Our journey through Italian pizzas, focaccia and piadine this time makes its way to Emilia. After Imola, Romagna by nature but Emilia for its political geography, as another typical bakeshop amd street food speciality joins the piadina: the crescente Bolognese. It’s geographical the "bridge" between piadina romagnola and another famous panfocaccia, crescentina (better known as tigella) from Modena. This time, then, the match is between Modena and Bologna, already divided by the eternal challenge of tortellini.
If the "ciccioli" isn’t crackling
In spite of the name, they are radically different dishes. The less famous of the two, the crescente (or crescenta) Bolognese, is a kind of focaccia prepared with flour, salt, lard, biga (a starter dough of flour, yeast, and water), sugar, yeast, and water. Submerged in the dough and crust is diced ham and bacon. The original recipe was deposited in 2013, by the Italian Cuisine Association and the Felsinei bakers, at the local Chamber of Commerce. It is also called "crescente con i ciccioli" because the pork rind, after being cooked in the oven goes particularly crunchy, resembling the crackling you get from working with pork fat.
A scholar street food
The history of this dish is as ancient as it is vague. Nonetheless, it is known that it was a very poor dish, born from the bakers bread baking leftovers, which in Bologna is called "carsänt" (or "carsèint" towards the Bassa), in other words "che cresce". The bakers then added lard and gambuccio, which is the end leg part of the ham, often discarded and, some say even a little rancid! - just for a change. Only during the post-war period will the leg be replaced by more valuable cured meats such as raw ham and bacon. The crescente is the classic street food, to be eaten alone or stuffed with the city's typical cold cuts: mortadella, but also pink salami and coppa di testa. There are however numerous variations that include the addition of lard, ciccioli (the real ones!), or with the surface covered in rosemary. Monica Sartoni Cesari and Alessandro Molinari Pradelli in their book La Cucina Bolognese, suggest a "coarse pesto of lard or bacon, garlic and rosemary" mixed in with the dough, "in place of the simple pancetta or prosciutto". That the crescente is part of Bologna's identity is also demonstrated by the "Crescentone", the name with which the Bolognese confidentially call the raised pavement of Piazza Maggiore.
From the Apennines to the lowlands. A linguistic guerrilla warfare
The story of the crescentine, mistakenly called "tigelle", is quite different: "tigelle" are in fact the terracotta or refractory stone discs used to cook them. As the local historian Andrea Pini says, "In a pizzeria would you ever ask for the oven instead of the pizza? Or at the fast food restaurant, a fryer instead of chips? Or your grandmother for the baking pan instead of the pie?" Here, with the crescentine it happened. And yet the local dialect speaks clearly, "chersènt in t'al tigèli", they are called "crescenti nelle tigelle". The linguistic guerrilla warfare is probably due to the proximity to Bologna: the crescentine in Bologna are in fact the only ones fried, which belong to another food family, to simplify it, the fried dumpling family. The "crescentina modenese" is a poor dish born among the peasants of the Modena Apennines: only with its success and its landing in the lowlands was the confusion with the nearby Bolognese ones and the misleading term “tigelle” formed.
A tower of flavor
Get the picture? Good. Now all that's left to do is to prepare them: you only need flour, brewer's yeast (without exaggerating), extra virgin olive oil, water, milk (only for the "richer" version) and salt. Once the dough has been prepared, the crescentine are placed in tigelle, containers made of terracotta or refractory stone with a lid, which are preheated and placed in the fireplace (but there is also the modern version for the gas stove, as well as "cluster" ones with 4 or 6 discs). The diameter of a tigella is about 15 cm by 1.5 cm thick: inside, the dough is separated from the terracotta with walnut or chestnut leaves. The tigelle, with the crescentine inside, were traditionally placed one on top of the other to form a tower. Once cooked, you start with the filling: the traditional one is cunza, the typical Modena dough made with lard, garlic and rosemary, also used for borlengo. But likewise, with cold cuts, cheese and game. And, in recent times, Nutella. The crescentine are often marked with sun symbols (of very remote Indo-European origin, they symbolize fertility and the flow of the world around a fixed point) or family coats of arms, engraved in the tigella. Evidence of an ancient tradition that, from the Modena Apennines, has become part of our gastronomic heritage. Crescentine modenesi or crescente Bolognese, which would you choose?