The glorious Sicilian Caponata is the dish of the next edition of the IDIC – International Day of Italian Cuisines which will be celebrated on Saturday 18 May, in conjunction with Catering Day.
The caponata will be the special on the menus of over two hundred Italian restaurants around the world that have registered for this fifteenth edition, but as in the past, hundreds more will do it spontaneously. For the first time the IDIC will also be celebrated in Armenia and Iraq, in the canteen of an ENI camp.
“The IDIC is a reaction to the systematic falsification of Italian cuisine and agri-food products made in Italy,” says Paolo Monti, chef patron of AMA, Hong Kong. “The Day is not a social media trend of the moment, since it was born in 2008 it has involved hundreds of chefs and restaurateurs around the world and their customers”, adds Mario Caramella, executive chef of a luxury hotel (with Italian restaurant) in Gurgaon , India. The IDIC promotes the right of international consumers to authentic, quality Italian cuisine when they enter restaurants labeled as Italian.
Catering Day – For the culture of Italian hospitality, of which IDIC is part this year, is an initiative created by FIPE to enhance and strengthen the values and role of Italian catering and gastronomy. “The IDIC has always been a concrete celebration of Italian catering outside Italy, of great importance for its marketing: abroad the authentic Italian restaurant is irreplaceable for promoting Italian products, tourism and lifestyle”, concludes Rosario from Dubai Scarpato, animator of the itchefs-Gvci network, a network of Italian cuisine professionals that has been operating in 70 countries since 2007, in which IDIC was born.
The Sicilian Caponata, not surprisingly a vegetarian dish, is a fitting homage to Sicily, an authentic treasure of Italian regional cuisine, and adds to the series of traditional or highly representative dishes of Italian cuisine, celebrated over the years by the IDIC: from Carbonara to ragù Bolognese, from Pesto alla Genovese to Tiramisu, from Leonardo da Vinci’s chickpea soup to Pellegrino Artusi’s tortellini in broth and Gualtiero Marchesi’s Armonic Set.
