Why Italy, the cradle of European cooking, never became the gold standard – and why that might be its greatest strength
France is the first table. The Anglophone table relegates, the German‑Scandinavian table performs, the Eastern table revives, the Mediterranean table emerges. But before all of them, there was Rome. And from Rome came Italy – the undisputed mater of European cuisine, the source from which the continent’s cooks drew their first inspiration. Yet Italian cuisine never became the global gold standard. It never produced an Escoffier, a Guide Culinaire, or a Michelin‑starred empire. Its food conquered the world not through the force of courtly refinement but through the quiet, desperate migration of the poor.
Why? The answer lies not in the quality of the cooking, but in the politics of the peninsula, the structure of the church, and the fragmentation of the German elite.
The Great Power That Wasn’t
Italy has not been a unified great power for most of its history. For centuries after the fall of Rome, the peninsula was a patchwork of city‑states, republics, duchies, and papal territories, all competing, warring, and trading. When France was building a centralized state under Louis XIV, when England was forging a national identity, Italy remained a constellation of rival powers. A Florentine had more in common with a Frenchman than with a Venetian; a Neapolitan felt closer to a Spaniard than to a Milanese.
The unification of Italy in 1861 was a political miracle, but it did not create a shared culinary culture. The historian Massimo Montanari notes that “Italy, an ancient country but a young nation, finally managed through political unification in 1860‑1 to bring together a wide range of regional states, all different from each other and all with strong individual identities”. The library’s blog on Italian cuisine puts it even more starkly: “Italy’s 1861 unification presented a peculiar challenge: How could a national cuisine emerge from regions separated for over a millennium, inhabited by people with different histories, mutually unintelligible dialects, and distinct cultural practices?”. The problem of Italian cuisine is the problem of Italy itself: a single label overlaid on a dense network of local identities.
France had a royal court that could codify taste, a network of guilds that could enforce standards, and a state that could project culinary power abroad. Italy had none of these. Its cooking remained “basically amateur cooking even when it is executed by professionals… home cooking, la cucina casalinga, human, lighthearted and informal”. There was no Italian equivalent of the Guide Culinaire because there was no Italian state willing or able to sponsor such a project.
Pellegrino Artusi’s Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well (1891) was a heroic attempt to stitch together a national cuisine from the fragments of regional practice. He collected recipes from across the peninsula, hoping to teach Italians what their fellow citizens were eating. But his book was the work of an amateur, not a court chef; it was a compendium, not a code. Until the late 20th century, “Italian cuisine” was a concept in search of a reality.
The Church That Seasoned, Not Standardised
The Catholic Church is often credited with shaping European food culture – promoting meatless days, encouraging fish consumption, and sponsoring monastic gastronomy. In Italy, the church certainly left its mark. Monks and nuns developed recipes for Christmas sweets, spongata, and the famous “filled hosts” of Puglia. Trappist monks in Rome created an iconic chocolate that is now an inextricable part of the city’s gastronomic identity.
But the church’s influence was localised and ritualistic, not centralising. Its dietary rules – abstaining from meat on Fridays, fasting during Lent – varied widely by region and were often honoured in the breach. More importantly, the church did not create a culinary hierarchy. It did not elevate one regional style over another. It did not train a class of elite chefs who could spread a uniform doctrine.
Indeed, the church’s role in Italian food was sometimes outright hostile. In the 19th century, anticlerical sentiment was so strong that people invented a pasta dish designed to kill priests – a culinary protest against the power of the clergy. The church was a source of recipes, but not a standardiser. Its influence on the national palate was additive, not architectural.
The Holy Roman Empire That Took Roman Cooking North – and Failed
The Roman culinary tradition did not die with the empire. It spread northward, carried by trade, conquest, and the slow osmosis of daily practice. The Germanic elites who ruled the successor kingdoms adopted Roman dining customs, at least initially. As one scholar notes, the Germanic elites “would be the first to incorporate the forms of banqueting of the Romans”. The term “Romano‑Germanic” describes the conflation of Roman culture with that of various Germanic peoples in areas ruled by the empire and then by barbarian monarchies.
But the adoption was partial and superficial. The culinary writings of the late Middle Ages “suggest a food culture abundantly different than its distant Roman ancestor”. Ingredients central to Roman cuisine – garum, the fermented fish sauce used in almost every recipe – were sidelined and forgotten. The Germanic elite fragmented into countless petty kingdoms, duchies, and free cities, each with its own customs, its own taste, and its own indifference to the cooking of the south. The Holy Roman Empire was never holy, never Roman, and never an empire – and its food culture reflected that fragmentation.
The Franks, the Visigoths, the Ostrogoths, the Lombards – all ruled parts of the former empire, but none created a culinary system that could compete with the French court. They lacked the centralisation, the wealth, and the cultural ambition to transform Roman cooking into a national cuisine. By the time the Renaissance revived interest in classical culture, the culinary initiative had already passed to the Italian city‑states – which were too busy fighting each other to project their cooking northward.
The Tragedy of Italian Cuisine
Italian cuisine did not fail; it simply never succeeded on French terms. It never had a Versailles, a guild system, or a state willing to standardise taste. It never produced a Carême or an Escoffier because the social structure that would have made such figures possible did not exist. Italian cooking remained regional, home‑based, and improvisatory – a mosaic of local traditions, not a monolith.
That diversity is now its greatest strength. While French cuisine struggles to maintain its relevance in a world that has grown weary of butter and hierarchy, Italian cuisine has conquered the globe through sheer deliciousness. Pizza, pasta, gelato, espresso – these are not the products of a state‑sponsored culinary project. They are the inventions of the poor, the improvisations of the hungry, the gifts of the emigrants who carried their memories across the ocean and, in the abundance of the New World, invented the dishes that would later return to Italy as “tradition”.
The Italian table is not the first table. It is not the second, third, fourth, or fifth. It is a different kind of table altogether – one that was never meant to be set for a king, but for everyone. And perhaps that is why, in the end, it has become the most beloved table of all.