What is the best food in Europe?

El secreto ibérico (for non-vegetarians) ;)
 
I'm gathering that you're talking about South America? A lot of distant relatives of mine went to Argentina. In fact, Italians from Argentina are my best matches on 23andme. They still sometimes come back with their families in August. It seems that they have maintained their "Italianicity" better than Italian Americans even when there's been some intermarriage.Americans tend to assume that all Italian cuisine is like Italian-American cuisine, when it really isn't even that faithful a copy of southern cooking, much less like the cooking of my people. (Although that has changed in recent years.) They don't believe me when I say that the first pizza I ever ate was in an American school for Friday lunch. :) Our pizza was called farinata and it was made from ceci flour. The closest to pizza would be our focaccia, with olive oil, salt and maybe onions.
Savona_Farinata_Bianca.jpg
focacciafinal.jpg
We also didn't eat pasta every day. Where I come from is sort of where Emilia, Liguria, and Toscana meet, and my mother had to do homage to my father's Emilian roots as well, so she always followed a sort of rough rotation: pasta, minestra, risotto, polenta, gnocci, and so forth for the starches, along with things like roasted or boiled potatoes. We probably ate pasta twice a week. Yes, they call them cappelletti in parts of Emilia. My nonna from Parma called the big stuffed pasta tordei. They were dressed with cream and grated parmigiano, or melted butter and salvia. My favorite pasta is still my mother's ravioli alla genovese, though; it was to die for. :) I tried to keep up these traditions, but it's difficult when you work ten hours a day, so the more complicated stuff had to wait for holidays. They ate a lot of parmigiano in those valleys, obviously. Prosciutto too, of course, since one of my father's villages is a valley over from Langhirano. My favorite cured meats, though, are mortadella and culatello. Anyway, I'm also very fond of French food, other than that I'm not too big on organ meets. A little bit goes a very long way for me when it comes to them! I like Spanish food too, and Greek to a certain extent. I've also come to really love Chinese food. It can be very complex and sophisticated.
Jesus! All this talk and images made me hungry. :LOL:

Oh, yes! I forgot to define that I was talking about South America.
Argentina indeed received a lot of immigrants, from many parts of Italy. You probably have distant relatives from São Paulo, which, unlike Southern Brazil, received a significant number of immigrants from Liguria, Tuscany, Emilia, among other regions. But the "Italianicity" is kept more strongly in small towns of the South, where is still spoken a peculiar language, generated from that several brought by immigrants.

In the Southern colonies, there was no pizza and nothing like it, and pasta was restricted to a few types, such as one that seems "rigatoni" (but we don't use this word). I'm talking about the more traditional cuisine, of course, and it really wasn't so diverse, comparing to what we have today.

Interesting to know about "tordei". We call "torTei" a very popular pasta that I forgot to mention. It's filled with a kind of pumpkin cream and boiled in water. It's great! Other popular dish is the "fortaia".
Salvia is the major flavor of our galeto and menarosto, and it's also used for tea.

I looked in G. Earth the region that you mentioned. I would have not managed to leave such a beautiful place. :)
Well, my people were mainly from TV area, but I have fingers near Lake Garda, BL, and even ancestry traces in VI and UD.
 
Jesus! All this talk and images made me hungry.
laughing.gif


Oh, yes! I forgot to define that I was talking about South America.
Argentina indeed received a lot of immigrants, from many parts of Italy. You probably have distant relatives from São Paulo, which, unlike Southern Brazil, received a significant number of immigrants from Liguria, Tuscany, Emilia, among other regions. But the "Italianicity" is kept more strongly in small towns of the South, where is still spoken a peculiar language, generated from that several brought by immigrants.

In the Southern colonies, there was no pizza and nothing like it, and pasta was restricted to a few types, such as one that seems "rigatoni" (but we don't use this word). I'm talking about the more traditional cuisine, of course, and it really wasn't so diverse, comparing to what we have today.

Interesting to know about "tordei". We call "torTei" a very popular pasta that I forgot to mention. It's filled with a kind of pumpkin cream and boiled in water. It's great! Other popular dish is the "fortaia".
Salvia is the major flavor of our galeto and menarosto, and it's also used for tea.

I looked in G. Earth the region that you mentioned. I would have not managed to leave such a beautiful place.
smile.gif

Well, my people were mainly from TV area, but I have fingers near Lake Garda, BL, and even ancestry traces in VI and UD.

A few of my friends here have accused me of posting "food porn". :grin: I do love to cook, and not just Italian food. I'm one of many people who cooked myself all the way through Julia Child's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking". I just wasn't as clever as Julie Powell, so I didn't cash in by writing a book about it.

One of the things that attracted me to this site is that there are sections for travel, and music, and food etc. I would post on French food, Spanish food etc. but I worry that members from those countries might feel I was trampling on their preserve.

