MEDITERRANEAN KITCHEN
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The Mother Cuisine

Anyone who has ever seen, smelled and then eaten his way through a platter of the green noodles known as fettuccine verdi can resdily accept Italian cooking as a symbol of Latin culture, and as a satisfying expression of a love of the good life as well. It would probably occur to verry few people, however, to regard Italian cooking as the source of every other Mediterranean cuisine.

Nevertheless that is precisely what it is. The cooking of the Italian penisula was the first fully developed cuisine in Europe. Its originators, the ancient Romans, found some of their culinary ispiration in Asia Minor and Greece, and thei also drew on many resources and ingredients that were home grown. Combining all these, they made it possible for Italy to teach France and all other Occidental cultures the meaning of good cooking and eating. Indeed, Larousse Gastronomique, the bible of the French kitchen, goes so far as to make the concession that "Italian cooking can be considered, for all the countries of Latin Europe, as a veritable mother cuisine".

The Italian cuisine became a mother, most experts agree, in 1533, when Catherine de'Medici journeyed from Florence to France for her marriage to the future King Henri II. Both Catherine and her kinswoman Marie de'Medici, who followed in her footsteps to become the queen of King Henri IV in 1600, brought teams of expert cooks to France with them. These culinary aristocrats possessed, and delivered to France, the secrets of the most sophisticated cookery that had yet been developed. They knew the art of making modern pastry and desserts cakes and cream puffs and ices.

Medici cooks also prepared, for the first time outside Italy, dishes including such now-familar vegetables as artichokes, broccoli, and the tiny peas that the French took as their own and that the world now knows as petits pois. The French had never eaten so well.

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