Piadina con Erbe di Campo

A Romagnol grandmother in late March is bent at the verge of a country lane outside Bertinoro, scissors in one hand and a cloth bag in the other, working a stand of dandelions and strigoli at the foot of a hawthorn hedge. She knows which leaves are still soft and which have already gone bitter past use. The bag fills slowly. At the house the greens are washed in three changes of cold water to strip the soil out of the rosettes, blanched briefly in a wide pan, then squeezed dry in handfuls and chopped on a board. A cast-iron skillet goes onto the flame. Olive oil, garlic crushed flat, a dried peperoncino snapped in half, then the greens turned through the hot fat until they collapse into something deep and faintly bitter.

The greens are the spring almanac of a foraging tradition the inland farms have kept for centuries. Dandelion (tarassaco) gives the leading bitterness. Wild chicory adds depth. Silene vulgaris, called strigoli or stridoli across Romagna, is the sweet grassy note prized above all the others and the one that sets a local mix apart from a generic one. Young nettle tops, blanched first to knock back the sting, contribute a green-iron taste. Sorrel and borage and the soft fennel tops are added in tiny quantities for lift. The mix changes by valley, by month, and by which hedge the picker walked past first.

What this fold asks of the cook is correct draining and correct heat at the plate. Soggy greens turn an unleavened round to wet paper in under a minute; the lard-shortened dough has almost no crumb to absorb their water. The greens are pressed in the colander with a fist until the liquid runs clear, then chopped fine so they spread evenly across the disc and do not leave bare strips of bread between forkfuls. The testo has to be steady-hot, around the temperature a hand cannot hold a hover over for more than two seconds; a cool plate freckles the round unevenly and the centre stays gummy. A smear of squacquerone, the fresh runny Romagnol cheese, is sometimes laid under the greens as a bind and a quiet cream against the leaf bitterness.

The build assembled at the chiosco goes warm into the hand. The disc has caught its pale-brown freckling at the rim and stayed soft enough in the centre to fold without tearing. Inside it the greens have gone dark almost to black, glossy with oil, the garlic broken down to a soft paste between the leaves. The smell coming up is grassy and a little smoky from the hot pan, with the bread itself contributing the warm wheat note of cooked flour and a thread of caught lard. The first bite is a give of bread, then the bitter lift of dandelion, then a small clean chilli burn at the soft palate that the wheat carries away within a second. The juice that escapes is olive oil, not water.

The order at the kiosk is a single word and a season. Across Romagna the customer at a chiosco will ask for una con l'erba, with the article l' doing the work of "the spring greens, you know which." Outside the foraging months the request switches: in autumn and winter the same kiosk fold uses cultivated chard, cavolo nero, or wilted spinach. In the hill towns above Forlì and Cesena the local festivals (sagre dell'erba) gather the picked mixes by the basket and the fold becomes the lunch handed out at the table. The verb at the counter is piegare, to fold, used both for the bread and for the bite of taking it.

The variations are siblings around the same round and they each turn on a different filling. The piadina con squacquerone e rucola swaps the cooked greens for raw rocket and a heavy spoon of the fresh cheese; the piadina con cavolo nero trades the foraged mix for the cultivated kale that holds through winter; the piadina con prosciutto crudo goes meat-led with no green at all. A nearer cousin from the Umbrian side of the Apennine spine takes the same wilted hedge greens and tucks them into a thick split griddle bread instead of a folded round, and the contrast tells the central Italian story: same green tradition, two different breads chosen by two different valleys.

A Foraging March and a 1900 Poem

The hedge-foraging the dish rests on is older than any printed Romagnol cookery. The Apennine and pre-Apennine peasant economy across central Italy depended on wild greens (erbe spontanee) gathered by women and children through the lean months between the winter root cellar emptying and the kitchen garden producing; nineteenth-century Romagnol agricultural surveys list dandelion, wild chicory, strigoli, and nettle as standard early-spring foods of the rural household. The verb andare per erbe, to go gathering greens, enters Italian regional dialect as a season as much as an activity.

The flatbread is much better documented than the filling that sits in it. Fourteenth-century ecclesiastical records of the Romagnol countryside register the bread among the items owed in kind by tenants, the period's recipe set down as wheat flour, water, salt, optionally a little milk and a little lard. The modern Italianised name and the cult of the bread as a regional emblem were crystallised by Giovanni Pascoli in his 1900 poem on the Romagnol round. EU protected-origin status (PGI) for Piadina Romagnola arrived in 2014, codifying the unleavened lard-or-oil dough and recognising both the thicker inland form and the thinner coastal one as canonical regional shapes.

The combination of the foraged greens and the Romagnol round is not a separately registered specialty but a folk preparation kept by inland kitchens and by spring sagre. At a chiosco above Bertinoro in March a counter cook will receive a basket of the morning's picked mix, blanch it, cook it down in oil and garlic in the back, and fold it into a freshly griddled piadina classica within the hour. The Consorzio di Promozione e Tutela della Piadina Romagnola received EU PGI registration for the bread on 24 October 2014, which is the firm date in the dish's paperwork; the foraging on which the filling depends predates it by approximately six centuries.