In the past newsletter dedicated to the legacy of nonna Marcella, I ended with a quote: “Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.”
Since then, I’ve been thinking about that fire: where it comes from, how we keep it alive, and what it really means to say that we cook in the name of tradition. What follows is a continuation of that reflection.
Last year, we were approached by a marketing agency about a possible collaboration with a food brand. They asked us to develop a series of recipes using their products (high-quality frozen vegetables that I already use regularly in my everyday cooking). Before moving forward, I was asked to identify which category best described my cooking style. The agency had defined three creative pillars, each meant to represent a different way of cooking and talking about food.
The first pillar celebrated creative expression in the kitchen, with an emphasis on originality and playfulness: inventive recipes, unexpected combinations, and smart shortcuts.
The second pillar framed food as a conscious, healthy choice. It focused on wellness, meal prep, anti-waste cooking, and food trends, positioning creators as guides to a balanced, mindful lifestyle.
The third pillar was for those who enjoyed rewriting the rules of everyday cooking, rethinking the familiar through creative twists on traditional dishes and fresh takes on classic recipes.
Tommaso and I looked at each other in silence. Which one would you choose?
None of these categories truly represented my way of cooking, which I would define, quite plainly, as traditional.
So we politely declined the project and went back to doing what we have always done: cooking the food we love, in the way that feels most honest to us.
And yet, the idea that my style of cooking remained unnamed and unaccounted for, lingered in the back of my mind like an unanswered question.
For me, today, traditional cooking means something very concrete.
As I wrote in a past newsletter about my nonna, after she passed away I felt an urgent need to return to her recipes. I wanted to cook them again, to hold on to the stories embedded in those rural dishes I grew up with.
So I tried to define what traditional Italian cuisine truly means, at least for me.
One of the clearest definitions I’ve found comes from I conti con l’oste (2020), a memoir of sorts by Tommaso Melilli, an Italian chef who trained in Paris before returning home to investigate what gives an osteria its unmistakable blend of hospitality, honest cooking, and care for ingredients. He writes:
“... Il menù seguiva con naturalezza le materie prime di stagione e, soprattutto, le scadenze emotive e nostalgiche di chi stava in cucina. Secondo la latitudine, si aspettavano gli asparagi, i ricci di mare, e i porcini con la stessa impazienza apprensiva con cui si aspetta il regalo di compleanno di un fidanzato sbadato…”
“…The menu naturally followed seasonal ingredients and, above all, the emotional and nostalgic deadlines of those in the kitchen. Depending on latitude, asparagus, sea urchins, and porcini mushrooms were awaited with the same anxious impatience reserved for a birthday gift from a distracted lover…”
— I conti con l’oste, Tommaso Melilli
According to Melilli, and I wholeheartedly agree, traditional cuisine is inseparable from seasonality, but also from emotional and nostalgic deadlines. Tradition teaches you to wait, to long for what reliably returns, year after year, with reassuring and comforting precision: the first bright yellow zucchini blossoms in June to dip in batter and fry; the ripe figs at the end of summer to lay beside thin slices of salami; the sharp, intoxicating zest of oranges that perfumes Carnival sweets.
That is why I feel the urge to knead grape focaccia in September, as soon as the first seedy wine grapes appear in the vineyards. Why I bake pan co’ santi at the end of October, slicing it on the morning of November 1st, to have a bite of that sturdy and rich bread studded with walnuts and raisins, an unmissable treat for All Saints’ Day here in Tuscany.
It is why I make panforte and cavallucci at Christmas, fry cenci and frittelle for Carnival, and knead schiacciata di Pasqua scented with aniseeds and mint liqueur for Easter. And why, around June 24th, I grow restless: this is when green unripe walnuts must be picked to make nocino, the bitter, inky liqueur tied to the shortest night of the year, when witches are said to dance beneath walnut trees.
It is a calendar of rituals, some religious, some pagan, some rooted in the peasant rhythms of the countryside. I see it as an emotional geography of habits.
If this way of cooking resonates with you, if you, too, feel the pull of a seasonal ritual or a dish that marks the passing of time, I would love to hear about it. What is the recipe that tells you where you come from?
Traditional food is a collective memory of gestures, skills, flavours, and scents, a shared map that can bring you home. It reflects geography, climate, and history, builds or reinforces an identity, and tells us who we are now.
Tradition carries knowledge: how to ferment, how to preserve, how to dry, how to reuse, how to wait. It is practical wisdom, refined over generations.
This is one of the reasons I felt such a strong desire to learn how to forage for wild herbs. It is not because it’s trending. I see it as a way to reconnect with early memories of my nonna walking into the fields to gather wild greens for her famous salad or a simple frittata. But it is also a way of keeping alive rural skills that risk disappearing if they are no longer practiced. I walk along the road and begin to notice crespino, borsa di pastore, piantaggine, cardamine, stellaria and tarassaco. I repeat their names silently to myself, trying to fix them in my memory, to match each sound to the shape of a leaf, the colour of a flower, like learning a spell.
I often think about the extraordinary work Jessica Cani is doing in Sardinia to document and safeguard Sardinian food heritage. When she tells the stories of hyper-local cheeses, pit-roasted meats, myrtle leaves resting under roast chicken, or intricately stuffed parcels of pastas, she is not offering a crowd-pleasing, postcard version of tradition, steeped in nostalgia. What she does instead is recording gestures, techniques, and knowledge that are slowly disappearing, practices that encapsulate the spirit, culture, and identity of a place.
