tortelli

Tortello is the direct diminutive of torta, the Italian word for a round cake or flat bread, from the Latin torta, a twisted or rounded form derived from torquere, to twist. The plural tortelli names a category of stuffed pasta that predates the more specific diminutive and augmentative variants. Medieval Italian cookbooks from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries use tortelli to describe a variety of filled pasta shapes, not all of them ring-shaped.

The earliest attested use of tortelli in a culinary context appears in Boccaccio's Decameron, written around 1353, where the word appears in a comic description of a paradise where tortelli are cooked in capon broth. This is not a recipe, but it confirms that the word was in common use in fourteenth-century Tuscany and that the dish was associated with abundance. Boccaccio treats tortelli as self-evidently desirable.

In modern Italian cooking, tortelli typically refers to a square or rectangular stuffed pasta, distinct from the ring shape of tortellini and tortelloni. In Mantua, tortelli di zucca are half-moon or rectangular parcels filled with squash, amaretti, and mostarda. In Parma, tortelli d'erbetta are large squares filled with ricotta and chard. The name has more regional variation than almost any other pasta form.

The word's longevity in Italian is partly because it occupies a grammatical middle position: a diminutive of torta without further modification. It can absorb regional variations in shape, filling, and preparation in a way that the more specific -ini and -oni forms cannot. Tortelli is the genus; tortellini and tortelloni are species within it.