Welcome to Laguna in Cucina!
A colorful food memoir, filled with seasonal recipes and glimpses of the past and present, unique stories from Venice and the Lagoon.
An incredible stage was set on the sprawling campo in the ancient heart of Venice. A campo rather large and empty-looking most of the year, but soooo lively on that evening in late June 2019.
An evening when the sky reflected the pink colors of the mimosa albizia tree, much beloved and watered in the early morning by people from the neighborhood, the favorite spot for them to stop in the morning, very early when one could still breathe and take in the scent of summer blossoms.
And now, in the early evening, its lemony scent was even stronger but mingling with the smell of something very unexpected going on in the corner of the campo.
Just imagine - an incredibly colorful buffet served on white linen on long wooden tables and protected by large white tents, arranged by people who were usually quite shy but strangely happy and talkative that evening.
All because that buffet wasn’t just any solstice celebration: Food cooked and served by practically every family in the neighborhood, and they were all standing there, explaining and presenting their menus to a very curious audience: Fellow Venetians and only a few tourists who had been attracted by the smell of freshly baked cakes, creamy vegetable soups, grilled fish dishes with unusual spicy sauces, and even street food, once so popular in Venice but now, most of the time, forgotten.
Recipes and happiness which seemed to come out of books - or at least, recipe journals. But here, I was quite wrong: Like my grandmother, these men and women had never thought of writing down their family menus. Our Venetian culinary herittage, these incredible recipesm had been passed down by one generation to the next.
But why I asked, was nobody writing down these recipes? I did receive an answer but it was long and too incredible, will share with you later on.
But first of all, I was able to persuade my cousin in joining me to hunt up any recipes from the attics of the neighborhood. And at the same time, visit and interview our neighbors on their incredible way of cooking.
Laguna in Cucina is the weekly Newsletter of La Venessiana’s Online Cooking Class dedicated to home cooking in Venice and the Lagoon1. Our first edition will be online on 20 July 2023, ushering in the most colorful season of the year - summer solstice!
LAGUNA IN CUCINA is a food memoir of the Lagoon, bringing our readers easy seasonal recipes, stories about Venice, the islands, people, and places.
If you’d like to discover the historical and contemporary recipes and islands of the largest Lagoon of the Mediterranean Sea, do join us below :-) Your support would mean a lot to us!
Iris and Lina
La Laguna Veneta (the Venetian Lagoon), the largest wetlands in the Mediterranean Sea, stretches from the River Sile in the north to the River Brenta in the south: Its surface is approx. 550 km². 8% of the Lagoon consists of larger and smaller islands, including Venice (built on 118 islands). Did you know? Just 11% of the Lagoon surface consists of water, while 80% consists of barene (salt marshes, sometimes similar to islands) and velme (sand banks), home to reeds, hardy limonium and edible herbs, which have been used in cooking and for medical purposes since Roman times.