The Cembran gastronomy

The Cembran gastronomy

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Besides the gastronomic products really typical from the Cembra Valley, several among the courses preferred by the Cembrans come from the wider sphere of the cuisine of the Dolomites (Trentine and Tyrolese).

Many of these started as simple dishes of the rural tradition, but now they are prepared with a greater richness of ingredients.
Below I give a little selection of them (for now I don't supply the recipes).

Savoury dishes

Carne salmistrada (corned meat) - It's a typical Cembran recipe to prepare a fragrant and very tasty dish. Any kind of meat can be used (beef, pork, sheep, game, with a preference for the rear quarters): it is flavoured with various spices (salt, black pepper, juniper berries, laurel, cloves and cinnamon) and left about three weeks inside a little barrel (better if it's a wooden one), wet with white wine (preferably Müller Thurgau). There's also a smoked version of this dish (the carne fumada.)

Lucanica seca - Also called luganega seca, it's a typical little salami of the Cembra Valley. It's prepared with beef and pork meat put into sausage skins, with lard and spices (salt, black pepper and garlic) and maturing the salami for at least one month.

Patugo - It's a sort of vegetable stew: usually potatoes, French beans and courgettes that, after they are cooked, are strained to obtain a cream (even if someone likes that there are small pieces of vegetables). It can be seasoned with oil or with bacon fat, and it goes well together with polenta or cheese.

Patate a bronʒón - Typically Cembran, this is a course made with pieces of potatoes, cooked together with tomato sauce and flavourings.

Smacafàm - This is a classic of the Trentino. The essence of the dish is a dough of flour, olive oil, milk and (usually) eggs; little pieces of fresh luganega sausage are put inside it. Yet, every family prepares it following an own recipe: the flour can be only white or mixed with the buckwheat one and inside the dough can be inserted other ingredients like the cured bacon and the lard. Everything is then cooked to obtain a soft consistency. In Trentine dialect smacàr means to crush, to hit, and fam means hunger: so the meaning of smacafàm is about hunger-breaker. Going through the ingredients you can find that the name is completely appropriate.

Carne salada e fasói (salty meat and beans) - It's salty and flavoured beef, with stewed beans as a side dish.

Trentine luganega - Also known as lucanica, it's a delicious sausage; according to Marcus Terentius Varro it's named after the people of the Lucans, who produced a kind of salami («Lucanica, a lucanis populi a quibus romani milites primum didicerunt»). The Trentine luganega is made by lean pork meat (shoulder, neck and chops) and a little bit of bacon fat, all coarsely minced. The paste is seasoned with salt, pepper and garlic and made into sausage to obtain long rows of salami, each of them about 15 centimetres long (6 inches). After a maturing of around one month, the luganega is ready: it's the basis of many Trentine dishes, but it can be simply eaten after it's griddled, perhaps served with sauerkraut.

Torta de patate (potato pie) - It's prepared with grated potatoes, a little bit of flour, salt and pepper. According some variants, it's possible to add into the mixture little pieces of luganega, egg or pork fat. The dough is baked for about half an hour, in order to obtain a reddish colour.

Tónco del pontesèl - This dish started as a simple sauce: the literal meaning is sauce of the balcony (compare with the Genoese tocco, with the same meaning of sauce); the reason of the reference to the pontesel is unknown. It used to be a plain dish made with pork fat, water, flour and salt. In recent times it changed into a much more tasty course based on meat (beef, veal, pork, luganega, according the variants). Usually the tonco is served with polenta, mushrooms and cheese.

Tortei - They are a sort of thin pancakes: a batter made of flour, milk, eggs and salt, cooked on a hot griddle; a non-standard variant adds to the mixture chopped courgette flowers. They are eaten with cheese or salami (typically speck), but also wrapped with sweet stuffing: excellent for instance with Nutella, appreciated in the Cembra Valley like it happens worldwide

Mòsa - It's a thick soup made with maize flour and milk. It was often eaten in distant times ('sti àni in Cembran, i.e. these years), when the food wasn't really plentiful; now it's a dish for the lovers of the simple flavours from the past.

Polenta - Yes: also in the Cembra Valley it's one of the favourite dishes. The maize flour should be taken directly from the mill, ground to the right grain (neither too fine nor too coarse); compared to the polenta prepared in the Venetian region, the Trentine valleys one has usually a less soft consistency. It strictly has to be prepared in the copper pot (the paról, in Cembran), better if it's heated with the wood-burning oven (the fornasèla), and it has to be cooked for at least 40 minutes, stirring it with the appropriate wooden stick (the polentàr) according precise times and rhythms.

