Bologna: Three Names for One Table

Bologna

La Dotta, la Grassa, la Rossa

Tuesday, September 1

Bologna has three names and uses all of them. La Dotta, the learned, for the oldest university in the world. La Grassa, the fat, for the table. La Rossa, the red, for the brick and for the politics. Cities collect nicknames the way people do, by being talked about, and any city that can carry three adjectives for nine hundred years and still argue about which one comes first is a city worth a Tuesday. Tonight is the capital’s own night: not Emilia-Romagna the region, which is a hyphen holding two different kitchens together, but the one city on the plain that wrote its recipes into law and then forbade anyone to cook them differently.

Begin with the ground. Bologna sits exactly where the Apennines stop, and the Po plain begins, on the Roman road that runs dead straight along that seam from Piacenza to the Adriatic. Everything about the city comes from being the hinge between mountain and plain. The Po itself is twenty-five miles north; the sea is fifty miles east at Ravenna. Close enough to smell on a west wind, far enough that the city never learned to cook fish. The plain is the fattest farmland in Italy, and it handed Bologna its entire kitchen. Soft wheat instead of the durum of the south, which is why Bologna’s pasta is egg dough rolled by hand into a sheet, and why, on a night with no pasta on the table, the same wheat arrives as fried bread instead. Dairy on the flat and in the hills, which became Parmigiano-Reggiano. The whey from the Parmigiano dairies fed the pigs, which is why the pig is everywhere: prosciutto, mortadella, salame rosa, cotechino, the sausage in every sauce, the lard the bread is fried in. No olives grow on the plain, so the fat is pork fat and butter. Add the fog that sits on the fields from October to March, and you have a cuisine built to feed people who work outdoors in the cold and damp. That is the whole logic of La Grassa. Nobody in Bologna is fat by accident.

What most visitors never see is that Bologna was a water city. From the twelfth century the Reno and the Savena were diverted inside the walls into a web of canals, and the Navile ran north to join the Po and, through Ferrara, to reach Venice and the sea. A river port with no river. The canals turned the mills that made Bologna, from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, the leading silk-veil producer in Europe, on a water-driven machine the city guarded as a state secret. Goods went down the Navile to Venice; salt, spices, and Venetian trade came back up. The hemp that grew on the Bolognese plain became the rope and sailcloth of a fleet Bologna never saw. In the twentieth century the canals were paved over, one by one. There is a single window left, the Finestrella on Via Piella, where you lean out over a rail, look down at water running between the backs of houses, and realize the whole city is standing on it.

So the sea is not Bologna’s story, but the sea did put three things on its table. Salt above all: the salt pans at Cervia were a papal monopoly, and Bologna was a papal city from 1506 to 1859, so the salt that cured every prosciutto and every mortadella came up from the Adriatic under the Pope’s seal. Eel, from the lagoons at Comacchio north of Ravenna, the one fish the inland Emilian kitchen ever took seriously. And baccalà through Venice for Fridays. That is the extent of it. The brodetto, the grilled sardines, and the piadina belong to Romagna, the coastal half of a region that is really two regions joined by a hyphen. Emilia is butter, pork, and egg pasta; Romagna is olive oil, fish, and flatbread. Bologna is Emilia’s last city before the line, and it never once looked over it.

