STORIES EVENTS
It’s with dry pasta that we recognise ourselves as Italian by Lorenzo Ruggeri
Interview with Cristina Bowerman, President of the Ambassadors of Taste Association, ready for the new challenge in China. Her restaurant Glass is due to open in Xi’an What is Italian cuisine according to you? The ingredient, the technique. But if there is a characterising trait, I think of pasta, in particular dry pasta. In the United States I’ve seen fantastic fresh ravioli or tagliatelle being made, but as far as you can travel you will never find dry pasta treated the way we do it, with our culture, differentiation, not only in terms of type but how we work it. It has to do with our palate memory, we already know which pasta to associate with which sauce. And then the huge variety of shapes, the cooking techniques: cooking pasta like risotto, fresh pasta. We associate single techniques with specific shapes and types that others don’t have. And in cooking, in the texture and sensitivity with which we handle the pasta we distinguish ourselves, it defines us. In this, Italian cuisine is unrivalled.
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ook, entrepreneur and President of the Italian Ambassadors of Taste Association. We tapped into Cristina Bowerman, fresh winner of the Tre Forchette in the Restaurants of Italy guide with her Glass Hosteria in Rome.
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Abroad, Italian cuisine is strongly associated with very traditional home cooking, while modern cuisine finds it even more difficult to carve out its own space. Why is that? For me there is no modern or traditional cuisine, there is an Italian cuisine profile. When you walk down the street and see a well-dressed person, you don’t know which Italian designer made that coat, but you recognise an Italian style: the stitching, the balance of shapes. There is an Italian style. Same thing, there is no modern or traditional cuisine but a profile of flavours, which must be respected. I’ll give you an example. One of my best-selling dishes at Glass is modern Bagnacauda with black garlic, gnocchi, edamame, sea urchins, squid ink bread, seasonal black truffles. This recipe has nothing traditional but reflects the Italian profile: creamy, round, has unusual flavour peaks and yet I respect that canon of Italian cuisine and is recognized as such. Modern cuisine, including Italian cuisine, has been strongly influenced by Northern
JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2021