Food
Dishes collected by the students between Lanciano, the Aventino valley and the mountains. Almost all of them first courses: it is the part of the recipe book the original work managed to finish.
A classic dish of the Frentano culinary tradition. The name comes from the notched rolling pin used to work a dough of flour, water and salt, without egg. In Lanciano, where the dish keeps to the old tradition, the long pasta is served with a sauce of castrato, mutton from a sheep about a year old. Restaurants, of course, offer variations and interpretations of their own.
A dish of the Christmas holidays, adapted to the customs of each village. It is a rich hen broth — today made with mixed meats — with cardoon, in which small meatballs and stracciatelle of egg and grated cheese are then cooked. Once served, diced savoury sponge cake can be added to it.
The pasta is made on a rectangular beechwood frame called a chitarra, guitar, named after the thin metal wires stretched along its longer sides. The sheet of dough, usually made with eggs, is laid over the wires and pressed with a rolling pin, which cuts it into strips of square section. They are normally served with a meat sauce, but also with fish, or with vegetables and ricotta. It is perhaps the best-known dish in Abruzzo.
Square-cut spaghetti from the De Cecco pasta factory in Fara San Martino, with a cream of Altino sweet pepper “a cocce capammonde”, red garlic from Sulmona, crisp pancetta and a dusting of dried pepper. The area has pasta factories of considerable size and tradition, known by now all over the world.
In the local dialect the “trappito” is the oil mill: this is the dish prepared in the mills with freshly filtered oil, which it was customary to offer to the farm workers. Abruzzo's extra virgin olive oil is rich in scents and flavours that change with the area and the kind of olives: there are more than thirty olive varieties in Abruzzo.
The dough is made of flour and potatoes. It was much used in the mountains, where a shortage of wheat flour was made up for with potatoes: the Sangro Valley saying “la patane è mezze pane”, the potato is half the bread, is still well known — because bread too was made by mixing potatoes and flour. The usual dressing was a castrato sauce, but by working vegetables into the dough the gnocchi can turn green, or red with pepper powder.
An unleavened maize flatbread, to be eaten with cooked greens or crumbled into them — sometimes tossed in the pan — with garlic, Altino sweet pepper and potatoes. One variant uses “sardelle”, sardines, and the Altino “cruco” pepper, fried in the pan and then eaten whole. It used to be the food of the poor; today it is the most sought-after dish in the farm restaurants of the area.
A bean soup with trimmings of pork rind. It is a winter dish once tied to the killing of the pig: the beans were set to cook in the pot beside the fire together with pieces of ear and trotter, as well as the rind itself.
A seafood first course in which the hairy crabs are cooked whole, in a sauce of tomato, garlic and parsley, and brought to the table just as they are: the flavour comes from the shell.
“Hunting” this prized crab is made particularly difficult by very restrictive rules.
The ingredients
Food
Small, horn-shaped, deep red, pointing upwards: “a cocce capammonte”. It is air-dried, toasted and crushed in a mortar called a “penele”.
Altino
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Food
Four genotypes out of the seven in Europe survived here through the last ice age. A true Noah's Ark of the white truffle.
Quadri, Borrello, Rosello, Pizzoferrato
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Food
Where the air is cold and dry, above nine hundred metres, exposure to the air alone is enough to keep it.
Upper and middle Sangro valley
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