The Etruscans called it Felsina. The Gallic Boii gave it Bononia, which is the name it still answers to in Latin on the university seal. Rome planted a colony here in 189 BC. In the Middle Ages it was a free commune bristling with a hundred towers, of which two survive, the Asinelli and the Garisenda, leaning toward each other like old men in a piazza. The city was papal property on paper from the thirteenth century and in practice ran itself, under the Bentivoglio family, who held it as the Pope’s vicars and behaved like its princes. Cesare Borgia took every town in the Romagna between 1499 and 1503, the last of them Forlì, where Caterina Sforza held the fortress against him through a winter until the wall came down. A woman who a decade earlier had stood on those same ramparts while her husband’s assassins held her children below and threatened to kill them all, and told them to go ahead; she had the means to make more. It was not a bluff. She was twenty-five, and the only value those children had as hostages was a mother’s love, which she had just explained wasn’t the problem they thought it was. Seeing that killing the children wouldn’t help their cause, the assassins walked away, and the children lived. I have a fondness for her. She ran the fortress, the treasury, the alliances, and a manuscript of four hundred recipes at the same time, and I would take her on my team tomorrow: not on the line, where she would be wasted, but across the table from the wine distributors, who have never in their lives met someone who knew how to run a negotiation. Cesare never took Bologna; his father bought the family its foothold in Emilia another way, marrying Lucrezia to Alfonso d’Este of Ferrara, thirty miles north, with a dowry the Este could not afford to refuse. It was the Borgias’ great enemy who finished the job. In 1506 Julius II, the Warrior Pope, marched on Bologna in person, drove the Bentivoglio out, and rode in under the porticoes. He had Michelangelo cast a bronze of him for the front of San Petronio; when the Bentivoglio slipped back five years later, the Bolognese pulled it down, and Lucrezia’s husband melted it into a cannon, christened it La Giulia, and pointed it at the papal army. Bologna stayed papal anyway until 1859, and in 1530, in that same basilica, a pope crowned Charles V Holy Roman Emperor, the last time a pope ever would. The Renaissance was like that here: a poisoner’s daughter, a pope in armor, a statue turned into artillery, all within a morning’s ride. Modern Italy keeps only the hint of it, which is what you taste at the end of tonight’s dinner. And in 1088 it opened the university, the oldest in the world, which did more than anything else to shape the physical city. The porticoes, nearly forty kilometers of them in the old center, exist because a town full of students needed rooms, and landlords built out over the street to make them. The city allowed it on one condition, written into law in 1288: the ground beneath the overhang stayed public, open to anyone, high enough for a rider on horseback. The house got its extra floor, and the street was never lost. You can walk from the railway station to the Basilica of San Petronio, a mile through the center of the city, in a rainstorm and never open an umbrella. The students also invented the osteria: cheap wine, a plate of crescentine and salumi, and a room to argue in.

Bologna has always been a working town, and this is where the Naples comparison people make is both right and wrong. Both cities are loud, both are proud of being underestimated, both put their best food in the hands of the poor. But La Rossa is the working-class city that got rich and kept its politics anyway. The name is for the brick, for the Resistance, which had its capital here in 1944, and for the Communist city governments that ran Bologna from the war into the 1990s. They built the cooperative economy that still runs much of the region’s food chain. The Parmigiano dairies, the pork consortia, the Coop supermarkets, the engineering belt that grew up along the Via Emilia, the packaging machines, the motorcycles and the sports cars twenty minutes down the road, all grew out of the same cooperative workshop culture. Bologna eats like a rich city, votes like a poor one, and sees no contradiction.

And it regulates its food the way a working city with a law school would. Mortadella, the workers’ lunch, cheap and filling, sliced into a roll at ten in the morning by men who started at six, was defined by a cardinal’s edict in 1661, and the definition has barely moved since. The tortellino was deposited with the Chamber of Commerce in 1974 and the ragù in 1982, each recipe sworn before a notary by a confraternity that exists to enforce it. In this city, tradition is not the absence of argument. Tradition is the argument, written down and defended like a border. The men in the confraternities are tremendous fun at dinner.

Here is what is personal for me. Our sign says Osteria e Ristorante, and I chose the order of those words on purpose. The ristorante is the room with the wine list and the tablecloths. The osteria is older and humbler: the tavern, the room where you eat what the kitchen has, at one price, with whoever is at the next table. The Tuesday family dinner is our osteria. It is the half of the name I care about most.

Which brings me to the neighbor. Forty kilometers up the Via Emilia, in Modena, there is a restaurant that has held three Michelin stars for fifteen years, has been named the best restaurant in the world twice, and is called Osteria Francescana. Massimo Bottura opened it in 1995 on a side street in Modena’s old town and deliberately called it an osteria, a restaurant with the highest ambitions in Italy. He was the son of a fuel-oil family, dropped out of law school, bought a failing trattoria outside town in his twenties, and learned from the rezdora who came with it, a woman named Lidia Cristoni who had rolled sfoglia every morning of her life. Then a few years abroad, Ducasse in Monte Carlo, a season at El Bulli, and back to Modena with a head full of ideas the Modenesi did not want. The early years were hostile. The dining room was empty, and the standard line in town was that he was insulting his grandmother. The dishes that caused the trouble are the ones that made him: Five Ages of Parmigiano Reggiano in Different Textures and Temperatures; The Crunchy Part of the Lasagna, which is only the corner everyone fights over; Oops! I Dropped the Lemon Tart, built around a real accident in service; and the one that matters tonight, Tortellini Walking on Broth, six tortellini in a line across a plate on a ribbon of broth, served in a region whose deposited recipe says in broth, nothing else, no exceptions. The confraternities were not amused. It took Michelin until 2002 to give him one star, 2006 for two, 2011 for three. When the 2012 earthquake cracked hundreds of thousands of wheels of Parmigiano in the warehouses, he invented a risotto using the damaged cheese, put the recipe out worldwide, and the whole stock sold. The rival he traded the top of the world with in 2016 and 2018, Noma in Copenhagen, closed as a restaurant at the end of 2024 to become a laboratory. The osteria in Modena is still serving dinner at twelve tables.

