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C H E E S E+ 202 2 culturecheesemag.com 55 F ood historians, however, posit several reasons for the prohibited pairing. The geographical argument says most of the best Italian cheeses are made in the mountains where dairy herds thrive, not near the sea where fresh fish is daily fare. So traditional Italian recipes using either fish or cheese were developed on parallel tracks rather than intersecting ones. That claim loses ground, though, when one considers regions like Campania, from where Mozzarella di Bufala Campana hails, and Lazio and Sardinia, where pecorino Romano and Pecorino Sardo, respectfully, are made. Those parts of Italy all sport substantial coastlines. The gustatorial argument says the strong flavor of cheese overwhelms the mild flavor of fish. The counterpoint here is that a lot of seafood (clams, mackerel, mussels, and sardines) packs a potent punch while many Italian cheeses (burrata, ricotta, and provolone dolce) are quite genteel. The ancient history argument, says California-based food archeologist Farrell Monaco, lies in ancient writers making the pairing a controversial one just as the Romans rose to replace the Greeks as the dominant power in the Mediterranean. Monaco explains that 300 years or so before the definitive rise of the united Roman empire, when Sicily was an important Greek colony, a Greek-speaking Syracusan cook named Mithaecus brought to Athens aspects of Sicilian gastronomy, elements of which would later be considered the underpinnings of Greek fine dining. Plato mentions Mithaecus, rather disparagingly, in his fourth century B.C. Socratic dialog Gorgias when he says the cook's decadent food has no place in a healthy civilization's diet. Despite the Platonic critique, Mithaecus penned on sheepskin parchment what is believed to be western civilization's first complete cookbook. Sadly, only one recipe from that book is known to us now. It uses cheese in the preparation of a ribbon-like fish called tainia. According to Athenaeus, the Greek rhetorician who recounted this recipe in his third century A.D. tome Deipnosophists (loosely translated as Philosophers at Dinner), it went something like this: After you gut a tainia and remove its head, wash it off, cut it into steaks, and pour cheese and olive oil over it. In another part of Athenaeus's 15-volume opus, Monaco explains, his dinner philosophers discuss a second fourth century B.C. Greek food writer's instructions on other ways to pair curds with fish. But from these citations, taken from a poem entitled The Life of Luxury by Archestratus, Monaco says the snark about Sicilian and Syracusan plates of cheesy seafood very clearly details his distaste for them. The repeated practice of criticizing Greek and Sicilian cooks who combined seafood and cheese could in fact be the origin point for the long-standing taboo of the pairing in modern Italian cuisine, according to Monaco. Still, it's difficult to discern from these texts which ancients—the Greeks or the Romans—despised the Sicilian penchant for combining fish and cheese more at that point in time. Fast forward to the twenty-first century, though, and there is plenty of evidence that modern Greek culinary culture has embraced the pairing— even if it's still not welcome in Rome. MODERN MARRIAGES "Regarding the cheese and seafood love affair, I believe we all come from a place where we are guided against their pairing," says Marianna Leivaditaki, a Cretan-born, London-based chef. "The truth, though, is that the two ingredients can go well together and nothing strange happens." While corresponding electronically as she visited family in Crete, Leivaditaki said she'd just finished a meal of beautifully grilled cuttlefish stuffed with fresh Cretan mizithra and literally nothing else. Cretan mizithra is a soft, white, salty, spreadable cheese made by combining whey and fresh, raw goat's and/or sheep's milk. Greek-American chef and cookbook author Diane Kochilas demonstrates how to make a similarly stuffed squid dish in which she combines mild, soft, whey-based anthotiros; nutty, grated sheep's milk graviera; and salty Greek DOP feta cheeses in an episode of her public television series My Greek Table. Now in its third season, the Confident Italians (and their vocal cousins living in other parts of the world) don't typically explain why they aggressively eschew combining seafood and cheese on the same plate. It just isn't done. It's a culinary passo falso (false step).