Mangia!

Cooking Authentic Italian

By Jacqueline Rupp

Pizza, spaghetti and meatballs, lasagna – so many Italian dishes are kid-friendly family dinner standards. But if you are still using jarred sauce and take-out menus for your Italian dinners, you might be surprised to find out how easy and economical it is to eat authentic Italian. It's not a surprise that Italian dishes are crowd pleasers.

"Happy and healthy!" is how Sharon Sanders, author of Cooking up an Italian Life (Pergola West, 2001) and lover of all things Italian describes Italian cooking. "Nobody doesn't like Italian cooking is the old saying," she says. "It's a very accessible cooking style because it is very much about the home and family. By using fresh and seasonal foods, Italians have learned to cherish and celebrate the foods of the season."

As an example Sanders cites how Italians traditionally enjoy seasonal fruits. "You enjoy strawberries in the summer months, appreciating their fresh true flavor, but then in a month or two no strawberries grow and you need to wait another year to enjoy them again," she says. "In the meantime you eat other seasonal fruits and vegetables – you really never get tired of one thing because the menu is always changing with the seasons."

"I love to cook Italian because my family loves to eat it," says Jerry Gillespie from Philadelphia, Pa., an amateur chef and frequent visitor to the city's famed Italian market. "Some of my favorite dishes? Spaghetti and sausage because my kids love it, lasagna because my kids love it, pizza because I love it and fettuccine Alfredo because my whole family loves it." But if you don't know the difference between an antipasto and a pesto, then it's time to take a tour of this culinary tradition and discover why Italians the world over exalt, "Mangia!"

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• Fabulous Florence: A Flourishing City in Italy
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