page_title: Mediterranean cuisine
section_title: Italian
hierarchical_section_title: Mediterranean cuisine / Cooking / Italian
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Spaghetti aux vongole (Alassio, Italie) English: Spaghetti with clams (Alassio, Italy) Italiano: Spaghetti alle vongole
context_page_description: Mediterranean cuisine is the foods and methods of preparation by people of the Mediterranean Basin region. The idea of a Mediterranean cuisine originates with the cookery writer Elizabeth David's book, A Book of Mediterranean Food and was amplified by other writers working in English. Many writers define the three core elements of the cuisine as the olive, wheat, and the grape, yielding olive oil, bread and pasta, and wine; other writers emphasize the diversity of the region's foods and deny that it is a useful concept. A common definition of the geographical area covered follows the distribution of the olive tree.
  The region spans a wide variety of cultures with distinct cuisines, in particular the Maghrebi, Egyptian, Levantine, Ottoman, Greek, Italian, Provençal, and Spanish, though some authors include additional cuisines. Portuguese cuisine, in particular, is partly Mediterranean in character.
context_section_description: Mediterranean Italian cuisine includes much of Italy outside the north and the mountainous inland regions. It is a diverse cuisine, but among its best-known and most characteristic foods are risotto, pizza in Neapolitan and Sicilian styles, and pasta dishes such as spaghetti.
  Risotto is a dish made using Italian short-grain rice, which is both highly absorbent and resistant to turning into a pudding when cooked with stock and flavoured with onions and garlic, cooked in butter. Anna Gosetti della Salda's book of Italian regional cookery lists 37 risotto recipes, 18 of them from the Veneto. Variations among Veneto risottos include additions of fish and white wine; chicken; eel; mushrooms and grated Parmesan cheese; quails; small pieces of beef; courgettes (zucchini); clams; ragù; beans; mussels; prawns; cuttlefish; and asparagus.
  Pizza, or as David notes "pissaladina or pissaladière" in Provence (the cuisines of Mediterranean France and Italy having something in common), is a piece of bread dough rolled out thin, with a topping which varies from place to place, but is generally much simpler than those in the English-speaking world. In Naples this is tomato, anchovies and buffalo mozzarella. In San Remo it is onions cooked in olive oil, with salted sardines. The Provençal variety uses onions, black olives, and anchovies.
  Spaghetti dishes also vary. It may be eaten as David says "simply with olive oil and garlic", without cheese, or with a sauce of "very red and ripe peeled tomatoes", cooked briefly and flavoured with garlic and either basil or parsley. One Sicilian variant includes pieces of bacon, onions fried in fat, garlic, stoned olives, and anchovies, served with olive oil and grated Parmesan cheese.
caption: Spaghetti alle vongole, a typical Italian dish of pasta with clams
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