Cookery lessons and deciding on the menu 30/4/09
With the May 5 deadline less than a week away, I have decided to give our two cooks lessons in making tapas... My husband and I spent hours working out the menu. Not a simple task at all. Tapas, fundamental to the social life in Spain and now becoming a lively part of Irish socialising, are not so famous in Italy it turns out. I had somehow expected culinary practices in Sicily (southern Italy)to be similar to those in Andalusia (southern Spain), given that Sicily was under Spanish domination (the Aragons)from the early 1400s to the early 1700s. I also expected there to be a North African flavour to Sicilian cooking,due to its proximity to Tunisia, just as Andalusia's proximity to Morocco is felt in lots of the soups and stews and tapas found in Southern Spain. But endless menu discussions with my husband and the cooks revealed that Italians feel that the Spanish are their poor cousins and so their food could never be considered as good as Italian food, and especially not Sicilian ...