Paról and polentàr on the fornasèla

Canéderli (Knödeln in German) - They are classical Tyrolese rissoles. The traditional recipe would require that they are served inside the broth, but many people eat them plain or with sauce.
A popular Trentine rhyme gives a recipe for the canederli and mentions many of the Trentine specialities:

I CANEDERLI

Per fare dei canéderli col brodo e col ragù
se ciapa del preźemolo e se lo taia su,
farina, óvo e źigole, luganeghe col spéck,
pan vecio senza migole e 'n toc de formai ∫gnèc.

Se fa balòtole col pan gratà
tre', quatro fregole de ai pestà
'na meʒa chichera de lat e vin
èco i canederli de noi Trentìn'.

Ensèma coi canederli noi altri ghe magnàn
'na tesa de luganeghe e 'n toc de smacafàm
ne pias polenta e fìnferli, la mòsa con él lat
capuśi con le scódeghe che vanźa fór dal piat.

Par la maiolica 1 inoltre gh'è
capuśi e crauti su per Piné;
g'aven le trote gió lì a Toblìn
col vino santo e 'l Marźemìn

Translation:

THE CANEDERLI

To do some canederli with the broth and with the meat sauce
you've to take some parsley and chop it,
flour, egg and onions, luganeghe with the speck,
old bread without crumbs ² and a piece of soft cheese.

You've to make pellets with the bread crumbs
three, four cloves of crushed garlic
half cup of milk and wine
here are the canederli of us people of Trentino

Together with the canederli we're used to eat
a nosh-up of luganeghe and a piece of smacafàm
we like polenta with chanterelle mushrooms, the mòsa with the milk
cabbages with pork rinds that spread out the dish.

To eat there are also
cabbages and sauerkraut in Piné;
we've got the trouts down there in Toblino
with the wines vino santo ³ and Marzemino.

Notes

¹ Concerning the meaning of the Cembran term maiolica see the little dictionary by Pedrotti:

MAIÒLICA majolica, food

Dai, mòvete, l'è ora de maiòlica!
Hurry up, it's eating time!
It's a playful way to define the food, in which it's synthesized the
verb magnàr (to eat) and the word maiòlica (majolica), matter that
can be used to make up the plates. Also magnòlica is utilized.

[dictionary entry translated by me]

² The phrase “old bread without crumbs” should mean that the bread has to be not too dry and crumbly,
not to become a "mush" when it's put into the milk.

³ The vino santo (not to be mistaken for Tuscan vin santo) is an excellent Trentine sweet wine from the valley of lakes (near Toblino); it's obtained using only nosiola grapes, so called probably because of their slight scent of hazelnut (nocciola in Italian).

Strangolapreti - They are typical Trentine green dumplings, made with spinachs, bread soaked with milk, flour and eggs. They're served with runny butter and Parmesan: really gorgeous.

Crauti (sauerkraut) - They're prepared finely cutting savoys and cabbages (they are more or less sweet depending on the amount of savoys compared to the cabbages) and putting them into a barrel with various spices: typically there are used salt, black peppercorns, cumin, fennel seeds. After leaving them in the flavourings for at least 40 days they are ready to be eaten: excellent as a side dish, for instance of the luganega.

Bró brusà - It's a soup of water, salt, oil, flour. The bró brusà (meaning burnt broth) has a more or less dark colour on the basis of the cooking times and of the amount of flour. At pleasure pasta or pulses can be added.

Osei scampadi (or oseléti scampadi) - From the name (that in Cembran means escaped birds) you can inherit that this dish was cooked in case of fruitless shooting and no wild fowls available for the kitchen: they are roulades of meat (veal or pork) with bacon or speck, lard, onion and sage. At pleasure also a little bit of pork sausage can be added.

Sweet dishes

Stràboi (Strauben in German) - They are traditional Tyrolean fritters. The batter, prepared with flour, eggs, butter, milk and grappa, is poured into the frying oil to form ribbons, drawing doodles in order to fill the whole surface of a dish. They're often served with bilberry jam.

Zelten - It's a cake made with a great deal of dried fruit and nuts (but there are innumerable variants of the recipe): hazelnuts, almonds, pine kernels, prunes, dried figs, raisins. In the mixture it has to be put also cinnamon, clove, aniseeds, candied fruits, orange juice and rum. It's a Tyrolese Christmas speciality, usually prepared two or three weeks before the feast.

Strudel de pomi (Apfelstrudel in German) - Now very famous Tyrolean speciality. Besides the apples (pomi in Cembran), in the stuffing there are raisins, pine kernels and cinnamon. The pastry is traditionally the so-called “pasta matta” (i.e. mad pastry: an elaborate mixture based on flour, butter, water, eggs and salt), but puff or short pastry can be also used, perhaps the variant of the short pastry done with yeast; personally I prefer the latter: a real deliciousness, whose morsels melt in your mouth

Torta de rave zalde (carrot pie) - Another cake from the Dolomites: it's a delicious pie, whose dough contains grated carrots (rave zalde, literally yellow turnips) and ground walnuts.

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