the Building blocks of southern italian cuisine

In the Kitchen with Chef Michael White

Every cuisine has its building blocks: flavor builders that add depth to food. In France, you start with shallots, butter, thyme, and bay leaves for the base of a sauce. In Italy, it's garlic, onion, and oil; it's tomatoes; it's the trinity: olives, capers, and anchovies.

If you sauté zucchini in olive oil, it would be delicious enough, but when you add a little garlic, you add and assert flavors that make it even better. There are a lot of misconceptions about southern Italian cooking. First, almost everything that it is noted for, including the beloved tomato, came from somewhere else but over thousands of years has been incorporated into a unique cooking style. Most Americans think southern Italian food is ziti and red sauce, because those were the kind of dishes southern Italian immigrants made in the 1930s, '40s, and '50s. In reality, the playbook is huge for southern Italian food, from couscous to seafood, the use of mint, and sheep's cheese, sausages, and peppercinos. Pickling, preserving in vinegar, is a big part of their culture. Southern Italy is not comprised of rich terrain, yet it yields a bounty of ingredients that produce more pronounced flavors perhaps because of the extra effort needed to survive. Olive trees flourish best in limestone beds, tolerating drought thanks to sturdy root systems. Craggy hills drop to seascape borders; the kind of place you can find caper bushes growing with wild abandon. The waters on the Sicilian coast teem with the herring's cousin, the anchovy. These are the jewels of cooking, tiny additions that make the whole even more delectable.