Sunday lunch: Extraordinary moments where we share our experiences and flavours with our loved ones…
by Andira Vitale
This is the moment of intimate and loving gathering where all our loved ones sit around the table, eat together, and share experiences and delicacies. We are talking about Sunday lunch, a traditional classic…
Sunday is the weekly day of rest for many Italians. It is a day in which you can enjoy the slower pace and some indulgences: classically, for grandmothers and mothers, this is also the day in which they acquire all the skills they dedicate themselves to work. You can prepare a Sunday menu full of delicacies that will make sure to spoil your family.
The Italian tradition is uniform throughout the country, despite the differences in gastronomy and habits, and requires, if possible, a lovely Sunday lunch when the whole family gathers around a table laden with delicious foods. Recipes to enjoy together.
Sunday lunch includes a varied meal, which starts with appetisers and is divided into first courses of pasta (usually homemade), second courses of meat or fish, then vegetable appetisers and the inevitable dessert.
So, we are thinking about what to cook for Sunday lunch. In that case, we are spoiled for choice. We can benefit from the enormous heritage of Italian cuisine: dedicating a lot of time to Sunday and always relying on historical memory, preparing extremely traditional and following traditions handed down from generation to generation.
The classic Italian version of the Sunday menu includes strictly local dishes. It is typically divided into land and sea dishes (depending on the location and season). Among the starters, cured meats dominate, together with ham and salami. Cheeses, but often alone and as seafood appetisers. For first courses, long pasta with sauce and ragù is preferred to season pasta, lasagne, tortellini, risotto, and fish or seafood. The second course includes the classic roasted or baked fish. In contrast, the side dishes include potatoes, salad, roasted vegetables, delicious Italian-style chips, and mixed fried fish. Every self-respecting Sunday lunch ends with dessert: homemade cakes or tarts, ice cream or small pastries purchased in pastry shops.
This is the typical Sunday menu. However, there is also room to try other culinary cultures on this special day. The Sunday menu can, therefore, include dishes of French origin (for example, ratatouille, boeuf bourguignon or bouillabaisse), of Japanese ancestry (such as the famous sushi), or perhaps of a more distant country discovered thanks to a previous trip. Share the taste and memory with our loved ones.
The Sunday table is an institution that allows us to rediscover the feeling of home and family, regardless of age and geographical origin.
In this sense, meals are tools for reviving tradition and memories, filling the environment with past scents and genuinely creating that inviting and engaging atmosphere that distinguishes the family.
In general, this moment is characterised by generosity and abundance: the condiments are rich for each dish, the accompaniment of bread is not missing, and it is also permissible to indulge in a few “encores”, putting aside worries related to your figure for at least one day.
In the list of typical Sunday first courses of the Peninsula, there are Sorrento style gnocchi, tagliatelle with Bolognese ragù, lasagne with sauce, tortellini in broth, saffron risotto, agnolotti with stew filling, Genoese pasta or even pasta and potatoes with provola, or more northern flavours such as polenta with Osei, pizzoccheri, pasta with pesto; among the more elaborate proposals we can find green lasagne, lasagna with salmon and courgettes or with speck and pumpkin, and then spaghetti with seafood, risotto alla Pescara, orecchiette with turnip greens and so on.
Among the second courses for Sunday lunch, on the other hand, there are meatballs with sauce or fried meatballs, braised meat in Barolo wine, stuffed chicken, polenta with stew and many other delicious ideas such as ossobuco, cassoulet, Milanese cutlet. Still, we can vary on fish with recipes such as broth, stuffed calamari or baked bluefish fillets.
In the typical Neapolitan Sunday lunch, meat sauce is never missing; cooking the sauce for several hours as tradition dictates: this will be the seasoning not only for the pasta for the first course but also for the second course, serving the meat (beef and pork, in general) which flavours the preparation.
Every self-respecting Sunday lunch ends with a delicious dessert: tarts, sbrisolona cake, strudel, babà, and cannoli are some ideas that can complete the Sunday menu.
What if we didn’t have to dedicate so much time to cooking? Even in this case, there is no problem because there is no shortage of alternatives to offer a quick Sunday menu, but always tasty and traditional.
In this sense, baked pasta is a simple and winning idea for serving a dish that satisfies all palates. Equally valid is to propose a second course with baked chicken with potatoes or a baked salmon fillet.
But quick recipes for Sunday lunch are also gnocchi with sauce, chicken curry, quiche or focaccia to serve as an appetiser, pre-cooked lasagne with pesto, trout baked in foil, Roman saltimbocca… in short, it is not. The quality and taste of the dish are directly proportional to the time taken to prepare it. You can create many mouth-watering dishes with the right amount of creativity and ingenuity!
But we can describe the classic Italian Sunday lunch with these words: It’s not what you eat; it’s who you eat with!
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