas may be, depending on the order, unquantifiable, in the most rigorous tradition of Neapolitan cuisine there are only two variants: Margherita and marinara.
It is a stew for at least eight people, because it should contain many types of fish such as crayfish, gurnard, weever, John Dory, monkfish, conger eel, whiting, sea bass, and crab.
These are cooked with Mediterranean vegetables and herbs, namely onions, garlic, tomatoes, thyme, fennel, parsley, bay, and orange peel.
[81] Paella is a characteristic Spanish dish, originally from Valencia, radiating early on to Catalonia and Murcia along Spain's Mediterranean coast.
It comes in many versions, and may contain a mixture of chicken, pork, rabbit, or shellfish, sautéed in olive oil in a large shallow pan, with vegetables, and typically round-grain rice[82] (often of the local albufera, arròs bomba, sénia varieties or similar) cooked to absorb the water and coloured with saffron.
[93] The 1984 Guida all'Italia gastronomica states that, "around 1975, under the impulse of one of those new nutritional directives by which good cooking is too often influenced, the Americans discovered the so-called Mediterranean diet.
Increased wealth and busy lives have led people to eat more meat and less vegetables: their diet is becoming more Northern European, with more convenience foods and with less of a preventive effect on cardiovascular disease.
