To testify this is the use of different spices and herbs like cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, wild fennel ,mint, hot chilli pepper, pastries prepared with honey and the tradition to work and conserve meat.
Food and wine typical tradition of Calabria – which varies according to its ethnic-cultural diversity – is an added value to the product choice and realization.
Typical inns and restaurants present ancient popular receipts in their dishes so to be considered ‘archeological food’.
The ‘caviar’ of poor people is the food of Calabria that more than other can summarize the sense of a popular way of cooking in this land.
It is produced with anchovy eggs preserved with oil in a very red hot chili pepper sauce: this receipts bring us to a poor cooking tradition made of simple and genuine elements, of strong, almost violent, tastes and perfumes.

Furthermore it introduces a new particular aspect of this way of food preparation that is food processing in order to be stocked, as once people from Calabria did, to fight the famine periods, that often occurred. The cousine from Calabria is very balanced: it is possible to have sheep and pork meat dishes as well as vegetables (mainly eggplant) and fishes ones. This region is also leader in the production of red hot chili pepper in all southern Italy. It is called ‘pipivruscente’, pipariellu or pipazzu and it gives every kind of food a special taste without covering it. We can find it even in certain kinds of ice-cream. Pasta is one of the main food in Calabria, handmade together with goat and pork meat whose preparation and cooking time has been inherited by Greeks. Swordfish and cod dishes mainly in the province of Reggio Calabria play a principal role in the cousine and Festivals of this region.

Read the list of the traditional products from Calabria identified and recognized by Italy and European Community as DOP and IGP