Chiara Lanzarotti remembers when “everybody was a farmer” within the small city of Teglio.
“It is nonetheless like a postcard,” Lanzarotti stated, pointing her cane to the south aspect of Italy’s Valtellina valley, surrounded by the Orobie Alps, that are snow-speckled, even in mid-July.
Lanzarotti’s maternal ancestors, the Tusetti’s, settled in Teglio on Valtellina’s north aspect – 16km south of the Italian-Swiss border in Lombardy and 900m above sea degree – within the 1600s, and cultivated buckwheat, a conventional meals staple for farmers tending their terraced mountain crops. Flour floor 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 known as pizzoccheri, which was topped with greens like cabbage and potatoes, in addition to cheese and butter, which fuelled them from daybreak to nightfall.
Whereas it is arduous to know when the dish was first made, within the 1799 guide Die Republik Graubündent (The Republic of Graubünden), German historian Heinrich L Lehmann wrote a few “perzockel” dough created from buckwheat flour and egg, which was cooked in water and served with butter and grated cheese. Lehmann famous that farmers dwelling in small houses would additionally use this similar dough to make a less complicated, gnocchi dish as they did not at all times have the posh of time or area to roll and minimize the dough into flat tagliatelle noodles.
By the tip of the 1800s, there have been 5,000 acres of buckwheat cultivated in Valtellina. In the present day, nevertheless, solely 50 acres are farmed, primarily in Teglio. Buckwheat manufacturing declined drastically with the rise of industrialisation within the Nineteen Fifties and was changed by extra profitable crops like wheat, which was substituted for among the buckwheat flour used for making pizzoccheri.