So tonight we cook Bologna the way Bologna wrote it down: the recipes as the confraternities deposited them, nothing walking on broth, no crunchy corner. And we serve them under the word osteria, the same word Bottura chose for the restaurant that broke every one of those rules. The tradition and the rebellion, one table, one Tuesday. A first course that arrives together: zuppa imperiale, the soup the rezdore of Bologna make on the days when folding tortellini is more than the morning allows, cubes of baked Parmigiano custard in the capon broth that is the real point of every Bolognese soup; and beside it a salad of pear and Parmigiano, because Emilia grows most of the pears in Italy and because the region’s oldest proverb warns you not to let the farmer find out how good cheese is with pears. Then crescentine, the fried bread of the Bolognese osteria, which Modena calls gnocco fritto and which has nothing to do with a gnocco of potato, with mortadella under the cardinal’s edict and a soft fresh cheese to cool it, at room temperature, the way it is eaten standing up. Then the cotoletta alla Petroniana, named for San Petronio, the city’s patron: a breaded veal cutlet laid with prosciutto and Parmigiano and baked under a veil of broth, which is Bologna’s answer to Milan’s cutlet and a fatter one, as you would expect, with friggione beside it, the onions cooked down for two hours with a little tomato that the city called the poor man’s meat when meat was out of the question. And for the book, if not the Tuesday, zuppa inglese, the trifle soaked in scarlet alchermes that the Emilians say was made for the Este court at Ferrara, Lucrezia Borgia’s court.

The wines tonight are from our own shelf, and the honest story is why. Lambrusco is what Bologna drinks with all of this: the dark sparkling red of the plain, bone dry, with a bitter edge to the foam that cuts pork fat like nothing else. Almost none of that Lambrusco makes it to America. What crossed the ocean for fifty years was the sweet, low-alcohol export version, sparkling syrup, and it did to the name here what it deserved. Rather than pour that next to the mortadella, the Prosecco does the duty: bubbles against fried dough and cured pork, which is the job the real Lambrusco was born for. With the broth and the pear, we pour an Anderson Valley Gewürztraminer, a wine with enough perfume to stand up to nutmeg and enough acid to cut the cheese. And with the cutlet, our own Pinot Noir from the Comptche ranch. It does with a Bolognese cutlet what a young Sangiovese di Romagna would do: sits down next to the prosciutto and lets it speak.

The Menu

Tuesday Family Style Dinner  —  $29 per person  ·  Wine flight of the three pairings $20

Primo  Zuppa Imperiale & Insalata di Pere e Parmigiano

The Sunday soup of Bologna: golden cubes of baked Parmigiano-and-semolina custard in a rich capon and chicken broth. Alongside, mixed greens with sliced late-summer pear, shaved Parmigiano-Reggiano, toasted walnuts, and a balsamic vinaigrette — the pairing the Emilian proverb tells you to keep from the farmer

Secondo  Crescentine con Mortadella

Pillows of fried bread — not a pasta, no potato, just leavened dough puffed in hot fat — with sliced mortadella and soft, tangy crescenza stracchino, the aperitivo of every Emilian evening, served at room temperature as Bologna serves it. In Modena, forty kilometers up the road, the same bread is called gnocco fritto. Same dough, two flags

Terzo  Cotoletta alla Petroniana

Bologna's own cutlet, named for the city's patron saint: breaded veal laid with prosciutto and Parmigiano, baked under a veil of broth until the cheese melts into the crust, laid over a bed of friggione, the slow onion-and-tomato confit that is Bologna's poor man's meat. Richer than Milan's, and unapologetic about it

