European Cuisines & Recipes.

European cooking is a long argument between north and south, conducted in fat. Below the olive line, food is built on oil, tomatoes, wine and the produce of a generous climate; above it, on butter, cream, preserved meat and the ingenuity of long winters — fermented cabbages, smoked pork, cellared roots. In between sit the great crossroads cuisines, like the Balkans, where Ottoman technique collided with Central European abundance and produced food that belongs entirely to neither. What the continent shares is a devotion to preservation elevated into pleasure: cheese, cured meat, sauerkraut, pickles and bread are all answers to the same old question of surviving until spring, refined over centuries into the reasons people travel here to eat. Each country page below maps the essential ingredients and techniques, and the dishes that explain the cuisine fastest.

350 recipes on this route