Umbria, Italy’s Best-Kept Culinary Secret, Is Budding.

[elleng]

NORCIA, Italy — Norcia, a small town in Umbria, is little known outside Italy. It’s not a celebrity hill town like Siena or a religious destination like Assisi, but in Italian food its name is even more resonant.

Norcia has been famous for centuries for its butchers and the extraordinary array of cured meats they produce. Last month it acquired a wider and sadder renown as the town closest to the epicenter of a deadly earthquake.

Norcia, like most of Umbria, was touched but not transformed. The most serious damage was just south of Umbria, in the devastated towns of Amatrice and Accumoli, which, like Norcia, lie in the foothills of the volatile central Apennine mountain range. San Pellegrino di Norcia, a village near here, was leveled; many of its residents are still living in tent villages (where, photographs show, volunteers and field kitchens have been dispatched to produce pasta and tomato-meat sauce from scratch).

Good food may seem like a low priority when nearly 300 people have lost their lives and thousands more their homes. But in Italy, it is an obvious panacea in a disaster. . .

Umbrian cooks traditionally agree on one thing: Fresh pasta here should be made of nothing more than flour and water. Women pride themselves on being able to make tender, springy pasta without eggs, using a vigorous full-body kneading motion they call “a culu mossu” (with a moving butt), which looks something like dancing a samba. (For modern or modest cooks, the constant movement of the food processor is a good substitute.)' >>>


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