tortellini

Tortellino is the diminutive of tortello, which is itself a diminutive of torta, the Italian word for a round cake or flat bread. Torta descends from the Latin torta, the feminine past participle of torquere, to twist. The word moved from abstract twisting to the specific round form of a cake, then shrank through two diminutive suffixes to describe a tiny folded ring of pasta.

Bologna and Modena have contested the origin of tortellini for centuries, each city claiming the original recipe and the original shape. The Confraternita del Tortellino, the Bolognese guild of pasta makers, registered the official recipe in 1974: pork loin, prosciutto, mortadella, Parmigiano-Reggiano, and nutmeg, sealed inside a ring of egg pasta. This was less a recipe than a political document. The Modenesi dispute it still.

The legend that tortellini was modeled on the navel of Venus, glimpsed through a keyhole by an innkeeper in Castelfranco Emilia, first appeared in a 1974 poem by Giuseppe Ceri. The legend is almost certainly invented, but food writers have repeated it for fifty years as though it predates the pasta. The navel shape is real; the keyhole is not.

Tortellini in brodo, tortellini in broth, is the canonical preparation: the filling needs the clarity of a good beef or capon broth to express itself fully. The substitution of cream or tomato sauce is a twentieth-century accommodation that purists in Bologna still resist. The tiny ring holds more history per gram than almost any other pasta.