You could say that Italian food has been with us since the Romans decided to invade Britain. The Romans had already been heavily influenced by the Greeks and Etruscans before them so it wasn’t all their original ideas. One thing is certain, they did not bring pasta, but they did bring olives, citrus fruit, wine and snails!
So, how have we ended up with the Pizza and Pasta we love so much, and the gelato Ice Cream? Dining out in an Italian restaurant with the jaunty music, the frescos of old Roman on the walls and the Chefs cooking away on commercial ranges like the Lincat SLR6 Silverlink 600. You average domestic oven and hob just isn’t going to cut it when faced with hundreds if not thousands of dishes are being made each week. If you are cooking in those kinds of quantities, then it is better to look for commercial options. You could start by looking at https://www.247cateringsupplies.co.uk/catering-appliances/commercial-ovens-and-ranges/commercial-ranges/lincat-slr6-silverlink-600-4-burner-gas-range-oven
You may be wondering how this beautiful food found its way to our shores.
First of all it’s a bit sad that we just stick to the Pasta, Pizza and Gelato. Italy is a very diverse place and before it was a unified country it had lots of different regions that all had very different ideas about food. In the North there are the cold Alps and in the South it is warm as the Mediterranean laps against the beaches of Calabria. This gives the Italian farmers the chance to grow a number of diverse ingredients to add flavour and colour to the dishes. One thing that the Italians do appreciate is that good food and good times go together, this is the main ingredient that has seen the cuisine be so successful in the UK.
The Italian food we eat is very heavily influenced by the immigrants that left Italy after the First World War. Italy was suffering a recession and the new world of North America offered a fresh start. Naturally the people wanted to have a taste of home. This taste came over to Britain with the GIs in the Second World War and, like Indian/Bangladeshi and Chinese food, there was a lot of interest by the British in what new foods of the world were out there to be sampled. This American Italian food was very influenced by the use of Pasta and the street food of Pizza.
It was in the nineteen seventies when a big influx of Italian immigrants, like their ancestors to the USA, began to come to Britain as well. They started, like the Bangladeshi and Chinese migrants, to open restaurants and offer the food of their native country to the UK. They played on the lifestyle of dining and “La Dolce Vita”, or the Good Life in English, even if this did mean Spaghetti Bolognaise and Chips. We only get a limited range of the wide diversity of food that Italy produces but that is slowly changing as more restaurants open and we become more daring.
Buonamangiata!
