Venetian cuisine, from the city of Venice, Italy, or more widely from the region of Veneto, has a centuries-long history and differs significantly from other cuisines of northern Italy (notably Friuli-Venezia Giulia and Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol), and of neighbouring Austria and of Slavic countries (notably Slovenia and Croatia), despite sharing some commonalities.
Cuisine in Veneto may be divided into three main categories, based on geography: the coastal areas, the plains, and the mountains. Each one (especially the plains) can have many local cuisines, each city with its own dishes.
The most common dish is polenta, which is cooked in various ways within the local cuisines of Veneto. Polenta once was the universal staple food of the poorer classes, who could afford little else. In Veneto, the corns are ground in much smaller fragments in comparison with the rest of Italy: so, when cooked, it resembles a pudding.
Typical of many coastal areas, communities along the coast of the Venetian Lagoon serve mainly seafood dishes.
In the plains it is very popular to serve grilled meat (often by a barbecue, and in a mix of pork, beef and chicken meat) together with grilled polenta, potatoes or vegetables. Other popular dishes include risotto, rice cooked with many different kinds of food, from vegetables, mushrooms, pumpkin or radicchio to seafood, pork meat or chicken livers. Bigoli (a typical Venetian fresh pasta, similar to udon), fettuccine (hand-made noodles), ravioli and the similar tortelli (filled with meat, cheese, vegetables or pumpkin) and gnocchi (potatoes-made fresh pasta), are fresh and often hand-made pasta dishes (made of eggs and wheat flour), served together with meat sauce (ragù) often made with duck meat, sometimes together with mushrooms or peas, or simply with melted butter.
Cuisine from the mountain areas is mainly made of pork or game meat, with polenta, as well as mushrooms or cheeses (made by cow milk), and some dish from Austrian or Tyrolese tradition, such as canederli or strudel. A typical dish is casunziei, hand-made fresh pasta similar to ravioli.
Among the typical seasoning of Venetian cuisine, you can find butter, olive oil, sunflower oil, vinegar, kren, senape, mostarda, salsa verde.
In his book La cucina veneziana, Giuseppe Maffioli discusses how Jewish cuisine deeply influenced Venetian culinary practices. Venice adopted numerous Jewish dishes, such as vegetables prepared alla giudia, various salt cod recipes, almond-based pastries, and puff pastry. A notable example is pesce in saorâÂÂfried fish marinated with vinegar, raisins, pine nuts, and eggplantsâÂÂwhich initially alarmed Venetians who thought it might be harmful. Additionally, the Jewish habit of preparing risottos with a variety of vegetables became commonplace in Venetian kitchens. Locally, the term alia giudia refers to tomato sauce.
The following are dishes typical of the three subregions of the Veneto. The page for Venetian language provides additional information on writing and pronouncing the dishes' names.
Venice and many surrounding parts of Veneto are known for risotto, a dish whose ingredients can highly vary upon different areas. Fish and seafood are added in regions closer to the coast while pumpkin, asparagus, radicchio, and frog legs appear farther away from the Adriatic Sea.
Made from finely ground maize meal, polenta is a traditional, rural food typical of Veneto and most of northern Italy. It may be included in stirred dishes and baked dishes. Polenta can be served with various cheese, stockfish or meat dishes. Some polenta dishes include porcini, rapini, or other vegetables or meats, such as small songbirds in the case of the Venetian and Lombard dish , or sausages. In some areas of Veneto it can be also made of a particular variety of cornmeal, named , so that the colour of polenta is white and not yellow (the so-called ).
Beans, peas, and other legumes are seen in these areas with () and (). Venice features heavy dishes using exotic spices and sauces. Ingredients such as stockfish or simple marinated anchovies are found here as well.
Less fish and more meat is eaten away from the coast. Other typical products are sausages such as , garlic salami, Piave cheese, and Asiago cheese. High quality vegetables are prized, such as red radicchio from Treviso and white asparagus from Bassano del Grappa. Perhaps the most popular dish of Venice is , thinly sliced veal liver sautéed with onions.
Squid and cuttlefish are common ingredients, as is squid ink, called . Regional desserts include tiramisu (made of biscuits dipped in coffee, layered with a whipped mixture of egg yolks and mascarpone, and flavoured with liquor and cocoa), (biscuits made with butter and vanilla), and nougat.
The most celebrated Venetian wines include Bardolino, Prosecco, Soave, Amarone, and Valpolicella DOC wines.
Among the many Venetian desserts, the most well-known are:
Vicenza, along with Venice, has one of the most distinctive cuisines in the Veneto. Previously, the Vicentians were often referred to as the magnagati or mangiagatti (meaning 'cat eaters') due to the alleged presence of cats in their cuisine (caused from poverty in the past and during World War II), though the cooking of cats is now illegal in Italy. Typical plates of the city and the surrounding area include:
Venetian wine is produced in Veneto, a highly productive wine region in northeastern Italy. The broader area comprising Veneto, Friuli-Venezia Giulia and Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol is known collectively as the Tre Venezie, after the Republic of Venice. Veneto is the most populous and biggest denominazione di origine controllata (DOC) producer of the three regions. Although the Tre Venezie collectively produces more red wine than white, the Veneto region produces more whites under DOC and is notably home to the Prosecco and Soave wines.
The region is protected from the harsh northern European climate by the Alps, the foothills of which form Veneto's northern extremes. These cooler climes are well-suited to white varieties like Garganega (the main grape for Soave wines), while the warmer Adriatic coastal plains, river valleys, and Lake Garda zone are the places where the renowned Valpolicella, Amarone and Bardolino DOC reds are produced. Bianco di Custoza is a wine cultivated in the Custoza region, near Lake Garda.
Noteworthy is spritz, a wine-based cocktail, commonly served as an apéritif across Italy. It consists of Prosecco, a mixer (usually soda water), and a flavouring ingredient, which can be a bitter liqueur, a bitter apéritif, an amaro or a syrup. The original spritz veneziano uses the bitter apéritif Select as its flavouring ingredient and was created in Venice in 1920. Popular variants are Aperol spritz and Campari spritz, which use respectively Aperol and Campari as flavouring ingredients.