TERRITORY
Traditional cooking has its roots in the territory whose is expression. When the land was still main mean of subsistence and the goods circulation was just the shop under home, to chose what to put on the table for eating wasn’t so difficult. Housekeepers had to prepare rich tasty meals with the available materials as crops arisen both in their own garden and even in the village. It wasn’t matter of typical or traditional products, but the thing more instinctive to do was cooking exclusively the products which the territory was able to offer.

Therefore the traditional cooking of a determinate region or place necessarily developed as from the products which region and place were able to offer copiously, in terms of territory’s morphology, climate and environment.
Italy has remained a rural country for long, but Umbria has been a rural region even longer and in many ways keeps being it still today. From this point of view the variety and permanency with which the typical region’s products were cultivated, helped greatly to recover tradition and uniqueness of foods. Great part of them are available and can be found today with the same ease with which they were for our grandparents.
Just outside the supermarkets, there is a whole world to discover.

SEASONS
Traditional cooking is connected with cycle of seasons. This consideration is even too much obvious. The necessary products for preparing different dishes weren’t available all year and as regards to their availability it was established which dishes to prepare or not.
The cooking rhythm followed the natural seasons rhythm. Every housekeeper disposed of just some foods and lunch and dinner for all family was prepared in base of them. It was like this for all the running season. The menu was the same for a few months, then it changed with the season, and so on.
This habit is still in vogue, even if lesser, thanks to the widening of market and to the new techniques of production which allow to broaden the ageing times of the earth’s fruits in order to make them available throughout the year. Without considering that some food and dish are linked better than others to the climate and temperature and even if available, are preferably consumed in a season rather than another.
Has anybody ever tasted stewed lentils and “cotechino”(Italian pork sausage) in July?

FEAST DAYS
More typical foods are often linked to the local feast days Another aspect related to the regional gastronomic cycle is the turn over of religious and various feast days. Some of the most substantial cooking traditions have recurred without stopping since ages thanks to the solid link which preserve with that kind of occasions.
Christmas, Easter, feast of saint patron, but also Carnival, New Year’s Day and mid-August holiday are times of everybody’s life characterized by particular dishes, without which, the feast would be perceived in a completely different way. Any feast day would be low-keyed lived, with less enthusiasm and participation, without that dish, that cake...
Memory is intermingled with fragrances and rituals which go together with typical and traditional dishes, until to become integrating part of the same feast.

MEMORY
Really special dishes call strong emotions and memories. Everybody has his favourite dish, which no one chef, of any level, will never be able to obscure, whatever the commitment and mastery of his art .
There is no competition and definitely there can’t be with the grandmother’s cake, the mother’s ravioli, the homemade pasta. Everybody has memories of his childhood related to this or that dish which over time have become an irreplaceable ingredient able to make that dish unique and special in comparison with all the others. Nothing or no one could ever do the same, since as good as it might be, the hands to prepare it wouldn’t be the same, it wouldn’t be tasted in the same context, the same affections would be missing.
The “taste” has its reasons which reason does not know.