Inspiring travelers to fall in love with the world
The work
BBC’s food stories are in-depth narratives, trend-based news features, and recipe stories (recipes with accompanying histories and backstories that are tied to local culture).
Storytelling
Below is an excerpt from my story for BBC Travel about the Valtellina valley in Northern Italy.
In the Valtellina valley, buckwheat cultivation – along with its signature pasta dish – is a centuries-old tradition. However, what’s considered the “real” recipe is up for debate.
Chiara Lanzarotti remembers when “everyone was a farmer” in the small town of Teglio.
“It’s still like a postcard,” Lanzarotti said, pointing her cane to the south side of Italy’s Valtellina valley, surrounded by the Orobie Alps, which are snow-speckled, even in mid-July.
Lanzarotti’s maternal ancestors, the Tusetti’s, settled in Teglio on Valtellina’s north side – 16km south of the Italian-Swiss border in Lombardy and 900m above sea level – in the 1600s, and cultivated buckwheat, a traditional food staple for farmers tending their terraced mountain crops. Flour ground from the plant’s triangular seeds, grano saraceno in Italian, or furmentùn in Valtellina’s dialect, was central to a hearty tagliatelle-style pasta dish called pizzoccheri, which was topped with vegetables like cabbage and potatoes, as well as cheese and butter, which fuelled them from dawn to dusk.
While it’s hard to know when the dish was first made, in the 1799 book Die Republik Graubündent (The Republic of Graubünden), German historian Heinrich L Lehmann wrote about a “perzockel” dough made from buckwheat flour and egg, which was cooked in water and served with butter and grated cheese. Lehmann noted that farmers living in small homes would also use this same dough to make a simpler, gnocchi dish as they didn’t always have the luxury of time or space to roll and cut the dough into flat tagliatelle noodles.