Bread and oil
With its peasant origins, it's hardly surprising that bread plays such an essential role in Tuscan cuisine. It's the star ingredient of many simple, nourishing dishes, but also serves as a base for antipasti. The special feature of Tuscan bread is that it contains no salt. While this may seem disconcerting at first glance, the reason is simple: bread in Tuscany is not meant to be eaten on its own, but, on the contrary, is always used as an accompaniment either to products that already contain a lot of salt, such as cold meats, or as a base for dishes that will later be salted. This is particularly true of filone, which resembles a baguette and is used to make bruschette, such as fettunta: made from toasted bread and rubbed with garlic, it is normally prepared with freshly extracted olive oil in autumn, which still retains its spiciness. Crostini di fegato, in a similar vein, are croutons spread with a creamy rabbit liver pâté flavored with capers, anchovies and sage. The richeraffettati misti is a large plate of mixed charcuterie sliced very thinly, in true Italian style. Traditional examples include finocchiona, a sausage flavored with fennel seeds, and soppressata, a purely peasant sausage made from poor cuts such as pork rind or pig's head. Delicately flavored with mild spices (nutmeg, cinnamon and cloves), it should not be confused with the very spicy soppressata calabrese. Also worth mentioning are buristo, the Tuscan equivalent of black pudding, but here served in thin slices, and salame, a broad term encompassing several types of cured meats similar to our salami. Other popular dried meats include rigatino, similar to pancetta, or prosciutto di Casentino, made in the province of Arezzo, east of Florence. The best-known Tuscan charcuterie, however, is lardo di Colonnata, produced in the village of the same name, near the famous Carrara marble quarries. With a Protected Geographical Indication (PGI), this product is still made in a unique way, leaving the lard to mature with salt and spices in marble cases. Finally, Pecorino Toscano, made from sheep's milk, has a PDO. It is also very popular as an antipasti, accompanied by bread.
But the famous bread is not just used to munch on cold meats and cheese. In fact, it's used to make many of the classics of Tuscan country cooking, such as pappa al pomodoro, a thick tomato soup flavored with garlic and basil and dipped in stale bread. It was even featured in Rita Pavone's 1965 song, Pappa al Pomodoro. This melt-in-the-mouth, richly flavored recipe was often used to wean newborn babies. The sauce should be served warm, drizzled with oil. Panzanella is a summer salad made mainly with stale Tuscan bread, accompanied by tomatoes, cucumber and basil, and seasoned with olive oil and vinegar.Acquacotta, on the other hand, is a rich soup combining chard and tomato, served on toasted bread, decorated with an egg yolk and finally sprinkled with pecorino cheese. Other peasant dishes include ribollita: a soup similar to minestrone, containing all kinds of vegetables and enhanced with a little bacon. Finally, pinzimonio is not necessarily a cooked dish, but is also part of this rural Tuscan cuisine. It's a collection of assorted vegetables (bell pepper, tomato, fennel, celery) served with olive oil simply seasoned with salt and pepper. The quality of the olive oil is essential for this dish. There are several DOP(Denominazione Origine Protetta) oils in Tuscany, such as olio extravergine di oliva Chianti Classico, Terre di Siena, Lucca and Seggiano.
The classics of Tuscan cuisine
Among the most common primi, ravioli nudi take their name from the fact that they contain no dough, but are stuffed with spinach, ricotta, egg and parmesan. They are often served with a tomato sauce. Tortelli di patate is a more classic stuffed pasta, filled with a crushed potato and Parmesan cheese. Simple in appearance, this dish is nevertheless accompanied by a rich meat and porcini or even truffle sauce. Pappardelle alla lepre is a popular autumn dish made with pappardelle, a large ribbon-shaped pasta, accompanied by a ragù of hare in red wine. A variant with wild boar meat may also be served.
On the secondi side, is impossible not to mention the emblematic bistecca alla fiorentina, a thick rib of beef. The meat, often from the Chianina breed of cattle, is always rare. At the opposite end of the spectrum, stracotto alla fiorentina is prepared with the poorest parts of the beef, and therefore requires very long cooking until the beef melts. Pollo alla cacciatora or "chicken hunter" is widely available in Italy, although its origins seem to lie in Tuscany. The chicken is braised for a long time with mushrooms, herbs, tomato and white or red wine. Trippa alla fiorentina is tripe simmered in a tomato, wine and onion sauce. Tuscan cuisine includes many offal dishes ingeniously prepared to sublimate the poorest parts, such as lesso, a stew made from various pieces of beef and veal tongue, served cold with a salsa verde made from parsley, garlic and lemon. Fegatelli are skewers of pork liver and stale bread, flavoured with bay leaves and barbecued. For the more curious, lampredotto should not be missed. This sandwich is generously topped with caillette, part of the beef stomach, simmered for a very long time and then served in a round bun with salsa verde. There are also a number of fish and seafood dishes, such as calamari alla toscana, squid served on a bed of candied spinach, or triglie alla livornese, red mullet cooked in a rich tomato and parsley sauce. In Italy, secondi (main courses) are not normally served with rice or pasta, but rather with vegetables, corn-based polenta or, in the case of Tuscany, fagioli cannellini, very large white beans often cooked simply with olive oil and aromatic herbs.