Here I posted about a memorable wedding banquet I attended in my own little area. It's "a chilometri zero" restaurant, so all locally sourced foods and recipes, which is what I prefer, even where, as here, it meant the restaurant couldn't serve any of the wonderful fish that's only thirty or so minutes away by car.
http://www.eupedia.com/forum/threads/30097-Memoral-Regional-European-meals?highlight=Lunigiana

Tuscan food is discussed here, in posts 8 and 12:
http://www.eupedia.com/forum/threads/30590-Tuscan-Holidays?highlight=Tuscan+holidays

This one is specifically on the food of the Cinque Terre. The links weren't showing, so I fixed it.
http://www.eupedia.com/forum/threads/30388-The-Cinque-Terre-and-its-cuisine?highlight=Cinque Terre

Anyway, tordei was just my grandmother's dialect word for tortelli, which are a form of ravioli. The filling was usually a complicated blend of meat, greens and cheese, but they do indeed have a specialty in Parma called tortelli di zucca:
http://www.langhiranovalley.it/immagini/tortelli_prodotti.jpg

The only "different" pasta shape I remember from the Veneto is "bigoli".
 
A few of my friends here have accused me of posting "food porn". :grin: I do love to cook, and not just Italian food. I'm one of many people who cooked myself all the way through Julia Child's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking". I just wasn't as clever as Julie Powell, so I didn't cash in by writing a book about it.

One of the things that attracted me to this site is that there are sections for travel, and music, and food etc. I would post on French food, Spanish food etc. but I worry that members from those countries might feel I was trampling on their preserve.

Here I posted about a memorable wedding banquet I attended in my own little area. It's "a chilometri zero" restaurant, so all locally sourced foods and recipes, which is what I prefer, even where, as here, it meant the restaurant couldn't serve any of the wonderful fish that's only thirty or so minutes away by car.
http://www.eupedia.com/forum/threads/30097-Memoral-Regional-European-meals?highlight=Lunigiana

Tuscan food is discussed here, in posts 8 and 12:
http://www.eupedia.com/forum/threads/30590-Tuscan-Holidays?highlight=Tuscan+holidays

This one is specifically on the food of the Cinque Terre. The links weren't showing, so I fixed it.
http://www.eupedia.com/forum/threads/30388-The-Cinque-Terre-and-its-cuisine?highlight=Cinque Terre

Anyway, tordei was just my grandmother's dialect word for tortelli, which are a form of ravioli. The filling was usually a complicated blend of meat, greens and cheese, but they do indeed have a specialty in Parma called tortelli di zucca:
http://www.langhiranovalley.it/immagini/tortelli_prodotti.jpg

The only "different" pasta shape I remember from the Veneto is "bigoli".
Thanks for the links. I'm going to explore them. :)

Well, I'm not myself a great cooker, but certainly I'm a good taster. :grin:

Yes, it's bigoli, but our traditional seems a little different, like this (Jesus!, really nothing to do with rigatoni :ashamed2:):

Bigoli-do-Real-Brunetta.jpg


This is, I think, the main pasta of immigrants in Southern Brazil. Some people here call it just "massa" or "macarrao". hehe

And here is the traditional tortei (the filling is lightly sweet):
13042012_154700.jpg
 
I learned how to make "Zucchine in Purgatorio", my Molfettese grandmother makes it. It came out amazing!

-Take one whole onion, and dice it into pieces

-Take about 4 zucchini, and cut them into slices.

-Place it in a large frying pan, and add about a palm full of salt over the zucchini; Cook on high, in extra virgin olive oil for about 5 minutes

-As it begins to become translucent, cook on medium, for 30 minutes. It will begin to soften, as you contiguously mush it with a wooden spoon.

-Pour four eggs with parmesan, or pecorino cheese, and beat them in a bowl. You pour this into the contents of the frying pan after the 30 mins of cooking.

-You cook it on medium/low for an additional 10 minutes, while you continue to scramble it, now with a fork and spoon.

I recommend eating it with toasted Italian bread.
 
Without a doubt, Spanish and Portuguese cuisine.

 
The question is not precise enough. One possibility is the question refers to restaurants. The other possibility, the issue of what people eat at home (or maybe better, what people eat, when they eat what is traditional in their countries).

I leave aside the former.

About the latter, the answer is clear: the Mediterranean. From Andalusia, to the Països Catalans (Valencia, Balearics, Catalonia), to the South of France, to Italy, to Greece (and also possibly we should include Lebanon), what people eat at home is just spectacular.

When I was a child, I did not realize of that.

Now, after having lived in several countries, I can state with confidence that my mom would be the number one in the Michelin list. I have learned a few things from her. And my parents eat *that* on a daily basis.

The interior of Spain eats much, much worse than the corresponding Mediterranean coast (I do not know about the Atlantic coast).
 
Every country has its culinary delights for the culinary tastes of each.
 
I agree with Fastar. We are lucky to have an excellent vegetable garden and we cook with extra virgin olive oil. The potages and stews are now adapted to modern life and are much lighter in fat since they do not work in the field. It is a varied diet giving special importance to legumes, vegetables, fish and meat. I was talking to a person from another European country and I was surprised when he told me that he ate meat every day. Personally what I prefer are the legumes. From Andalusia to Catalonia the homemade cuisine is fantastic, the gazpacho is a masterpiece for health, rice, meat and fish, not only is it food, it is a way of life.
 
Portuguese ofc :LOL:

I like French and Italian cuisine.
 
The cuisine of the Balkans and the Caucasus is the best and most balanced cuisine :)
 

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