The typical recipes of Emilia Romagna

The cuisine of Emilia and Romagna is rich. Fat yes, and with this? Do you eat to digest? Observe instead, we make no choice, where you want, the decision is up to you: at home, in the luxury restaurant, in the lowest of trattorias, as if thrown away, as if abandoned (you recognize them by the plates, pissa d’asen drinks, della door) on the street, between town and town, look at, let’s say, the Romagna, the Emilian, look at them how they eat: slow and safe.

Of course you forget, lucky them, for that hour or two or three, of the mechanism that surrounds them, of the noise that surrounds them, of all the modern “devil” that surrounds them. Men return to the table, alienation far away, even the party, the church, the lodge, the party. Anarchist or liberal, pigtail or communist, look at them as they eat: slow and understood. Fat the plate? and what does it do? salami for sauce, baked lasagna, zampone or scarpazzone, digestion is safe.

The wise choice of bread certainly helps her: thin, tasty and crunchy croissants; o wide bread, hard but light and airy pulp; when not even the pié, piada or piadina in the local language, which Giovanni Pascoli defined as “the bread, or rather the national food of the people of Romagna”.

The local wines, Albana, Sangiovese, Lambrusco, Fontanella, Cagnina and so on, help digestion even more, wines of no great family, but so straightforward and fresh as to pacify the most restless of dishes. The cuisine of the places has grown on this large, peaceful, gastronomic predisposition; here then is the patient package of stuffed pasta; the anolini in primis, from Parma; tortelli from Piacenza; cappelletti from Ferrara and Romagna; Modena ravioli; and the Bolognese tortellini that the poet says were born of amorous suggestion: the innkeeper “… who was one-eyed and Bolognese, seeing Venus the warlike learned the art of making tortellini”.

First Courses