Dolce  Zuppa Inglese

The Emilian trifle: sponge soaked in scarlet alchermes, layered with vanilla custard and chocolate cream — the dessert Bologna argues it invented, and serves as if the argument were over

The Wines

White  Gewürztraminer, Lula Cellars, Anderson Valley — perfume for the nutmeg in the broth, acid for the pear and the cheese

Sparkling  Prosecco Superiore DOC, Pasqua, Veneto — standing in for the dry Lambrusco Bologna drinks and America rarely sees, doing the job bubbles do against fried dough and cured pork

Red  Pinot Noir, Costa Vineyards, Comptche Estate 2021 — our own ranch, next to the prosciutto on the cutlet

The Recipes

Zuppa Imperiale

Baked Parmigiano Custard in Capon Broth — Serves 8

Ingredients

6 eggs

1 cup fine semolina

1 cup grated Parmigiano-Reggiano, plus more for the table

1/2 cup unsalted butter, melted and cooled

1/2 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg

1 teaspoon salt

3 quarts capon or rich chicken broth, clarified of fat and well seasoned

Method

Whisk the eggs until smooth, then whisk in the semolina, Parmigiano, melted butter, nutmeg, and salt to a thin, pourable batter. Butter a half-sheet pan, pour the batter in about half an inch deep, and bake at 350°F for fifteen to twenty minutes, until just set and barely gold at the edges — it should not brown. Cool completely in the pan, then cut into half-inch cubes; they keep, covered, a full day. At service, bring the broth to a simmer, drop in the cubes, and let them heat through for two or three minutes until they swell slightly and float. Ladle into warm bowls with generous broth and pass the Parmigiano. This is the soup the women of Bologna make when there is no morning to fold tortellini, and it holds in the pot for an hour without complaint, which is more than a tortellino will ever do for you. The broth is the point; the cubes are there to give it something to carry.

Insalata di Pere e Parmigiano

Pear, Parmigiano, and Walnut Salad — Serves 8

Ingredients

8 cups mixed tender greens

3 ripe but firm pears — Abate Fetel if you can find them, Bartlett or Bosc otherwise

4 oz Parmigiano-Reggiano in a piece, for shaving

1 cup walnut halves, toasted and roughly broken

3 tablespoons aceto balsamico di Modena

1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil

1 small shallot, minced

Salt and black pepper

Method

Whisk the balsamic with the shallot and a pinch of salt, then whisk in the oil in a thread until the dressing holds together. Halve and core the pears and slice them thin lengthwise, just before serving so they do not brown. Dress the greens lightly, mound them on the plates, lay the pear slices over, and shave the Parmigiano across the top in wide curls with a peeler. Scatter the walnuts and finish with black pepper. Emilia grows most of the pears in Italy, on the flat wet ground between Ferrara and Modena, and the pairing with Parmigiano is the region's oldest proverb: al contadino non far sapere quanto è buono il formaggio con le pere. Don't let the farmer find out how good cheese is with pears. The farmer found out.

Crescentine con Mortadella

Fried Bread with Mortadella and Crescenza Stracchino — Serves 8

Ingredients

4 cups all-purpose flour

1 tablespoon lard, plus more for frying (or neutral oil)

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon active dry yeast dissolved in 1 cup warm water

1/2 cup whole milk

1 lb mortadella, sliced paper thin

8 oz crescenza stracchino, at room temperature

Method

Rub the lard into the flour and salt with your fingertips until it disappears. Add the yeast water and the milk and knead to a smooth, soft dough, eight minutes by hand. Cover and let it rise an hour, until doubled. Roll it out to a scant quarter inch and cut into diamonds about three inches on a side. Heat two inches of lard or oil to 350°F and fry the diamonds a few at a time; they puff into hollow pillows in under a minute a side. Drain on a rack and salt lightly. Serve warm or at room temperature, the pillows in a basket, the mortadella draped on a board, the crescenza stracchino in a bowl with a spoon; the ritual is to tear a pillow open, lay in a fold of mortadella and a smear of cheese, and eat it standing up. In Bologna this bread is a crescentina. Forty kilometers up the road in Modena it is a gnocco fritto, and the two cities will correct you either way. The mortadella has been defined by law since a cardinal's edict of 1661 — pork, and only pork, and the white cubes are back fat — and it is still the cheapest great food in Italy.

