The same Italian teacher who taught me to stuff vegetables in her brown kitchen introduced me to diminutive and augmentative suffixes using the word pancia, or “belly”. It was a good move on her part, teaching me via my stomach, and years on I still remember her lesson. It went something like this: the addition of -ino or -ina, depending on the gender of the pancia being described, produces pancino/pancina, or little belly. The suffix -etta has a similarly diminishing effect, as in pancetta, which also brings us to cured pork. At the other end of the scale, adding augmentative -ione or -iona produces more the ample pancione and panciona. My wise teacher also explained how, in southern dialect, pancia becomes panza, like the Spanish, so we remember ever-faithful Sancho Panza on his donkey; how the word panza gives us belly-shaped, deep-fried (or baked) filled dough parcels called panzerotti/panzarotti.
Panzerotti are an adored culinary symbol in Puglia, as well as in Campania, Calabria and Basilicata, which makes sense, considering the proximity of the four regions and how panzerotti predate the borders we recognise now. The historian Luca Cesari wrote a wonderful piece for the magazine Gambero Rosso about the history of panzerotti, starting in the middle ages and, with the evolution of dough, the enclosing of a filling, which was then boiled, baked or fried. He moves swiftly through the centuries of dough filled with meat and then fried, observing tortelli in northern Italy, risshens in England and rissoles in France. He observes it was the French influence in Naples that was behind a 1790 recipe for fried dough filled with cheese and ham being called rissoles alla Napoletana, but how the author of the recipe, Francesco Leonardi, ends it by saying: “In Naples, these rissoles are called panzarotti”. Cesari notes that in Naples, the name panzarotti would be superseded by panzerotti, calzone and pizza fritta. Meanwhile, in Bari, by 1800, panzerotti were also being filled with a recently embraced immigrant, the tomato.
Today, there is a whole world of panzerotti, fortified by strong and passionately held ideas of how they should be made. This range is good news for home cooks, because we can pick what suits us best. And, for me, this week that meant simple dough without yeast and a three-cheese filling, rather like Francesco Leonardi’s recipe from 1790.
Panzerotti – deep-fried dough parcels filled with cheese
Prep 25 min
Cook 5-20 min
Makes 10-12
350g plain flour
50g lard, butter or olive oil
A pinch of salt
200g ricotta
3 tbsp minced parsley
1 egg
50g parmesan
Nutmeg
100g mozzarella, diced
50g provola (or 50g more mozzarella), diced
Lard, or olive, peanut or sunflower oil (approx. 1 litre), for frying
Working in a bowl, mix the flour, fat, a pinch of salt and 160g warm water, and knead until everything comes together into a soft, smooth dough. Rest the dough under an upturned bowl while you make the filling.
In second bowl, mash the ricotta, parsley, egg, parmesan and a grating of nutmeg into a rough paste, then stir in the diced mozzarella and provola.
Making the panzerotti is a bit like making ravioli: roll the dough into a long strip about 20cm wide and 2mm thick. Put walnut-sized blobs of filling at 10cm intervals along the lower half of the strip, fold over the top half to cover the filling and press around it to get rid of air and seal. Use a cutter or glass to make half-moon shapes.
In a saucepan, heat the lard or oil to 160C. It is best to fry the panzerotti in pairs: they will take about two minutes on each side, so four minutes in total, to turn deep golden brown. Once done, use a slotted spoon to lift them on to a plate lined with kitchen towel. Any excess dough and scraps can be fried like crisps.
Alternatively, to bake the panzerotti, brush them all over with egg yolk, arrange on a baking tray and bake at 180C (160C fan)/350F/gas 4 for 20 minutes, or until golden. Both fried and baked can be eaten immediately or left to cool, then wrapped up and taken on a picnic.
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