It is said that the kitchen is the mirror of the country and the culture of this country. Nothing could be truer if we consider Italy. Italian cuisine has developed over the centuries, since Roman antiquity, with Greek, Arab, Byzantine, and new world influences.
As for the country, even the kitchen knows many and varied regional differences, while maintaining a common line, typical of the Mediterranean diet.
The first meal of the day is breakfast, normally between 7 and 10. Italian breakfast is exclusively sweet; usually, a coffee or a cappuccino, sometimes with a juice, with biscuits, croissants or bread and jam.
It is a light meal, so in a working day it is followed at mid-morning by a snack, which can be a snack, biscuits or fruit.
Lunch is one of the two main meals, usually between 12 and 14. It is generally hot and is composed in theory of four courses or dishes:
- Appetizers, a short taste of cheese or salami to stimulate the appetite
- A first course, based on pasta, rice or soup
- A second dish, or side dish, made of meat, fish, eggs or vegetables
- A dessert or fruit
These dishes are usually followed by a coffee and a bitter, also called ammazzacaffè, because it reduces the effects of caffeine.
A meal so complete is consumed, now, only on Sundays and public holidays, while normally you eat either a first or a second course.
The afternoon between four and five, especially for children, there is a snack, a light meal of dessert, bread and chocolate or biscuits, with tea or milk.
Among the adults, between six and seven, the aperitif has spread, a snack accompanied by a cocktail after work and before dinner.
Dinner is the other most important meal of the day and normally takes place between seven and nine. The scheme is the same as for lunch, and even in this case normally only a first or a second is eaten.
Times change a lot depending on the job, but generally the more you go down to the south, the more you tend to eat later.
Italian cuisine is a simple cuisine, often some dishes require less than five ingredients. But it is also a balanced cuisine, which relies on the quality of the products, rather than on the quantity.
The most famous recipes, in Italy, were written by mothers and grandmothers, not by the great chefs, and this makes Italian cuisine a home cooking, easily reproducible and often reproduced even abroad, so much so that it has become the most appreciated cuisine at the world.
In Italy there are four types of meals, but not all of them have the same importance.