Sauces and gravies

There's no shortage of sauces and gravies in Italy. In fact, some of them are among the tastiest and most sought-after Italian gastronomic specialties. You'll find a vast selection, though it must be said that the most famous sauces and gravies can be counted on one hand. These are products in a whole other league, so famous that they're sometimes considered separate.

We're talking about tomato sauce, the quintessential Italian sauce. Passata is the true Italian sauce, consumed today throughout the world. In southern Italy, it's still prepared using traditional methods, cooked in a giant pot for hours. The end result is surprising, a sauce with a unique flavor that can only be found in Italy.

Italian sauces

Tomato sauce is primarily used to season pasta. The same goes for another Ligurian sauce that has become famous worldwide, and consequently an icon of Made in Italy. Invented in Liguria, it's pesto.

More than a sauce, as the name suggests, it's a pesto. It's made with basil leaves crushed with a pestle in a beechwood or stone mortar. Be careful, though, because true pesto is made exclusively with a specific variety of Ligurian basil.

Finally, there's béchamel. Used as a key ingredient in lasagna and other baked pasta dishes, béchamel is a quintessentially Italian recipe. To trace béchamel's inventor, we have to go back to the Middle Ages, around 1500. It's believed that it was invented by a woman, but not just any woman, but Catherine de' Medici.

Wife of Henry VIII and Queen of France, the Florentine noblewoman added a pinch of salt and nutmeg to milk. She then added it to the roux mixture, made from butter and flour. Thus was born béchamel, one of the most popular Italian sauces in the world.