Cotoletta alla Petroniana

Veal Cutlet with Prosciutto and Parmigiano, Baked in Broth — Serves 8

Ingredients

8 veal cutlets, about 5 oz each, pounded to 1/4 inch

2 eggs, beaten

1 1/2 cups fine dry breadcrumbs

1/2 cup all-purpose flour

6 tablespoons unsalted butter

8 thin slices prosciutto di Parma

1 cup grated Parmigiano-Reggiano

1 cup capon or chicken broth

Salt and black pepper

A few shavings of white truffle, if the season and the budget allow

Method

Season the cutlets, dust them in flour, pass them through the egg, and press them into the breadcrumbs. Brown them in the butter over medium-high heat, in batches, until gold on both sides but not cooked through, and lay them in a single layer in a roasting pan. Cover each cutlet with a slice of prosciutto and a thick layer of Parmigiano, then pour the broth around them, not over, to come a third of the way up. Bake at 400°F for eight to ten minutes, until the cheese has melted into a veil over the ham and the broth has reduced to a spoonful of sauce around each cutlet. To plate, spoon a bed of friggione across the center of each plate and lay the cutlet over it, overlapping rather than covering, so the crust stays crisp where it rides the rim and softens into the onion where it doesn't. Spoon the pan juices around and serve at once. This is Bologna's answer to Milan's cutlet, named for San Petronio, the city's patron, and it takes the Milanese idea and does what Bologna does to everything, which is add prosciutto and cheese and a little broth and refuse to apologize. The truffle is the confraternity's version; the cutlet does not need it, but it does not refuse it either.

Friggione

Slow Onion and Tomato Confit — Serves 8

Ingredients

4 lbs white onions, sliced thin

1 tablespoon salt

1 tablespoon sugar

1/3 cup lard or duck fat

1 cup canned San Marzano tomatoes, crushed by hand, with a little of their juice

Black pepper

Method

Toss the onions with the salt and sugar in a bowl and leave them two hours, until they have wept a pool of liquid; drain them but do not rinse. Melt the fat in a wide heavy pan over the lowest heat, add the onions, and cook uncovered, stirring now and then, for an hour and a half to two hours, until they have collapsed into a soft, sweet, barely golden tangle. They must not fry and they must not brown; this is a confit, not a caramelization. Stir in the tomatoes and cook thirty minutes more, until the tomato has disappeared into the onion and the whole thing is more onion than sauce. Correct for salt and finish with pepper. Friggione is at its best made in the afternoon and served in the evening, and better still the next day. Bologna called it the poor man's meat — the dish of houses where the cutlet was a rumor — and it is the contorno the city puts beside the cotoletta without being asked. Tonight it goes under the cutlet instead, as the base the veal rests on. Lard is what the pig left the Bolognese; use whatever fat your own kitchen has left you.

Zuppa Inglese

Alchermes Trifle with Custard and Chocolate Cream — Serves 10–12

Ingredients

1 sponge cake or 1 1/2 lbs savoiardi

1 cup alchermes

4 cups whole milk

8 egg yolks

1 cup sugar

1/2 cup cornstarch

1 vanilla bean, split, or 2 teaspoons vanilla extract

4 oz dark chocolate, chopped

1 tablespoon unsweetened cocoa

Whipped cream for the top

Method

Make the custard: bring the milk to a simmer with the vanilla. Whisk the yolks with the sugar and cornstarch until pale, temper in the hot milk, return to the pot, and cook over medium heat, whisking, until thick and just boiling. Divide it in two. Stir the chocolate and cocoa into one half until melted and smooth. Press plastic onto both and cool. Slice the sponge into fingers and brush, do not soak, each with alchermes until it is the color of a cardinal's hat. In a glass bowl or individual glasses, layer sponge, vanilla custard, sponge, chocolate custard, sponge, and finish with vanilla. Chill at least four hours or overnight. Top with whipped cream before serving. The name means English soup, and nobody agrees why; the Emilians say it was made for English visitors to the Este court at Ferrara, the Tuscans claim it for themselves, and Bologna serves it as though the matter were closed. The alchermes is the point: a scarlet liqueur of spices and rose that has been colored, since the Medici, with an insect. Do not skip it and do not tell the table.

Chi mangia bene vive bene.

Who eats well lives well.

Deposited at the Chamber of Commerce. Served on a Tuesday.