Piadina con Crescenza

A spatula at a chiosco outside Cesena pulls a freckled piadina from the iron testo the moment a customer hands across an order, and the cook drops a heaped scoop of crescenza from a steel tub onto the centre of the warm disc with the back of a wide knife. The cheese is white and almost flowing at room temperature, kept in the kiosk fridge through the morning so it goes on cold. It hits the hot round and slackens within seconds. The cook works the back of the knife across the disc in one wipe to spread the cheese to the edges, lays a single slice of prosciutto crudo over the top, folds the round in half across the filling, and presses the seam closed in the hand of the customer waiting at the wooden ledge.

The name on the steel tub decides how the fold behaves. Crescenza takes its name from crescere, to grow: the paste is set to ripen in a warm room for roughly a week, where it swells like a leavened dough before it is cut, and it leaves the dairy at the firmer, drier end of the soft-cheese range. Ask instead for squacquerone, the Romagnol cousin a kiosk near Forlì is far more likely to be carrying, and the cheese in the tub is a different animal: matured only one to four days at three to six degrees under the rules that earned Squacquerone di Romagna its EU Protected Designation of Origin in 2012, it holds so much water that it barely keeps a shape on the knife and runs toward the bread the instant it is spread. The drier crescenza sits where it is put and tangs quietly; the wetter squacquerone floods the crumb and reads sharper. Most kiosks in the region pour the second and call it the first.

The disc under the cheese is not one bread but two protected shapes, and the choice changes how much liquid the fold can take. The Piadina Romagnola IGP rules, granted in November 2014, recognise a thicker inland round of fifteen to twenty-five centimetres across and four to eight millimetres deep, compact and slightly crumbly, the form baked around Forlì and Ravenna; and a thinner Riminese round up to thirty centimetres wide and no more than three millimetres deep, soft and blistered and pliable down the coast. A loose, weeping squacquerone wants the breadier inland disc with depth enough to drink it; spread thick on the wafer-thin coastal round it can soak straight through. The cook matches the cheese to the bread in front of them, which is why the same order can arrive as two different parcels forty minutes apart along the via Emilia.

Take a fold from the ledge and the parcel is warm and a little heavy in the hand, the freckled disc giving slightly under a fingertip pressed at the seam. The first mouthful registers a soft bread yielding at the teeth, a quiet baked-cereal aroma rising off the warm round with a faint trace of rendered lard, then the cool tang of the cheese arrives a beat behind, milky and slightly acid against the heat. The prosciutto comes through last as a long savoury salt that the cheese has tempered. The fold steams at the open edge as the bite continues. A small white drip is on the napkin at the close. The cheese is doing the work of a sauce here, sinking into the bread crumb rather than sitting on top of it.

The order at the chiosco is short. A regular outside Forlì or Ravenna will ask for una con squacquerone, using the Romagnol name of the looser local cheese, or for una crescenza e crudo, the cheese with the ham, or simply la classica. The year-round bestseller is none of these three but the squacquerone e rucola, the cheese against a heavy fistful of raw peppery rocket and no meat at all, the cool wet paste and the green bitterness pulling against each other inside the warm bread. The kiosks above Rimini quote the price by the fold, and the standard daytime order is one fold and a small beer at the wooden ledge, eaten standing in five minutes.

The Bread of Aeneas and a Cheese That Grows

The round has a literary patron, and he reached for an unlikely ancestor. The poet Giovanni Pascoli, raised at San Mauro in the Romagnol countryside, published a poemetto called La piada, first as a magazine piece in 1900 and then in his collection Nuovi poemetti in 1909, and in framing it he called the flatbread the “pane di Enea”, the bread of Aeneas. He was pointing at Book VII of the Aeneid, where the Trojans, out of dishes, eat the flat wheat cakes they had been using as plates and so fulfil the prophecy that they would one day be driven to devour their own tables. Pascoli took that buried scrap of Virgil, tied it to the unleavened round his neighbours cooked on the hearth, and handed Romagna a founding myth for its poor man's bread. It is a poet's leap rather than a documented line of descent, but it is the leap that lifted the dialect word piada into standard Italian and made the kiosk round a regional emblem.

The cheese carries a quieter and better-attested record. Crescenza and stracchino are documented in Lombard cheese making from the medieval period, the two names used for the same fresh cow's-milk cheese at different maturations, the rind absent and the paste set by calf rennet. The looser Romagnol form under its dialect name squacquerone turns up in monastic and episcopal correspondence by the late eighteenth century: by one often-repeated account the bishop of Cesena, Cardinal Bellisomi, wrote asking what exactly this oozing cheese was that had been sent to his table. That high-water style is the one the modern rules protect, the Squacquerone di Romagna PDO fixing its production across Bologna, Ferrara, Forlì-Cesena, Ravenna, Rimini and a strip of Pesaro and Urbino.

So the fold the kiosk hands across the ledge has no certificate of its own. It is a folk assembly that rides instead on the certified files of its two halves, a cheese first registered in 2012 and a bread first registered in 2014, both Romagnol files signed in Brussels two years apart. The Lombard origin in the glance card is the older truth of the cheese family; what the lunch queue in Cesena actually eats, more often than not, is the local high-water cousin that grew up in the same province as the bread folded around it.