Brief history of Apulian cuisine
Apulian cooking is apparently a very frugal type of cuisine whose main ingredients are grano duro, oil, a vast range of garden vegetables, fish from both her seas – the Adriatic to the East and the Ionian to the South – and wine. A type of frugality that was the alimentary model for the cuisines of ancient Greece and Rome, the two most significant dominations seen in this region. However, there are also traces of the passing of the Byzantines, Arabs, Swabians and Spanish in the culture and, therefore, also in the cooking traditions.
If universities in America (and elsewhere) believe that the Mediterranean diet (of which Apulia is probably the best representation) is the healthiest of all, the reason for this can be identified in the fact that its inhabitants (today almost 4 million) are industrious farmers, herders, fishermen who know how to handle the produce available to them with skill – and equal simplicity since the beginning of time. The result is a strictly seasonal cuisine of flavours and fancies, of scents and quirks, practised with love and passion, with tradition and a knowledge that has been handed down orally from mother to daughter. All these characteristics are the key fruit of an ancient history: the earliest certified human presence here is that of the “Man of Altamura”, an archaic example of homo neanderthalensis who lived 250,000 years ago. In approximately 1,000 B.C.E., this generous land was settled by the Daunians, the Peucetians and the Messapians, people who probably came from Illyria. During the later Hellenistic age, the region became a part of Magna Grecia.
It is a long and fascinating history where each epoch has left clear and significant traces on the territory, of which its simple, yet equally ingenious, cuisine is a representative and efficient synthesis.
