page_title: Mediterranean cuisine
section_title: Geography
hierarchical_section_title: Mediterranean cuisine / Geography
caption_attribution_description: Español: Distribución potencial del olivo en la Cuenca del Mediterráneo (Oteros, 2014)English: Potential distribution of the olive tree in the Mediterranean Basin (Oteros, 2014).
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: Various authors have defined the scope of Mediterranean cooking either by geography or by its core ingredients.
  Elizabeth David, in her A Book of Mediterranean Food (1950), defines her scope as "the cooking of the Mediterranean shores" and sketches out the geographical limits:
  from Gibraltar to the Bosphorus, down the Rhone Valley, through the great seaports of Marseilles, Barcelona, and Genoa, across to Tunis and Alexandria, embracing all the Mediterranean islands, Corsica, Sicily, Sardinia, Crete, the Cyclades, Cyprus (where the Byzantine influence begins to be felt), to the mainland of Greece and the much disputed territories of Syria, the Lebanon, Constantinople, and Smyrna.
  Despite this definition, David's book focuses largely on Spain, France, Italy, and Greece.
  She defines this region as coextensive with the range of the olive tree: "those blessed lands of sun and sea and olive trees". The olive's natural distribution is limited by frost and by availability of water. It is therefore constrained to a more or less narrow zone around the Mediterranean Sea, except in the Maghreb and in Spain, where it is distributed more widely, and on the islands of the Mediterranean, where it is widespread.
  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":
  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. The olive tree, the emblematic tree on more than one account, traces the bounds of a frontier of landscapes and lives on either side of which the Mediterranean begins or ends. Above Montelimar, nicknamed "Gates of Provence", is the limit of the olive.
  Other authors question that there is any such common core:
  The belief in a common core, emerging from a claim to authority over that kernel of "Mediterranean-ness," is what underlies writing describing the culinary Mediterranean, yet it seems that only from far away does a unified Mediterranean exist. The closer one gets to that common core, the less it is visible, until the food of Umbria comes to seem entirely different from the food of Tuscany, and to compare either to the food of Greece would be absurd. The very idea of a Mediterranean ensemble—be it onions and olive oil and tomatoes or some other combination entirely—presupposes not only a shared history but a unified history, an imagined moment in which the Mediterranean presented a single culture that over time has, like a language, split and branched and flowered into the wild variety of contemporary cuisine.
  Some writers include the cuisines of the eastern Adriatic coast – Albanian, Montenegrin, and Croatian, while most do not mention them. Some writers also include areas not touching the Mediterranean Sea or supporting olive cultivation, including Serbian, Macedonian, and Portuguese cuisine.
caption: Potential distribution of the olive tree over the Mediterranean Basin (Oteros, 2014)[2]
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