Molise Food & Traditional Cuisine

Molise's cooking is the food of transhumance and small farms. Sheep provided meat and cheese, the household kept a pig, and pasta was made by hand from durum wheat with water rather than eggs. Very little of it has travelled.

Two things are worth knowing. The region is one of Italy's larger truffle producers, both black and white, and much of the harvest has historically been sold on and marketed under the names of better-known regions. And Molise's cooking overlaps heavily with Abruzzo's, which is unsurprising given they were a single administrative region until 1963 — the differences are local rather than sweeping.

The sections below cover the dishes, where they are bought, and a small wine region with one grape worth going out of your way for.

Molisano cooking is frugal, strongly flavoured and built on pork, sheep and hand-made pasta.

Pasta

• Cavatelli — small shells of durum wheat and water, rolled with two fingers. The regional staple, served with lamb ragù, with beans, or with broccoli.
• Fusilli — rolled around a thin iron rod (ferretto) by hand, thicker and chewier than the factory shape that borrowed the name.
• Sagne and taccozze — rough-cut flat pasta, usually with pulses.

Meat

• Pampanella — from San Martino in Pensilis: pork baked with a great deal of sweet and hot paprika until it turns deep red, eaten hot or cold, often in bread. Unlike anything else in the region.
• Pezzata — mutton stewed with tomato, chilli and herbs, traditionally shepherds' food and still the centrepiece of a summer festival at Capracotta.
• Signora di Conca Casale — a rare cured sausage made in a single village by a handful of families, a Slow Food presidium.
• Ventricina del Vastese — a spiced salami shared with the Abruzzo border.

Cheese and truffle

Caciocavallo di Agnone is the region's best-known cheese, a stretched-curd cow's milk cheese aged hanging in pairs. Sheep's cheeses and scamorza are everywhere; stracciata, a fresh ribboned cheese from the Alto Molise, is more local still.

Truffle is abundant — black summer and winter truffle and some white — and it turns up in ordinary cooking here rather than as a luxury garnish, particularly in the Alto Molise around San Pietro Avellana, which holds a white truffle fair.

The coast

Termoli has its own brodetto, cooked in a terracotta pot with green peppers, and a tradition of trabucco fishing from timber platforms over the water.

Bread and sweets

Bread is durum wheat and long-keeping. For sweets: picellati or cauciuni, pastry filled with chestnut or chickpea and honey; ostie ripiene from Agnone, two communion-style wafers enclosing honey and nuts; and fiadoni, baked cheese pastries at Easter.

There is no metropolitan food scene here. What Molise has instead is producers, village festivals and a strong tradition of cooking at home.

Where to buy

• Agnone for caciocavallo, direct from the dairies, and for the cheese shops along the main street.
• San Pietro Avellana and the Alto Molise for truffle, in season and from the people who dig it.
• Termoli's fish market operates each morning off the port.
• Campobasso and Isernia hold the largest weekly markets.

Sagre

The village festival is the main food institution, and in a region this small they are genuinely local events rather than tourist draws. Notable ones include the Pezzata at Capracotta in late July, the Sagra della Pampanella at San Martino in Pensilis, and truffle fairs in the Alto Molise in autumn and winter.

Many coincide with the return of emigrant families in August, which is when the mountain villages are at their fullest and most sociable.

Where to eat

Agriturismi and village trattorie are the realistic options outside the towns, and both usually serve a fixed sequence rather than a menu. Booking ahead matters, not because places are busy but because a village restaurant may not open at all unless it knows someone is coming.

Practical

• Lunch is the main meal, and kitchens close firmly in the afternoon.
• Sunday is when families eat out; it is the one day village restaurants are reliably open.
• English menus are rare inland.

Molise is one of Italy's smallest wine regions and has no denomination of national weight. It has one grape worth travelling for, and a revival story behind it.

Tintilia

Tintilia del Molise DOC is made from a native grape that almost disappeared. Grown at altitude — mostly between 400 and 700 m — it fell out of favour after the Second World War because it yields very little, and growers replaced it with more productive varieties until only a few hectares remained.

From the 1990s a small group of producers brought it back, and DNA analysis in the 2000s confirmed it as a distinct variety rather than, as long assumed, a local name for a Spanish import. It gives a firm, peppery red with real acidity, lighter in colour than its tannin suggests, and it is the one thing in Molise's cellar that exists nowhere else.

The other denominations

Biferno DOC, in the river valley of the same name, covers red and rosé blending Aglianico with the dark grape Abruzzo is best known for with Tintilia permitted in the blend, plus a Trebbiano-based white. Pentro di Isernia DOC is smaller still and rarely seen outside the region.

At the table

Tintilia with pezzata, with lamb and with aged caciocavallo — it has the structure for them. Biferno rosé with pampanella, which is one of the few things sharp and spiced enough to need it.