Ah Italy, the land of pizza, pasta and plenty of tomato sauce. At least, that’s the impression many visitors have when planning a trip to the Bel Paese.
But if they’re planning to visit popular tourist sites like Cinque Terre or Portofino, they might be in for a shock — because the traditional food of Liguria, the northwest coastal region where both are located, is far from what outsiders might call “Italian.”
Where other regions of Italy have traditional dishes that are what we’d recognize as “Italian” food, traditional Ligurian dishes are slightly different.
Of course, there’s pasta with pesto. But there are also dishes like farinata, a kind of chickpea pancake that’s salted and served in slices, and cappon magro, a “salad” of seafood and cooked vegetables, slathered in basil-heavy green sauce, usually served in an elaborate pile that makes it look like a dish set for a banquet.
As for tomatoes? You find them pepping up the odd stew or sauce but they’re not front and center as they are in our imaginings of “Italian” food.
That’s partly down to the fact that Italy’s food scene is highly regional, with huge variation even from town to town. But, say experts, that’s not the only explanation.
A love of tradition — perhaps too much
You might think that the lack is down to Liguria’s landscape of steeply terraced hills, cliffs and mountains. But Sergio Rossi, who blogs about Ligurian food as the self-styled “Cucinosofo” (kitchen philosopher) says that’s not the case: “Tomatoes grow very well here.”
Rather, he says, it’s more likely to be the “traditionalist” and “closed” nature of the Ligurians — despite regional capital Genoa having been one of the most important ports and trading hubs of the Mediterranean. “Ligurians were the biggest traders but [new ingredients] didn’t necessarily enter into their recipes,” he says.
“The Genoese are reserved, tending towards family intimacy and community. In the past, changes were always seen with a certain diffidence, especially by the working and middle classes — as happened with the introduction of ingredients from the New World.”
While the Genoese have a long history of making and eating pasta — there’s a document from 1244 which references it — they simply “never hit on tomato as a condiment.”
In fact, says Rossi, the arrival of the potato was “much more important” than that of the tomato. Potatoes gave the people of the entroterra — the hilly, mountainous inland areas populated by contadini (peasants) — a reliable food that kept them alive.
Although even then, that Ligurian tradition-loving nature didn’t make it easy. The potato was seen as a “chic thing” from abroad, he says — so by the 18th century, while the Genoese aristocracy were happily feasting on French-style potato dishes, rural communities were mistrustful.
The Catholic church had to step in, with local priests convincing their parishioners that potatoes were safe to eat as late as 1786. The humble spud would eventually “change the lives” of farmers and laborers, says Rossi. But tomatoes didn’t. “They don’t fill the stomach — so they would never be a fundamental ingredient,” he says.
Rossi says that it was only in the 19th century that tomato sauce became a viable mass-market and working class food, thanks to conservation methods such as canning.
“That’s when it entered into dishes — sometimes pasta but also stews, like minestrone Genovese and stockfish stew. The Ligurians produced a tomato sauce.”
‘A secretive part of Italy’
Typical foods like focaccia were introduced before tomatoes arrived in Italy.
Magdalena Bujak/Adobe Stock
Although foreigners associate Italian food with tomatoes, in fact they’re a relatively recent introduction to the country.
“The tomato arrived from Mexico as a novelty for botanic gardens in around 1580,” says Diego Zancani, author of How We Fell in Love with Italian Food. “But it took a very long time to be recognized as edible.”
By the time it was, Liguria’s world-famous dishes like pasta with pesto, focaccia and farinata were already entrenched.
And where other regions incorporated tomatoes in their signature dishes — “I’m always surprised when I go to Tuscany how much tomato they use in dishes that probably have [pre-tomato] medieval origins,” says Zancani — Ligurians did not. Like Rossi, he puts that down to the cultural isolation.
“Liguria has always been a very secretive part of Italy — Genoa had contact with the rest of the world because of their ships, but much of the rest is quite isolated,” he says.
“It’s a largely mountainous region, so traditions are kept much longer than other places. In any rural area, there’s a lot of conservatism — things were kept for centuries without much change.”