Tortellini is a specialty of an area in Northern Italy called Romagna which encompasses Bologna. Like ravioli, tortellini is a meat and cheese stuffed envelope of pasta, but it's small and ring shaped, and looks like a belly button. A 17th century Bolognese story maintains that tortellini was born when a chef molded his pasta in the navel of a beautiful woman. (From all accounts this arduous method of making tortellini has become extinct, even in parts of Romagna where labor-saving devices are least prevalent.) Nevertheless, tortellini is still handmade, by skilled cooks.
Mrs. Salvatore Di Cecco lives in Richmond Hill outside Toronto with her husband, who has retired from the macaroni and restaurant business. Mrs. Di Cecco was born in Romagna and is expert at making tortellini. Christmas, 1973, she used 170 eggs in the pasta and distributed tortellini and other pasta specialities to friends and relatives. But Mr. Di Cecco is not so keen on tortellini. In Italy during the war, when one piece of beef was like an emerald, he traded a large amount of macaroni for some cheese, eggs, and meat. His wife, though only eighteen, knew how to make tortellini. There was tortellini all over the kitchen, dotting every sofa and chair in the living room, and spread on every bed in the house. They ate tortellini for weeks. Mr. Di Cecco said, People were dying of everything in Italy, at that time, but I was the only person who nearly died of tortellini. . . . |
