Italian Food Vocabulary

with illustrated vocabulary, word definitions, example sentences and quiz 🤔

Photo: Typical Italian ingredients like tomato and garlic next to a plate of cooked spaghetti

Italian food has become one of the most world's most popular national cuisines. Italian restaurants can now be found in nearly all of the world's big cities, and famous Italian dishes like spaghetti and macaroni are cooked in home kitchens throughout the world. But the most famous Italian food of all is the pizza, especially the kind being sold in take-away pizza restaurants all over the world.

Pizza

Pizza originated in the Italian city of Naples in the late 18th century when someone tried putting a tomato topping on focaccia, an Italian flatbread that's still popular today. As other toppings were tried, new kinds of pizza appeared such as pizza margherita with its simple topping of tomato, mozzarella cheese and basil. Cured Italian meats were also tried and this led to meatier pizzas like pizza quattro stagioni with its mix of toppings made of salami, ham, olives, artichoke and mushrooms, and pizza capricciosa with baked Italian ham added to the tomato and mozzarella topping that most traditional pizzas are based on.

After American soldiers discovered pizza in Italy during World War Two, it became very popular in the USA. Demand for pizza steadily grew, and during the 1960s and 70s take-away pizza restaurants opened all over the USA. Since then American pizza companies have opened take-away restaurants all over the world, and this has led to the huge popularity of pizzas worldwide. They still sell traditional Italian pizzas like the pepperoni pizza and pizza marinara, but many of today's best-sellers are non-traditional pizzas like the Hawaiian pizza made with ham and pineapple and the Mexicana pizza made with Mexican-style ingredients such as bell peppers, ground beef and hot chilli peppers.

Pasta and pasta dishes

Many of the world's most popular recipes for home-cooked meals are also from Italy, especially those for various kinds of pasta. Some of the most popular pastas are spaghetti, macaroni and fettuccine, and home-cooked dishes like spaghetti Bolognese, macaroni and cheese and fettuccine Alfredo are popular worldwide not only because they're delicious, but also because they're so easy to make. For many pasta dishes, all you have to do is cook the pasta in boiling water and heat up a ready-made sauce or make a simple sauce like pesto. But some pasta dishes take more time and skill to make, and these include lasagne, a baked pasta dish in which sheets of flat pasta divide layers of meat, seafood or vegetables in a sauce.

If you go to an Italian supermarket, or if you eat in an Italian restaurant, you can find other kinds of pasta that are shaped like shells or tiny pillows. These are used to make small pasta dumplings with a vegetable or meat filling. They include tube-shaped cannelloni, square-shaped ravioli and ring-shaped tortellini. Like most pasta dishes, stuffed pasta dishes are usually served with a sauce of some kind.

Antipasto and main courses

Italian cuisine offers many dishes besides pizza and pasta, however. If you go to an Italian restaurant or trattoria for lunch or dinner, you'll probably start with an antipasto like bruschetta or with an Italian bread like focaccia seasoned with olive oil, salt and herbs. Or you might start with an Italian soup like minestrone or ribollita or with a pasta dish like gnocchi. For your main course you might have a dish made mostly of meat like ossobuco or scaloppine. If you're a vegetarian you can choose a main course like eggplant parmagiana or deep-fried rice balls called arancini that are stuffed with a filling of vegetables or cheese. Rice is also the main ingredient in risotto, a creamy dish in which rice is cooked in a meat, fish or vegetable broth. Another popular ingredient of many Italian meals is polenta. It's made from boiled cornflour and can be eaten as a porridge or a creamy side-dish or cooled and then sliced and baked or fried.

Italian desserts and coffee

After your main course, you'll definitely want to try one of Italy's famous desserts. The most popular include a very rich coffee-flavoured layer cake called tiramisu, a tube-shaped pastry with a sweet, creamy filling called cannoli, and a kind of sweetened cream thickened with gelatin called panna cotta. But if you're an ice cream lover, why not try the Italian-style ice cream called gelato?

You can then follow dessert with one of the many Italian coffees that are so popular all over the world these days. They include espresso, caffè latte, cappuccino, caffè macchiato, caffè mocha, and many others. These Italian-style coffees are usually made with an espresso machine that forces a high-pressure spray of very hot water through ground coffee beans.

arancini

bread basket

bruschetta

cannelloni

chicken cacciatore

fettuccine Alfredo

gelato

gnocchi

lasagne

margherita pizza or pizza margherita

minestrone soup

ossobuco

panna cotta

pasta

polenta

risotto

salami

scaloppine and lemon sauce

spaghetti carbonara

spinach and ricotta ravioli

tiramisu

tortellini alla panna or tortellini with cream

veal parmigiana

vinegar and olive oil