Tigelle: what they are, how to eat them in Bologna & Modena
- Category: Eat
The first time you see them arrive at the table, they look almost too simple to matter.Small, pale rounds of bread, stacked in a basket, still steaming.Then someone opens one with their hands, spreads warm lard scented with garlic and rosemary, adds grated Parmigiano Reggiano, closes it — and suddenly the entire table goes quiet.This is tigelle. Not street food, not exactly bread, and not somethin
At their core, tigelle belong to the Apennine hills between Modena and Bologna, where food was shaped less by recipes and more by necessity. For centuries, families cooked simple dough between heated clay discs — tigelle, originally — using chestnut leaves to keep ash away from the bread. The bread itself was called crescentine.Today, the name has flipped, the tools are cast iron instead of clay,
