tigella

The tigella is a small round bread, about eight centimeters in diameter, cooked between two heated terracotta discs in the Apennine mountains of Modena province. The name does not refer to the bread: it refers to the cooking implement. Tigella descends from the Latin tegula, a roof tile, through the Emilian dialect form téglia, a flat cooking pan. The bread that emerged from between the hot discs eventually took the name of its mold.

Written records of the cooking implement tegella appear in 14th-century Modenese notarial documents, where they are listed among kitchen equipment in household inventories. The bread itself was mountain food: women in the Apennine villages of Zocca, Montese, and Marano sul Panaro made tigelle from leavened wheat dough, pressing rounds between discs that had been heating in the embers for hours. The geometric pattern carved into the terracotta, often a stylized rose or wheat stalk, left its impression on each finished bread.

The traditional filling for a tigella is cunza, a mixture of lard, rosemary, and garlic pounded together in a mortar. The warm bread is split, the cunza spread inside, and the two halves pressed back together so the fat melts in. By the 20th century, a cast iron tigelliera (a hinged mold holding six tigelle at once) replaced individual terracotta discs, and gas-fired versions became standard in Modenese restaurants.

When Modenese workers moved to Milan and Turin after the Second World War, they brought tigelle with them, and the bread became a fixture at aperitivo events through the 1980s and 1990s. Today a tigelleria is a recognizable category of restaurant across Emilia and Lombardy, serving tigelle alongside boards of cured meats, soft cheeses, and pesto. The word entered standard Italian dictionaries around 1980.