Art and cooking - is there a connection?

Have you ever tried to define Italian cuisine? If not, you should try and imagine a scallop marinated in raspberry vinegar, covered with a leaf of an exotic plant and a straw of lemongrass, all stacked into a small heap in the middle of a table-sized plate decorated with pistachio confetti and eatable petals. Well, the Italian cuisine will be exactly the opposite. It will reach the edges of a plate, you’ll probably know the name of each ingredient and there are definitely going to be loads of nice, belly-filling carbohydrates in it.

The phenomenon of Italian cuisine made me wonder. After all, the French or the Greek have also had some great ideas how to transform single simple tastes into delicious meals. But it’s the Italian dishes that fill the menus of the world, so what is the trick?

I thought of one reason. There is something about the simplicity that makes it perfect. You just take really ripe and sweet tomatoes, you’re careful not to overcook pasta or shrimps, you add some olive oil that actually smells and tastes like olives and there you go – perfection. It’s like Michelangelo’s David, which after all is just a hunk of a male body (I’ve seen a few, and they didn’t strike me as extraordinary, to be honest). But this Italian combination of quality material and extra care about details made it perfect. The marble was the best, and someone made an effort to form smooth, strong muscles all over a tall human body. Pure nature, white colour, and what you get is a masterpiece. Just like a plateful of pasta.

Now, I don’t want to say that David is quite like macaroni, but what I mean is that there were some dishes I ate in Italy that made me think it was all about keeping it real. Once, on a warm November evening in Sicily, I was sitting on a porch of a village tavern, drinking white wine, listening to the quiet sound of rain in the night air behind my back and devouring the simplest bruschette (fine slices of toasted bread with condiments) seasoned only with salt and homemade olive oil. Neither me nor my friends could resist them and it occurred to me that many more complicated dishes impressed us less than that one. Such is the phenomenon of the poor cuisine or, as I called it that night, the “paradox of the obvious”: the perspective is a way a human eye perceives, we’re born with it, there is nothing more natural and physical; but even though it had always existed, it was the Italians who put it in black and white on paper for the rest of us.