Last Night's Regional Dinner: Liguria

Since Vini opened in November of '05, we’ve tried to focus on the most essential feature of good Italian cooking: its seasonality. All year round, in town markets across Italy, the stalls are laden with locally grown produce fresh from the fields, forests and sometimes roadsides.

Even in the big cities of Rome and Milan, the markets are still the measure of what is being grown locally at any given time. It is this fresh, seasonal produce that is being cooked in the good trattorie and ristorante.

Across the entire length and breadth of this country, a season can last almost a whole year long, so we’re trying to source more and more produce from New South Wales growers and, ideally, the Sydney basin.

When we started doing regional Italian dinners last August, we wanted to maintain the focus on the seasonality of Sydney markets and base our menus around what we found there.

Every Tuesday night, we look to a different region and get a little insight into how the history of the area shaped the culture and foods of its people.

This week, we went to Liguria, the last stop before France as you head up the north-west Italian coast. The land pulling up from the sea is almost sheer yet cultivated, mostly with grapes and olives.

Seafood remains central to a cuisine which shares much with the south of France and benefited from the foreign influences of trade through Genoa, historically an important port. The land provided olive oil, artichokes, basil, fennel, prickly pears and rabbits, with pine and walnuts in abundance.

Below is the menu for Tuesday 30 June 2009:

Liguria

Antipasti

Foccaccia

Marinated olives

Swordfish carpaccio

Primi

Braised rabbit, olive and rosemary with fresh pappardelle

Secondi

Chargrilled tuna w/ potatoes, lemon and green beans

Dolci

Rhubarb orange mascarpone and walnut tart

(recipe to come!)