Orvieto – City of Slow Food
Orvieto – “slow city” – has made the art and taste for “slow eating” its banner, giving life to “Orvieto con Gusto” (Orvieto with Flavour), a food and wine appointment born to safeguard flavours with its tasting schools, and to train palates to the pleasure of tastes and smells. Orvieto is, however, the “city of wine”: the Orvieto D.o.c. is the Orvieto district’s masterpiece, it exalts any dish and is also one of the main ingredients for one of the city’s most typical dishes, the “gallina ‘mbriaca” (drunken hen).
Fabro and the Orvieto district are then truffle territory: the precious tuber and the products of the underwoods are on show at the “Mostra Mercato del Tartufo” (Truffle Show and Fair) in Fabro in November, but which are on tables every month of the year.

From Pancotto to Cicadas
Orvieto’s culinary tradition comes from the past: from the Etruscans to the Romans, up to the Middle Ages and to the Renaissance period. In the 15th century Simone Prodenzani, in the castle of Prodo, elaborated succulent recipes writing the “Vaporetto” with the description of a genuine gastronomy: gnocchi with potatoes and truffles, bread soup, spicy umbrichelli, chickpea and chestnut soup, braised wild boar, bacon with sage and vinegar, the curate’s steak, broad beans on toast, cicale (flowers from corgettes), St. Joseph’s fritters.

When the hen is drunk
Every year, on Shrove Tuesday, the sharecropper had to give two hens to the owner. This would entail his choosing the oldest and toughest. So as not to refuse the gift, it was necessary to find a recipe that left the meat edible. The hen was washed in wine and flavoured with salt, garlic and pepper. After many hours, it was cut into pieces and left to marinate with herbs in Orvieto wine. It is cooked in a pan for four hours. In the end it is a real delicacy, still savoured in Orvieto today.

Medieval Banquets
Traditional cooking and medieval cooking are the protagonists of specific exhibitions with banquets that are held in the cloisters of the historical centre of Orvieto. Among the most popular menus presented, which can also be savoured in the many restaurants in the area, herb soup, white lasagne, wild boar civieri, roast baby pig in black sauce, curdled milk, doughnuts with spices. The superb quality of the olive oil must not be forgotten, also because it has an acidity of close to zero.

Traditional cuisine
Dishes from the past make their way onto the tables in Orvieto, such as little snails made with flour and water, ham and cheese, and rolled up in a shell-shape. Or the “tortucce”, delicious fried pasta, the doughnuts made with boiled aniseed and then baked in the oven according to a medieval procedure, tasty currant buns and bread with seasoned ricotta cheese. Lastly, “ciambellone con il vino”, a cake re-elaborated by the housewives’ fantasy where milk is replaced with wine. The pale-grey cheese produced in limited quantity, of the unmistakeable flavour: it is ripened for a year in grottas among the ashes of oak trees and walnut leaves. Among fresh water fish, the luce-perch is stuffed with lard, garlic, pepper, wild fennel, rosemary and truffles. It is cooked in the oven, adding salt, oil and lemon.