SARDINIA SUOMESSA: Culurgiones recipe, cultural heritage and Helsinki experience
For the vegan recipe I share mine only in person for the moment. But if you want me to talk about this topic, please let me know, I will think about it!
Now, let's start. This article is interesting also for vegan because it's not about a mere recipe but about a cultural tradition.
CULURGIONES, Sardinian fresh pasta recipe
They are an "IGP" recipe - protected geographical indication, born in Sardinia from ingredients connected to the life of its territory, first of all goat or sheep cheese, fresh sour and salty (viscidu), potatoes and durum wheat semolina. And a characteristic hand closure. The rest of the ingredients vary depending on the area.
CULURGIONES are not simple ravioli. They are a very precious traditional meal, also perceived as a gift and in ancient times as an amulet; they accompanied some fundamental rituals of social life such as marriage and funeral and moments of the agricultural year linked to fertility, at the beginning of spring and autumn (therefore Easter and the commemoration of the dead).
Today they are still considered a very important meal and with a connotation always close to the ritual, as both the recipes of the filling, of the pasta and the characteristic hand-shaped closure in the shape of an ear (spighitta) are a knowledges handed down orally.
A LONG PROCESS: A WAY TO FEED MEMORY AND TRADITION
The filling is prepared a day before so it can acquire taste: potatoes merge with garlic and cheeses, and all is surrounded delicately by a light mint flavour (mint is always fresh, not dried). The day after the pasta sheets are prepared and the table is covered with discs of dough on which a quantity of filling, the size of a walnut, will be placed.
And now it's time to close, quickly and gently, paying attention to details: the handmade closure in a ear of a spighitta it's like a signature. Tells to the people the care and the attention to the design, that it means an attention to respect the other's aesthetic feeling, it's a matter of grace and elegance.
Remember that historically this is a poor recipe from the mountains. (In the plains, the shepherd was rather a sharecropper than being independent, and ravioli developed with much richer recipes deriving from the culture of the latifundium which also supplied wheat, and also cow's milk, not only sheep and goat).
Culurgiones come from the milk of the goats/sheeps in shepherds families, the cheese was home made not bought for sure. The same for potatoes garlic and mint. Only the flour is something that shepherds could have from someone else, but mostly by barter at the origins of the recipe.
In this poor contest, Sardinian style is unique: creating a luxurious shape, copying nature from the most rich shape they recognise: the ear of the wheat. The symbol of the rebirth of nature and the sign that the life will have another year of prosperity. And without being perfunctory in the copying, but developing a painstaking attention to detail. This is what differentiates them from the Chinese dumpling with a similar closure: the most minute gesture, the embellishment of every single fold so that it is just like a grain of wheat wrapped in its glume.
I can't offer you rich food, I don't have a pig to slaughter for a feast, I don't have a lot of fruit and a variety of sweets - like in the Campidano plain - we are a goat-breeding family, but I can offer you my time, my gesture, my sign of love and respect, and something beautiful that comes from my will. An act of love and an artistic act at the same time.
This is the teaching I also received from my grandmother's family, daughter of goat breeders from the upper Gennargentu.
We didn't do Culurgiones but just squared ravioli with the same basic ingredients of the filling (and some differences that I will tell you the next time) potatoes and goat cheese. I learned Culurgiones from Ogliastra's traditional masters. I just needed the handmade closure technically, but all the tradition and the effort and the style and the philosophy were already in my heart since I was a child.
During this long process of the recipe, the oral tradition was and still is nourished by the transmission and exchange of stories, the narration of dreams made the night before, poems, knowledge, songs. It takes hours. And it's a recipe for sharing.
To grow together, to know each other, to teach the younger members of the family, to ask for advice the oldest. It's a traditional hymn to the beauty of family and to the wisdom of elders: they have more practice and the gesture is really defined, artistic, competent. And not only the gesture. They have seen a lot, they know all the family history and the family members, they know and keep all the secrets. And all the prayers, the stories, they can share a large part of traditional oral memory, some more and some less.
I had the good fortune to have a grandmother who was not very gossipy but very accustomed to poetry (she didn't finished the primary school) who during the preparation of the ravioli interpreted my dreams and told her own, who recited oral poems learnt by heart in her youth from Sardinian itinerant poets, some others taught by her grandmother and sang, in rhyme, in the traditional manner of the monodic chanting of her village, creating stanzas of her own on the theme of what had been discussed before.
I grew up a lot during this afternoons of my youth. And my grandma left me a notebook where, as a gift for me, made an effort to write something that had always made sense in orality.
An immense gift.
Far greater for me was to stay with her those afternoons instead of wandering around trying to 'have fun'.
Ravioli is the path through which I learnt the immense power that comes from respecting and listening to elders.
The power of Memory and Practice.
I will never stop teaching it. To myself and to others.
(Woman in the picture: mother of my grandma, Tzía Baílla was called)
That is why if I teach this recipe and the few others I know about fresh Sardinian pasta, I do it my way. By creating an immersive experience, by sharing the songs of my tradition, the stories of my family and the traces of oral tradition that have come down to me, and by stimulating sharing and cultural exchange.
If you want to browse, this link is to a post on Instagram in which there are two photos and a small video (where I am chanting during making of Culurgiones) of such an experience in May 2022 at a kindergarten in Helsinki - the event was for a fundraiser for the kindergarten.
Please note: Culurgiones in the first picture of the post are not made by me, but they are the very satisfying result of some participants who managed to achieve this in three hours! The Finns continue to amaze and fascinate me with their honed learning skills.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CeLtwNdMNDj/
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