A theory of Italian flavour

I have just returned from Italy, where, as tends to happen when I go on holiday there, I spent a large portion of my time cooking (most ambitious dish: ravioli stuffed with rabbit). Not for the first time, I was struck by the fact that cooking in Italy, as compared with cooking in Britain, is almost ridiculously easy. In Italy, any klutz can throw together, say, some tomatoes, onion, carrots and garlic, serve it on pasta, and the result will be delicious. In Britain, the most accomplished of chefs can construct a sauce from those same ingredients, and the result will always lack a certain something.

Why is this? Undoubtedly, raw ingredients—the fact that they tend to be so much better in Italy—are part of the answer. But I do not believe that they alone account for the difference. After all, if you go to the right places, and are prepared to spend money, it is possible to get extremely good raw ingredients in Britain—Neapolitan tomatoes, the best Ligurian olive oil—and I guarantee your pasta still won’t taste as good. No, there must be something else, some mysterious X factor, which accounts for the ease of cooking in Italy.

I can't say exactly what this is, but my guess is that it is environmental: something to do with the quality of the air—and even the water—in Italy. The pasta tastes different because it is cooked in different water, and is then mixed with the sauce in different atmospheric conditions from those that pertain in Britain, atmospheric conditions that, perhaps, are more conducive to the coalescing of flavours, the perfect marrying of pasta and oil. And then, remember, the person who eats the pasta is breathing different air as he or she does so, inhaling different smells, which mingle with the aromas of the pasta, and result in an altogether different flavour. None of these factors on their own would have much impact; but, taken together, there’s an accumulation of small differences.

If this theory seems outlandish, I would say this: flavour is a more complex, less definable thing than is commonly realised, and achieving it is never simply a matter of following a recipe. There is a mysterious—almost spiritual—aspect to cookery, which expresses itself in questions such as why things taste one way in one place, and another somewhere else. In our globalised food culture, we would do well to bear these less tangible aspects of cooking in mind. We should not expect, for example, that a cuisine can be transplanted from one country to another without there being a cost in terms of taste. Who, after all, would want to eat Yorkshire pudding in Rome?