The culinary and cooking tradition of the Gargano.
The Gargano cooking has the typical features of the well known Mediterranean cooking. This statement if left as an expression (generally, daily and obsessively recurrent) leads to at least two obviousness: a. the aforementioned cooking refers to a geographical area - and also refers to history - that is characteristic and typical of the Mediterranean basin; b. such as it is, it has been using, and still uses today, typical products of this particular environment and of that particular history: wheat, olive, vines, etc… With such a preface, it is necessary to go on a bit more than a simple observation to realise that the "mare nostrum" is a sort of culture liquid - and of culture - of as many countries as the cooking that faces the Mediterranean: an alimentary cookery and a gastronomic universe that has been diversified during the history and still is today, although the intercultural and intracultural contamination and the pushing towards the ratification and the standardisation. For example, it will be useful to acknowledge and to notice that in the Gargano cooking exists, next to the Mediterranean characteristics, one that is more analytically descriptive of an agricultural-forest-pastoral reality and that can explain the great variety of procedures and recipes, thanks to the use of very different food resources: such as the natural ones, vegetables, fruit and berries of fields and forests, such as those which are produced by typical cultural activities, continua source of food supply. This statement shouldn't surprise nor be taken as if it was groundless or extreme if we only consider that we're dealing with a phenomenon (food habits) that refers to a very old past. For many, too many, centuries the sea apart from being a trade and a traffic source, has overflowed with threats, attacks and massacres in order not to disappear alternately from the favourable horizon of the people of the Gargano. There are two examples, which are very different but both support the aforementioned statement. According to tradition: a. On July 20th, Saint Elia Day, Patron of Peschici, the residents avoid swimming - for devotion to the Saint (this is what they say) - but there is a more reliable explanation: on the same day shepherds took their flocks to wash in the sea so to avoid illness or death because of improvidence and inexperience the residents didn't swim. b. In the only Gargano cookery book, which is reliable and recent (Arbusti, 1988), there are about 300 recipes, about 30 of which (10%) use fish products. Considering also the aforementioned passage adding some historical events which touched the Gargano area: lots of occupations, domination and subjection, an intricate net of trade and contamination, it is not surprising to realise that a style of cooking from the Gargano that is rich of different dishes having the same value: vegetables and pasta, soup and meat, primordial and elaborate desserts, spontaneously grown fruits and citrus fruit, cheese and fish, molasses and rosolio. A cooking combination, a system in which local recipes - linked to the territory - and the cooking of different countries - which are far in time and space - are used together: Romans and Byzantines, Longobards and Arabs, Venice, Abruzzo, Puglia and Neaples inhabitants. For the same reason, it won't be surprising to realise that the cooking of the Gargano is characterised by archaic, simple and poor features, a reflection of a millennial poverty and effort, where thousands of people were committed in the difficult art of surviving, eating one's fill, cooking meals simply instead of creating them. On the other hand, the history of human civility is focused on the aim to procure one's meals, to guarantee the supply of food resources: from the arboureous men to the Gatt treaty; from the early Gargano settlement, happened probably as an escape from the impoverishment and from the danger of plains, to the efforts for the revival of animal breeding and for the local products trade, which was the permanent worry of the economy of the promontory. But poverty and the scarce availability of economic and food resources characterises and stimulates (together with the inevitable and provocatory proximity with places of power, wealth and maybe opulence and of refinement) the research, the creativity, the emulation, the simulation, the contamination. This gave birth to the most gorgeous dishes on the Gargano, where the daily and even the festive cooking is made to be tasteful and pleasant, the dishes which are based on few and poor ingredients.