Parcels of pasta

Press, 27 September 1988, Page 10

Parcels of pasta

Food & Fable

by

David Burton

For anyone setting out to eat their way around Italy, one mandatory stop would be the city of Bologna, universally acknowledged as the culinary capital of the north. It is nicknamed “la grass” (the fat), and the people there really do seem to be obsessed with food. Everywhere you look there are restaurants and specialist food shops — delicatessens, cake shops, pork butchers, and the polleia with their rows of unplucked pheasants and ducks strung across the outside of the shop. I imagine our Department of Health has a whole raft of regulations to protect us Kiwis from such dangerously colourful displays. Indeed, thanks to their assiduousness we cannot buy wild game at all. Bologna, “dark, many towered Bologna” as Carducci called it, has a beautiful old city centre, where the streets are still laid out as the ancient'

Etruscans planned them. Only two of the many medieval towers are still standing, and these lean as precipitously as that of Pisa (“to better sniff the cooking” say the locals). A long standing by-law has meant that every building is still fronted with red clay porticos. These arcades are a necessary protection from the extremes of the Bologna climate — the cold wet winters and the harsh sun in summer. Another deli I visited was the size of a supermarket, with row upon row of whole Parma hams, salamis, and bunches of garlic hanging from the ceiling, and vast glass cabinets full of every imaginable pate and salad.

At one end of the shop a log fire blazed, in front of which a series of chickens revolved on a spit shaped like an elongated ferris wheel. A side wing of the shop was taken up with an

open kitchen with a huge table in the centre, around which two women, neatly dressed in white, were preparing fresh ravioli and tortelloni. Bologna is the birthplace of these small stuffed parcels of pasta, which must count among the great glories of the Italian kitchen.

Tortelloni are usually stuffed with meat, but here in this delicatessen the women were using ricotta with a little parmesan and nutmeg. They looked so good we had to buy some, and they were duly presented to us in a box tied with purple ribbon.

Classic recipes for the various meat, poultry, and cheese fillings can be found in any good Italian cookbook, but here is my own recipe using our succulent, cultivated Marlborough Sounds mussels. The tortelloni are then served in the mussel cooking broth, rather like a won ton soup.

Mussel, tortelloni tortelloni The filling Wash 750 g spinach thoroughly, then using only the water that is still clinging to its leaves, steam until it is barely cooked. Remove and drain, and when it is cool enough to handle, squeeze it hard to extract as much moisture as possible. Chop finely. Place 2 dozen mussels in a large pot with iy 2 C dry white wine and steam until the shells just open. Drain and reserve the resulting cooking liquid, which is the base of your broth. Mix in 300 g tomato puree and if the broth is too salty, dilute with water or stock. Remove the mussels from their shells, chop them finely, then mix with the cooked spinach, 3-4 crushed cloves of garlic and 1 cup grated parmesan cheese (note: parmesan is far better bought in a block and freshly grated. This can be done in a food processor by chopping the cheese into little pieces first). The mixture should not need any salt. The fresh pasta This is a particularly rich version created in Bologna,

Pile 500 g high grade

flour on to a flat cool surface, make a well in the centre and break 5 eggs into it. Mix them in with a fork until you have a ball of dough. This can also be done in a food processor, in two lots, by beating the eggs first and then adding the flour slowly through the feed tube, until a ball forms. Now knead the dough, pressing with the ball of one hand and gathering with the other, for 7 to 10 minutes. Let the dough rest for 15 minutes, wrapped in plastic.

Roll out the dough in several lots, using either a pasta machine or a rolling pin. Make the pasta as thin as possible — a couple of millimetres is ideal. Correctly made pasta should be capable of being rolled out on a surface with no flour

sprinkled on it. . With a wine glass, cut rounds from the sheet of pasta and immediately begin making the tortelloni before the pasta begins to dry out. Place a teaspoonful of the mussel stuffing mixture in the centre of each round and fold it over to form a half moon. Press the edges to seal them, as you would a pasty. Now take the two ends and bend them back towards each other, squeezing them together to join them. Final Assembly Cook the tortelloni in plenty of boiling unsalted water for only about four minutes until the pasta is cooked. Meanwhile, heat the broth, and pour over the cooked tortelloni in a large serving dish or individual bowls. Serves 4 to 6.