Restaurant with Menu Brianza Monza
Monza and Brianza: peasant or courtesan gastronomy
Our chefs, Salvatore and Vincenzo Butticè, have always shown a particular sensitivity to the Italian gastronomic tradition, both in the regional and local sense.
For 18 years, the chefs of Il Moro Ristorante, present in the Monza area, have declined their own gastronomic vision that tells the story of Italian cuisine with a prevalence of Sicilian and Mediterranean.
The gratitude and recognition towards Brianza has matured in them a new vision, the focus on gastronomic Brianza that adds to their classic imprint.
What and how people ate in Monza and Brianza
The most used foods were of vegetable origin, therefore fruit and vegetables, wild and cereals. We also find foods of animal origin, mainly pork, sheep and farmyard animals, meat of beef origin was more than unknown.
The Brianza diet has been conditioned by social, economic, religious and ethical belonging, and these distinctive traits are particularly evident in the less well-off classes, in the peasants.
The breeding of cattle was aimed almost exclusively by the need to have a driving force to cultivate the fields and only the dominant elite consumed veal from the end of the twelfth century, cow’s milk was not used by the breeder because it was used to raise calves well and healthily.
Dairy production was characterized by sheep, goat’s and sheep’s milk, and sheep also contributed to wool production, so sheep meat was consumed only when the animal was no longer performing in milk or wool production.
The use of meat from farmyard animals followed the same principle as sheep meat, the hen that produced the eggs was used in the kitchen only when it had almost ceased its activity as a layer and so for geese or ducks.
Obviously, on a feast day (the commanders and the patron saint) the peasant family could afford meat at the table, and therefore the feast was a great party.
The pig raised on oak acorns in the woods, the only concession of the landowners, that is, to let the pigs graze in their own woods, was the food of the stock and reserve because it lent itself well to being preserved. The great tradition of cured meats and sausages in Brianza stems from the need to face hunger by stocking up.
Eating in Brianza
How was the Brianza menu composed?
The focus on the less well-off classes is a functional analysis with respect to the dishes of the Brianza gastronomic culture that are more internalized.
From the plant world, as already mentioned, the sources of sustenance were obtained, of satisfying the hungry need.
The food, or rather the preparation that was never missing was polenta.
Polenta has very ancient origins, since Roman times, puls. Corn did not exist. So the first form of polenta was made with spelt flour, or barley, millet, rye, panica.
The pànico was preferred to millet for the preparation of polenta.
Rye during the Middle Ages was also used to bake, obtaining dark-colored bread as opposed to the white bread of the rich, bread at the table already marked belonging to a social class.
In the absence of bread or flour were chestnuts, spontaneous in the woods and useful for feeding the crowds “Bovesin da la Riva”.
Maestro Martino and Bartolomeo Sacchi were well aware of the qualities obtained from the plant world by the Lombard and Brianza peasants, for these reasons we find them in their recipe books but embellished with spices, game and sugar.
From these moments the gastronomic crossovers intensified in Brianza, from the dried bean soup “Macco”, from macco which constitutes the root of macaroni, and the first meaning of macaroni referred to gnocchi, but the potato did not yet exist.
Gnocchi without potatoes and polenta without corn
Yet at the beginning the Brianza menu was without potatoes and corn.
Gnocchi were born as a variant of pulmentum (wheat gruel), Folengo in the fifteenth century presented them as a great peasant specialty based on: flour of minor cereals or breadcrumbs, sheep’s cheese and egg yolks, obtaining meatballs to be cooked in salted and boiling water.
Just in this period the polenta undergoes another transformation, because the spread of buckwheat influences the polenta making it bitter and gray, “small polenta bigia, buckwheat ..”
And it is precisely from the mid-1500s that corn began to be valued, coming from the new continent, and therefore a polenta very close to the one we know today.
To be more precise, a polenta without butter, (cow’s milk was not used because it was useful for raising calves) so the fat part in the polenta was added using lard (dorsal area) or lard (visceral fat).
Monza and Brianza at the table
Discovering, knowing or deepening the eating habits of a place generally requires the use of an analytical and careful approach.
Reconstructing eating habits is never an easy task, and the diatribes on the “risotto alla monzese” on the occasion of 4 Restaurants in Monza is the emblem of this.
Our chefs use two approaches of analysis and in-depth analysis in relation to the type of cuisine. Italy structures its gastronomic culture on 4 codes, peasant – seafaring – ecclesiastical and convent and aristocratic.
The first two codes, peasant and seafaring are characterized by their mode of transmission – from mother to daughter, from grandmother to granddaughter, the most used method of transmission has been narrative-verbal, this premise discards almost any possibility of finding recipe books and therefore cataloged and archived recipes and despite this the national gastronomy and therefore the typical Brianza menu refer to peasant cuisine.
To carry out this research, the chefs of Il Moro restaurant in Monza, Salvatore and Vincenzo Butticè and the whole team postulated 2 assumptions:
a) man eats what he has and what he is (Brillat Anthelme Savarin)
b) Man and what he eats (Feuerbach)
