A brief history of Friuli cooking
The region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia is a borderland, the setting for thousands of incursions and raids, carried out by Attila and the Huns of Pannonia, the Ottomans and the Austro-Hungarians. The culinary traditions in this area derive both from the territory’s morphology and from outside influences: Slav and Austro-Hungarian in the areas around Trieste and Gorizia, the Veneto region in lower Friuli.
The real distinction of Friuli’s cuisine is the kitchen itself, the fogolar where food is prepared. Diners sit around a large central fire to eat dishes prepared in the fireplace. Here, during long winter evenings, older members of the patriarchal families would recount their life stories, orally transmitting their knowledge to the younger generations.
Fish dishes have always been a feature on the coast, with simple, elegant dishes like boreto alla graisana. This ancient fish soup uses brill, but no tomato: as it had not yet reached Italy when the recipe was compiled and would only come into use in Friuli in the second half of the 1800s. Oil was also late to appear on the scene with condiments based mostly on butter or lard in use until the early 1900s. Melted lard was also used to dress salads with the addition of salt and pepper, the latter used frequently to conserve cured meats across the region. The manufacture of cured meats is an ancient art in Friuli, there are traces of a prosciutto in Roman times that, from the drawings, appears very similar to today’s prosciutto di San Daniele. Traditional dishes from Friuli almost never use chili pepper, instead they call for paprika and for spice, cren, a horseradish sauce similar to wasabi, that is served mostly with meat, fish dishes but also with vegetables and soups.
Since time beyond memory, this land has depended on barley, the cereal first cultivated by man from Neolithic times. Barley is the base for many traditional recipes such as barley and beans – a soup with borlotti beans, barley, the bone and rind of prosciutto di San Daniele – and orzotto, a barley dish that is cooked like a risotto with seasonal baby vegetables, like white asparagus and sclopit (bladder campion).
Towards Carnia and the mountains, the flavours become smokier, with prosciutto and Sauris smoked ricotta, and the food reflects Habsburg and Bohemian influences. The cultivation of the potato in Carnia, which has an important role in Friuli cooking, began in the second half of the 1700s and was combined with Montasio (an aged cheese, which in Friuli takes the name of the local dairy farm) to produce the frico – a cheese and potato cake usually eaten with polenta.
Made with genuine authentic ingredients and simple methods, Friuli’s cuisine moves at two different speeds, suited to both the elegant dishes adored by Virgil Oldman in The Best Offer and the greedy joy with which Vittorio Gassman and Silvana Mangano devour potatoes in The Great War, another great film shot and set in Friuli.
