A rainbow of tastes

Writing an entire issue dedicated to the tastes of Italy is the same as talking about the colours of nature while sitting on the rainbow. So, what can we do? A free style stroll around our landscapes of tastes. Let’s start with the appetizers, an evergreen dish: salami&cheese. Everyone knows the spicy Nduja from Calabria but have you ever tasted the ‘Nnuglia? It’s made with third choice pieces of pork including the tongue, the kidneys, the boiled stomach, the heart seasoned with the garlic, the pepper, the red peppers, the fennel seeds and the anise that are manually put

into a casing tied with some natural string. It’s true, it’s less fine but it is worth tasting something belonging to the peasant tradition that isn’t for sure less healthy than the industrial one. The stracchino cheese is an excellent product from Lombardy, well, the different types of stracchino cheese like the one with the pink crust that is made in the area of Mount Bronzone in the area of Bergamo. Do you know the strachet? It’s a type of stracchino cheese too. It’s quite weird, it is made in the mountains by using the semi-skimmed milk instead of the whole one.

Bread, pasta and no pesto

Let’s choose the bread from Sardinia for our meal. Not the carasau one: the ammondigadu or «pane tundu» (round bread) one. It’s a hard wheat loaf of bread, it is popped out in the characteristic village of Osilo, in the upper Logudoro and it is mixed with the water from the sources. Let’s cross the sea and reach Genoa. Do you fancy a good dish of pasta with pesto? Not at all: let’s have the nuts sauce, the historical delicious vegetarian sauce that you can use with all types of pasta mainly with “pansoti” (a type of filled pasta) filled with the ‘prebuggiun’ that is a mix

of wild herbs. As an alternative you can have the typical tajarin (a type of thin tagliatelle) from Piedmont that will never betray you. The truffle is just right for this type of pasta. Very well, but to cherish our nose with the aroma from a divine land let’s go to Marche where besides the white truffle (Tuber magnatum pico) and the Summer black one (Tuber aestivum vitt.) we can discover the precious black truffle (Tuber melanosportum vitt.). We can also reach Cervara, a village with a painting beauty, the highest in the province of Rome where the very perfumed truffles grow.

Main courses and side dishes

Since we are in Lazio, let’s stay here for our main course. Let’s write about the budellucci, the highest expression of the saying according to which «nothing is thrown away of the pig» since it is the small intestine’s inner part that is seasoned with oil, pepper, salt and wild fennel. Then we can also mention the “guanciale” (mainly the one from the village of Amatrice) so the pork is highly present in this region’s traditions as well as the cattle and pigs. We’d like to taste the Tordo matto from

Zagarolo, it is not a bird, it’s a roll of horse meat filled with chopped ham, garlic, coriander and parsley. According to the tradition of this beautiful village the meat must be macerated in the wine then cooked on the vine shoots’ coals. What’s better than some good potatoes as a side dish? The batata! It is known as a tropical imported product nowadays but the batata from the area of Lecce is a local sweet potato that grows in the Salento area near the landscapes of the century-old olive trees.

Dessert, when the North and the South mix up

We all know and love the cannoli from Sicily but what about the cannilieri? They come from Villarosa, a rural village in the heart of the province of Enna. They are made of flour, sugar, baking powder, sesame seeds and they are filled with hard-boiled eggs. And are we going to drink limoncello? No, we aren’t. The limoncella apple syrup is perfect. We might think it is typical from the North of Italy… it isn’t. It’s made in Campania: this sweet sparkling aromatic drink with a low alcoholic content is made

of this yellow apple from the South. Now it’s time to taste some cookies… maybe a “cantuccio” but not the classical one from Prato but the one from San Miniato, an amazing village perched on the Tuscan hills: these cookies are crispy, amber coloured and naturally baked, twice (bis-cotti). What about fruit? Trentino is even too famous for apples but it also offers very good pears. By the way, the Spadone Southern type featuring a very thin texture is the ideal Summer pear to make the pears strudel!