When food is identity: here is the volume “Formaggio in Sardegna”

If there is a Sardinian food that is unmistakably identifying, an emblem of the Island and the millenary history of its people, there is no doubt that it is cheese. The result par excellence of the pastoral culture of Sardinia stands out for its ability to restore its most ancient and noble vocation, if not directly its essence, its soul: because this product constitutes, at the same time, the foundation and the outcome of a diet, an economy, a lifestyle and a system of values. Very few other foods can boast such a profound meaning, such as to summarize the character of a region and its inhabitants and to influence, with its imagery, also its artistic production.

The journey through flavours

The publishing house Ilisso knows this well, and with the unmistakable flavor of Cheese in Sardinia it continues to set up “La tavola dei Sardi”, the series that tells the story of the island’s food tradition through agile and handy volumes designed for all the curious and lovers of taste. Always in combination with L'Unione Sarda (at the price of 12.90 euros plus the cost of the newspaper), one of the most anticipated “stops” of a food and wine itinerary that week after week is captivating more and more readers: in fact, throughout the island, there is almost no pantry without this very substantial product, which for a long time was able, with bread, to guarantee the completeness of a meal, and then to “impose itself” as the basis for countless sweet and savory recipes.

Dop productions

To describe the peculiarities of the island's dairy production, we start from the archaeological and historical aspects, we cross the ethnographic and socio-anthropological ones and we arrive at the aesthetic and artistic ones, in a 360-degree examination that, between science and economics, does not fail to dwell on the characteristics of milk, traditional cheeses and new proposals from the supply chain, with a review that includes cheeses with Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) and those that are part of the list of traditional agri-food products (PAT): a rich apparatus of factsheets and in-depth boxes in which to find great and historic "protagonists" such as Fiore Sardo, Pecorino Sardo and Pecorino Romano, but in which to also get to know new and certainly not occasional "appearances", from cow and sheep mozzarella to the numerous goat cheeses, without forgetting all the variously flavoured, seasoned and packaged dairy products in relation to the most up-to-date needs of taste and preference by the market and consumers. In a socio-anthropological journey that explores pastures and dairies, that opens the way to transhumance and international exports, and that in its temporal horizon contemplates eras and atmospheres that are very distant from each other - from the solemnity of the Nuragic bronzes depicting donors with rams and Shepherd Kings to the variously bucolic, celebratory, committed and ironic tones with which Sardinian art of the twentieth century has interpreted the figure of the breeder and his lifestyle - we listen to the cry of mouflons, sheep and goats, we follow the rhythms and codified rites of milking and milk processing, and we remember how that of the shepherd, with his works and his days, was one of the most ancient, vital and resistant "songs", sometimes even in spite of the transformations and revolutions brought about by so-called progress.

Food and Identity

Formaggio in Sardegna is thus proposed as an essential volume that pays homage to the daily and omnipresent food in the island's diet and cuisine, from its organoleptic characteristics to its cultural universe, with its relative baggage of practices, symbols, celebrations, rituals and codes.

A very important turning point in the path of knowledge and understanding of a people and their way of transforming a raw material synonymous with life like milk and translating it into one of the most essential elements of identity.