Peasant food on elite tables, or when festive meals become a daily habit

Elite cuisine and popular cuisine are distant and often conflicting worlds, even ideologically. However, on a practical level, we can observe crossovers and hybridizations between the two cultures. This appears to be true today, when several emerging chefs exalt “poor” cuisine. This was true in the nineteenth century, when bourgeois cuisine used to transform festive peasant dishes into dishes for everyday use. It was already true in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, when recipe books written for the tables of lords used “poor” products and reworked rural gastronomic practices and habits. Despite the ideological contempt they have been subjected to for centuries, peasants have indirectly participated in the construction of contemporary gastronomic heritage. The case of Italy, on which the paper focuses, can be taken as an example – unless it is a glaring exception.