These pasty-like cheesy parcels are ideal picnic fare
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 Cesari notes that in Naples, the name panzarotti would be superseded by panzerotti, calzone and pizza fritta.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.
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