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Traditional cuisine
The singular pleasures of good food and wine have always been an essential accompaniment to human affairs. Be it in the lavish courts of the nobles with their sumptuous banquets, or the humble fare served up in the homestead kitchens of their servants, the food and cuisine of the past speaks volumes about us and our history. We will rediscover long-lost flavours and savour age-old taste sensations, while exploring unexpected ingredients combined into audaciously unusual dishes.
 In our modern era the cyclical rhythm of the seasons has all but disappeared from our day-to-day lives. Throughout history, however, seasonal changes served as a kind of cosmological clock regulating peoples’ lives. In medieval times this link with the changing seasons was particularly strong, as it determined the availability of food for survival amongst the masses.
A number of local recipes originated this way, by using a simple staple food to which varying seasonal produce was added. These dishes have come down to us through the ages, and today we call them “traditional cuisine”.
Necessity was the mother of invention back then, and traditional dishes often required ingenious means of preservation or transformation so as to provide food for the long winter months. The dedication and gastronomic creativity of people through the ages, and an ongoing process of culinary exploration has brought into being a rich variety of traditional foods and dishes, ranging from the most rudimentary to the supremely elaborate.
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