Piadina Romagnola

Ingredients: 500 gr. of flour, 30 gr. of lard, salt, bicarbonate, lukewarm water (the necessary quantity).

The piadina!, Queen of the Romagnola table! In the past it was cooked in a terracotta baking-pan placed on burning ambers. Today, instead, it's cooked in an iron baking-tin. Knead the flour and the lard, the salt and the bicarbonate and a little water, sufficient to get a compact, sufficiently hard, mix. Stretch the mix by forming a few circles of 0.5 cm thickness and with a 15 cm diameter. Cook the piadinas in an iron pan by piercing their surface with your fork. Farce them as you wish, with cheese and cold cuts, or eat them as an excellent substitute of bread.

Passatelli

Dose for 4 people
Ingredients: grana cheese (slightly piquant), grated dry bread, four eggs and a little nutmeg.

It once was a fundamental rule for the grana cheese dose to be more abundant than that of the grated bread, if the flavour was to be enhanced. Knead the bread, the grated grana with the eggs in order to get a solid, well compacted mix. Add the nutmeg perfume. Boil the broth, little by little let the mix pass into the potato masher. Wait for all of the passatelli to emerge from the broth, then serve!!

Ciambella

(ring-shaped cake)

Ingredients: one kilo of sifted flour, 4 eggs, 2 hectograms of lard, half a kilo of sugar, an envelope of yeast (= the dose required for one kilo), an envelope of vanilla, a rind of grated lemon and about a quarter of milk.

Pour onto the baking-board - as if a fountain - the accumulation of flour, add the eggs together with all the other ingredients and also the milk- little by little-, amalgamate the whole mix. Knead the rather soft mixture, give it an oblong shape, put onto it small many-coloured "millefiori" and then place it into an entirely greased (with lard) sheet of metal, then cook it in the oven for about half an hour. It is the most widespread and most often wrapped up sweet, whatever the holiday or festival. One eats it with pleasure, accompanied with a good glass of wine or sopped in sweet wine.