Friuli Venezia Giulia Food & Traditional Cuisine

This region spent centuries divided between Venice, the Habsburgs and the Slavic world, and the kitchen never chose a side. A Trieste restaurant serves goulash and strudel without irony; an hour inland the food is mountain cheese and cured pork; on the plain it is Venetian. The ingredients that made the region famous abroad — the ham of San Daniele, the cheese of Montasio — come from small, specific areas, and the cooking around them is plainer than the reputation suggests.

The region’s cooking divides by altitude and by history. Almost nothing here is shared with the rest of Italy unchanged.

Prosciutto di San Daniele

Cured in one small hill town where air off the Alps meets air off the Adriatic, salted and pressed rather than only salted, and sweeter than its Parma rival. Produced under a tight denomination and eaten plain.

Frico

Montasio cheese cooked until it crisps, either as a thin wafer or in a thicker version bound with potato and onion. It began as a way to use cheese too aged to sell, and is now the region’s most recognisable dish.

Jota

A thick soup of sauerkraut, beans and potato from the Carso and Trieste, with pork somewhere in it. It is Central European food written in Italian, and it is winter food.

Cjarsons

Filled pasta from the Carnia mountains, sweet and savoury at once — the filling may hold herbs, raisins, cinnamon and potato, dressed with smoked ricotta and butter. Every valley has its own version and no two agree.

The Trieste table

Goulash, boiled pork with sauerkraut in the old buffet taverns, and a pastry counter of strudel, presnitz and putizza. Trieste was Austria’s port for six centuries and it shows here more than anywhere.

Fish of the lagoon

Grado cooks boreto, fish stewed with vinegar, garlic and a great deal of pepper and served with polenta. It is a fisherman’s dish with no wine, no tomato and no decoration.

Food culture here is tied to specific towns and to two institutions found nowhere else in Italy in this form.

Coffee with its own vocabulary

Trieste is Italy’s coffee port and drinks more of it per head than any other Italian city. Ordering requires local words: a nero is an espresso, a capo a macchiato, and in b means in a glass. Getting it wrong is the fastest way to be identified as a visitor.

The osmize

On the Carso above Trieste, farms may open for a few weeks a year to sell their own wine, ham and cheese from the house itself, announced by a branch hung at the roadside. The right dates from an eighteenth-century Habsburg decree and the custom still runs on it.

Towns that make one thing

San Daniele del Friuli for ham, Sauris for smoked speck in a German-speaking valley, Cormons for wine, Marano and Grado for lagoon fish. Each holds its own festival and the scale stays small.

Smoke and the mountains

Carnia and the Val Canale cure and smoke rather than air-dry, which is an Alpine habit rather than an Italian one, and it marks where the region stops being Mediterranean.

Friuli Venezia Giulia makes what many consider Italy’s best white wine, and it started a movement that changed how wine is made well beyond here.

Collio and the Colli Orientali

Two hill zones along the Slovenian border, on marl and sandstone soil the locals call ponca. The whites from here — Friulano, Ribolla Gialla, Malvasia Istriana, Sauvignon — have weight and structure rather than simple freshness, and they age.

Skin-contact wine from Oslavia

A handful of growers on the border returned to fermenting white grapes on their skins in buried amphorae, reviving a method older than modern winemaking. The style — sold everywhere now as orange wine — has followers on every continent, and it began in a few hectares of hillside here.

Native reds

Refosco dal Peduncolo Rosso, dark and sharp-edged; Schioppettino, peppery, saved from extinction by a few growers in Prepotto; and Pignolo, tannic and rare. None are grown in quantity anywhere else.

Picolit

A sweet wine from a vine that pollinates so poorly the bunches come out half empty, which is why it is expensive and always has been. It was served at the Habsburg court and is still made in tiny volumes.