Chianti and company
Of course, it's impossible to enjoy these dishes without pairing them with wines, as Tuscany has long been renowned for the excellence of its wine production. It's unthinkable to talk about Tuscan wines without mentioning Chianti, whose production is limited to a handful of vineyards around the cities of Florence, Siena, Arezzo, Pistoia, Pisa and Prato. It is traditionally bottled in pot-bellied flasks, the base of which is encased in a wicker basket called a fiasco in Italian. Other wine appellations in the region include Brunello, Carmignano and Sangiovese. For those less fond of wine, why not simply have a negroni, a cocktail based on gin, red vermouth and Campari, invented in Florence in 1919.
Although there are few desserts or sweet snacks to be found in Tuscany, there are a few specialties not to be missed. Schiacciata alla fiorentina, a light sponge cake flavored with vanilla and orange zest, is traditionally made for Carnival in February. It is dusted with powdered sugar and stencilled in the shape of the Florence lily, the city's emblem. Much more rustic, castagnaccio is a compact chestnut flour cake eaten by the poorest inhabitants of mountainous areas. More surprisingly, profiteroles, often called bongo in Italy, are extremely common in Florence restaurants. Indeed, choux pastry is an Italian invention and was originally fried. But if there's one dessert you can't miss in Italy, it's gelato. While it's difficult to pinpoint the precise origin of ice creams and sorbets, it would seem that 16th-century Florentine painter, architect and engineer Bernardo Buontalenti deserves this tribute. Indeed, he was a master at preserving ice cream. For the Medici court, he was able to create a delicious sorbet flavored with honey, bergamot and sweet wine. It is said that the guests were delighted by the extravagance of this dessert, so complex to produce with the limited means available to cooks at the time. Other sources also mention the Sicilian chef Francesco Procopio Cutò, founder of the famous Café Procope in Paris, as the inventor of ice cream. In any case, gelato, whether or not it originated in Florence, remains an unmissable treat when discovering the city.
At the table of Catherine de Medici
Promised to King Henri II, son of François I, whom she married in 1533, Catherine de Médicis brought a breath of fresh air to French cuisine, which was still rather poor and slowly emerging from the Middle Ages. Accompanied by Florentine cooks, confectioners and pastry chefs, she imported to the French court previously unknown vegetables such as artichokes, broccoli, peas, asparagus and spinach, as well as beans and tomatoes, freshly discovered in the New World a few decades earlier. What's more, it introduced the use of forks to the court, as the French aristocracy in the 16th century still ate with their hands or a simple spoon. Finally, pastry-making experienced an unprecedented boom with the introduction of specialties such as sorbet, ganache and nougat, as well as frangipane, said to have been invented by Count Cesare Frangipani as a wedding present for the future queen.
Choux pastry also appeared at the French court, thanks to Catherine de Médicis. Its paternity is attributed to an Italian pastry chef nicknamed Pantanelli. But it was Popelini after him who invented the cake, popelin, made from a fire-dried dough he called "pâte à chaud". From the 18th century onwards, he called it "pâte à choux". It was later perfected by French cooks to give us the éclairs, religieuses and Paris-Brest we know today.
The macaron, for its part, first appeared in Italy in the Middle Ages, where this small cake made from almonds, sugar and egg white, crunchy on the outside and soft on the inside, was eaten on its own and was not composed of two shells glued together by a filling. Catherine de Médicis introduced maccherones to the court. They were democratized at the wedding of Duke Anne de Joyeuse, favorite of King Henri III and son of Catherine de Medici, in 1581. So popular were they that they spread throughout France, giving rise to regional variants such as the Nancy or Montmorillon macaroon. The version we know today, however, originated in Paris in the 19th century.
Historians often consider that Catherine de Médicis was behind a veritable gastronomic revolution in France, bringing techniques and specialties that were later sublimated by French chefs. What's more, the term "Florentine revolution" is sometimes used to describe the introduction to the French court of previously unknown fruits and vegetables that were to enrich French gastronomy for a long time to come.
