Umbria Food & Traditional Cuisine

Umbria cooks like a landlocked farming region, because that is what it is. There is no seafood tradition, little butter, and almost no elaborate sauce. What there is instead is very good raw material treated simply: pork from a butchery tradition centuries old, lentils and pulses from the uplands, freshwater fish from Trasimeno, and olive oil that is among Italy's best.

Two things set it apart from neighbouring Tuscany. The first is the black truffle, which grows around Norcia and the Valnerina and is used far more freely here than the white truffle is further north. The second is the bread — pane sciapo, made without salt, which exists to carry salty cured meats and oil rather than to be eaten alone.

The sections below cover the dishes, where they are bought, and a wine region built on a grape that grows nowhere else.

The Umbrian table is built on pork, pulses, oil and fire. Most of the classic dishes have four or five ingredients.

Pork and the norcineria

Norcia gave Italian the word norcino for a pork butcher, and norcineria for the shop — the town's butchers were once itinerant specialists whose skill was sought across central Italy. The results include capocollo, guanciale, and the prosciutto di Norcia IGP, cured in mountain air.

• Porchetta — whole pig boned, stuffed with wild fennel, garlic and pepper, and roasted slowly. Sold by weight from vans at markets.
• Salsiccia grilled over embers, and wild boar (cinghiale) in winter stews.

Pasta and pulses

• Strangozzi (or stringozzi) — a thick hand-rolled pasta of flour and water, no egg. Served with truffle, with tomato and garlic, or alla spoletina.
• Umbricelli — the same idea, rounder and thicker.
• Lenticchie di Castelluccio IGP — small, thin-skinned lentils grown on the Piano Grande that need no soaking. Cooked simply with oil and served with sausage.
• Farro — emmer wheat, grown here since antiquity, usually as soup.

Truffle

The black truffle of Norcia (Tuber melanosporum) is in season roughly December to March, with a summer species (scorzone) available in warmer months. Unlike white truffle it is cooked, and it is used generously — shaved into strangozzi, worked into sauces, folded into omelettes.

Fish, bread and oil

Lake Trasimeno supplies carp, tench, pike and eel, most often as tegamaccio, a freshwater fish stew. The bread is unsalted, a habit shared with Tuscany and usually explained by a medieval salt tax; it makes sense beside cured meats and is disconcerting alone. Olive oil from the slopes around Trevi, Spello and Assisi is DOP-protected and worth buying at source in November when the new oil is pressed.

Sweets

Torciglione, an almond cake coiled like a snake; rocciata, a rolled pastry of apple, nuts and raisins; and Perugia's Baci, hazelnut chocolates wrapped with a printed love note since 1922.

Umbria's food culture is small-town rather than metropolitan: the important places are butchers, oil mills and autumn festivals rather than grand markets.

Norcia's shops

The norcinerie of Norcia are the region's single most concentrated food destination — counters of cured pork, cheese and truffle products, several of them family businesses over a century old. The town was badly damaged in 2016 and many have reopened in temporary structures; they are worth seeking out in whatever building they currently occupy.

Markets and mills

• Perugia holds a covered market below Piazza Matteotti and a larger Saturday market; the city's food shops along the Corso are long-established.
• Frantoi — olive mills — open to visitors during the November pressing, and buying oil straight from the mill is both cheaper and better than any shop.
• Città di Castello and Foligno hold the largest weekly markets in the north and centre of the region.

Festivals built on one ingredient

Umbria's autumn and winter calendar is a sequence of single-product festivals, and they are local events rather than tourist ones:

• Frantoi Aperti in November opens oil mills across the region.
• Nero Norcia in late February is the black truffle fair.
• Fiera dei Cavalli and the lentil festivals at Castelluccio run through summer.

How people eat

Lunch is the main meal outside the towns, and many kitchens close firmly between 3pm and 7.30pm. The traditional venue is the osteria — a short menu, local wine, and often no written list at all. In the hills, agriturismi frequently serve better food than restaurants, using what they grow.

Umbria makes far less wine than Tuscany and has one grape that nobody else has in quantity — which turns out to be enough.

Sagrantino

Montefalco Sagrantino DOCG is the region's signature and one of the most tannic red wines in the world — by some measures the highest in polyphenols of any variety. Grown on a few hundred hectares around Montefalco and Bevagna, it was for centuries made only as a sweet passito for Easter, and the dry version that made its reputation dates only from the 1970s. It needs long ageing: the DOCG requires 37 months, and good bottles improve for a decade beyond that.

Montefalco Rosso is the everyday counterpart — mostly Sangiovese with a little Sagrantino blended in, softer and ready far sooner.

Torgiano

Torgiano Rosso Riserva DOCG, just south of Perugia, was the region's first serious modern denomination, largely through the work of a single estate from the 1960s. The town also holds a wine museum that is genuinely worth an hour.

Orvieto

Orvieto DOC is Umbria's historic white, made from Grechetto and Trebbiano in volcanic soils, and once famous across Europe in a sweet form — the wine painters were reportedly paid in while decorating the cathedral. Most is dry now, and the best has a stony bite that reflects the tufa.

Grapes to know

• Sagrantino — tannic, dark, long-lived; needs food.
• Grechetto — the region's best white variety, fuller than Trebbiano.
• Sangiovese — the backbone of the everyday reds.

At the table

Sagrantino with wild boar and aged pecorino — it is too tannic for anything delicate; Montefalco Rosso with strangozzi and grilled sausage; Grechetto and Orvieto with Trasimeno fish and with truffle omelette; Sagrantino passito with rocciata at the end of a meal.