Defending traditional Italian food (or, better said, regional Italian food), in my view, should never become a means to support nationalism.
Traditional Italian cuisine is not a rigid, granite-like system of immutable rules, a Golden Age of idyllic food, but a living collection of dishes, habits, and techniques shaped by migration, by the influence of neighboring countries, by economic necessity, by evolving tastes, and, as Alberto Grandi has provocatively argued, even by coordinated marketing efforts during the years of the economic boom. What we call tradition is, in fact, the result of constant negotiation.
And yet, in a curious twist, what is often dismissed today as boring or old-fashioned traditional cooking turns out to be almost subversively modern.
At a time when we speak about sustainability, plant-based diets, seasonal eating, and reducing added sugars and ultra-processed foods, many rural recipes already embody those values. Tuscan castagnaccio — a thin, pudding like cake made with chestnut flour, water, olive oil, rosemary and pine nuts — is naturally vegan, gluten-free, and free from refined sugar.
Sicilian biancomangiare, in its almond-milk version, is vegan and gluten-free.
Pici from Val d’Orcia are a simple fresh pasta made only with flour and water: humble and entirely plant-based. It is necessity that shaped these dishes, along with frugality, common sense, and what the land had to offer. In their restraint, they feel surprisingly aligned with today’s conversations about how we should eat.
The beloved Italian tomatoes we now defend as sacred had to cross an ocean before they could root themselves in our soil. They arrived from the Americas with Christopher Columbus and were, at first, regarded with suspicion.
Or consider how a humble chickpea flour cake (something we call torta di ceci or cecina) links Livorno to Liguria, Sicily, Nice in France, and even finds distant cousins in India and Argentina.
Dishes travel, techniques migrate and ingredients adapt. What we call “authentic” is often the result of centuries of exchanges, misunderstandings, reinventions, and acts of creativity at the stove.
The portrait of traditional Italian cuisine should not be confined to nostalgia and the comforting image of a grandmother at the stove, even if that nonna is my nonna Marcella. Or at least, not only to that.
It would be dishonest to romanticize it, and we should resist the temptation to idealize a past that was far more complex than we like to remember.
Poverty shaped much of what we now celebrate. Scarcity, migration, hard labor, hunger. Later, Italian home cooking relied heavily on industrial shortcuts: stock cubes, flavour enhancers, convenience products that promised modern efficiency. Vegetable gardens were sprayed with chemical fertilizers and weedkillers now widely questioned.
The so-called good old days were not immune to contradiction. Both realities coexist within what we call tradition: the handwritten recipe book and the bouillon cube lived in the same drawer.
I admire the fierce, necessary reclaiming of traditional cuisines carried out by writers such as Olia Hercules for Ukraine, or Sami Tamimi and Yasmin Khan for Palestine. When a culture is threatened, when an oppressor attempts to erase language, memory, and identity, food becomes an act of resistance. In those contexts, preserving and telling the story of traditional dishes is an act of survival.
After seventeen years spent writing about Tuscan food — and many more spent living, breathing, and feasting on it — I have come to the conclusion that traditional food is the food that best represents what and how I like to cook and eat.
Even though many of the spices I use would have sounded extremely exotic to my grandmother, and even though my cookbook collection ranges from British baking bibles to Turkish vegetarian classics. I draw inspiration from all of them, grate ginger into my cicorie strascicate along with garlic and chili pepper, and sprinkle za’atar over my olive oil focaccia.
I am in awe in front of Scandinavian cardamom buns, and love nothing more than being invited to feast on a Japanese home cooked meal. I’m mesmerized by Easter European fermenting art, and I’ve been known for baking almost every year a British Christmas cake in October and feeding it with brandy every week till Christmas. And yet, it is Tuscan tradition that gives me a sense of time and space.
I like to say that I cook like a Tuscan grandma with a huge cookbook collection.
And I am not alone in this fond connection to traditional food. I noticed often the amazed look on my friends’ faces when I say I can bake a proper pan co’ santi, or make a lip-smacking chicken liver spread (it’s that extra teaspoon of vinegar that cuts through the richness of butter and liver and makes it irresistible).
Maybe it’s because we’ve reached that age when we begin to idolize our childhood. Many of us now have young children in our lives, and we find ourselves wanting to pass something on.
As my friend and colleague Irina Georgescu writes:
“Traditional cuisines are more than recipes — they are expressions of history, identity and place. Each dish reflects the land, climate, and culture that shaped it, preserving the knowledge and values of generations before us. They are part of our culinary DNA and of who we are today. They bring people together, creating a sense of belonging and continuity in an ever-changing world. By keeping traditional cuisines alive, we protect not only flavours but also the sustainability practices, stories and ancestral wisdom that define who we are.”
This is the tradition I want to stand for: a living practice rooted in seasonality, rural knowledge, and personal memory. It may not fit into a creative pillar, but it is the foundation on which I cook.
Before I close, I’d love to know what does “traditional” mean in your kitchen today? Is there a dish you keep cooking not because it is fashionable, but because it feels like home? Tell me in the comments. I read every single one.
If you value this kind of tradition consider supporting this work by subscribing or sharing this newsletter with someone who cooks from memory. Keeping these stories alive makes sense when we do it together.
