Traditional Cuisine

Valleluce’s dishes and recipes.

Panemmollo

Panemmollo is the best known and characteristic dish of Valleluce, particularly appreciated for its simplicity, accessibility and above all for its great variety. In fact, it is prepared with all the vegetables from the garden arranged on a base of bread soaked in the stock of the vegetables themselves. For this reason each family cooks a different panemmollo based on the season. The dish was created to reuse hardened bread so that it could be consumed daily by everyone, from the little ones to the elderly. In the past, bread was not prepared every day and everyone lived off the harvest of their own lands. The luckiest ones also added pieces of pork rind, lard, ham or sausage, usually one for each member of the family. When they went to work in the fields, women used to carry the basket of panemmollo on their heads with a handkerchief called spara and at lunchtime they served it by placing the basket on the ground on a tablecloth, around which everyone sat.

Calascioni

Calascioni are the sweets that are traditionally prepared for Easter and the Easter period. A variety of the calascioni is prepared in the same period in Sant’Elia, which is called “canascioni” and it’s prepared with a savoury puff pastry and its filling is made with various kinds of dry cheese. They are made with a puff pastry prepared with flour, albumen, olive oil, sugar and white wine. The filling is prepared with ricotta, egg yolk, vanilla and lemon peel dosed in base of the quantity of ricotta and sugar. In the preparatory phase, the filling is lain down on the puff pastry in several small quantities and coved with another puff pastry. At a later time, the various unities are divided with a cutter wheel and the surface is spread with a mixture of beaten egg and sugar and then baked.

Cruspole

The cruspole are the traditional sweets that are usually prepared for the various spacial occasions such as weddings, First Communions, Confirmations, Baptisms and the Patron Saint’s Festival. They are prepared with a puff pastry made with flour, eggs, sugar, butter, yeast and vanilla. The phyllo dough is then cut in little strips with a cutter wheel, intertwined, fried in a pan with hot olive oil and covered with a rich sugar layer at the end of the cooking.