With a resolution of last Monday 20 May, the Board of Directors of the Cazoeula Association (which has managed the Festival de la Cazoeula since 2013) formally established the Accademia de la Cazoeula/Casoeula, entrusting it, as its institutional task, with the deepen and spread knowledge of the dish (with particular reference to its historical origins).
The founders explain: “To begin, the Academy will first have to rewrite the Festival regulations, with the aim of integrating it with the lexical and recipe variations that characterize the various areas of the territories in which the dish is widespread. In this way, the Festival’s Board of Directors has attempted to follow up on the requests expressed, over the last few months, by the restaurants that have joined the Festival over the last 2 years (or that have recently expressed their intention to join in the near future ) and belonging to the provinces of Lecco, Monza, Milan and Varese, bordering the province of Como, in which the festival was born in 2013″.
And on the philological-gastronomic front it is highlighted: “As is known, Cazoeula or Cassoeula is the most typical Brianza dish, widespread throughout the geographical area of the pre-Alpine north-west of Lombardy and today in almost all of northern Lombardy, extending southwards to Milan as well as, with some substantial variations, in some limited areas of the southern and eastern provinces of Lombardy. Despite the substantial underlying uniformity, the recipe and the name of the dish (for which, depending on the area, the g, z, single or double are used) undergo variations linked to different local traditions”.
And a precise distinction is also made, to avoid controversy: “The aim of the Academy is certainly not to standardize these differences, which are strongly rooted in the different territorial traditions, but rather to systematise the differences, taking them into account in the disciplinary . With this initiative, the Board of Directors of the Cazoeula Association, aware of the importance that the Festival de la Cazoeula has assumed over the years starting from the first edition in 2013, also intends to prevent, in relation to the dish under our jurisdiction, controversies and misunderstandings similar to those that have recently arisen regarding the Perch Rice dish”. Here are all the stories about this last step.
