A TAVOLA: Cities That Know How to Eat & Drink

PARMA

Where Patience Tastes Very, Very Good

Parma is a city that seems to have looked at the idea of fast food and politely declined.

Here, some of the greatest things on the table are made with remarkably few ingredients: pork and salt, milk and rennet, flour and eggs.

The trick is what happens next.

You wait.

For months. Sometimes years.

And eventually somebody puts a plate of prosciutto and Parmigiano in front of you, opens a bottle of wine, and suddenly patience seems like an excellent life philosophy.

1. A City That Learned to Trade in Delicious Things

Parma's relationship with food isn't a recent piece of clever branding.

For centuries, the city was an important trading centre for cheese, cured meats and other foods from the surrounding countryside. One street near today's Via Farini was once known as Strada dei Genovesi, named for Genoese merchants who kept warehouses there before sending Parma's cheeses and salumi toward the Ligurian ports.

By the 1800s, Piazza Ghiaia had become a major market centre, complete with the Beccherie built to bring the city's butchers together. Markets are still held there today.

So Parma didn't simply become famous for food.

Food helped build the city.

2. Prosciutto di Parma

There may be no better example of Italian restraint.

A proper Prosciutto di Parma begins with pork, salt, air and time.

That's essentially it.

In the hills around Langhirano, the hams cure slowly as air moves through the valleys from the Ligurian side of the Apennines. The result isn't aggressively salty. It's delicate, almost sweet, with creamy ribbons of fat that begin to soften as soon as the prosciutto hits the plate.

Slice it thin enough and it almost becomes translucent. Then leave it alone.

Maybe some bread. Perhaps a piece of Parmigiano. Definitely a glass of wine.

At a Parma table, salumi aren't really an appetizer designed to get dinner out of the way.

They're permission to start sitting around the table early.

We strongly support this concept.

3. Tortelli d'Erbetta

Parma's other great talent is taking something modest and making it luxurious.

Tortelli d'erbetta are rectangular parcels of fresh egg pasta filled with ricotta, greens such as spinach or chard, and cheese.

Then comes the important part. Butter. Quite a lot of it.

The local expression is wonderfully direct: foghè in tal buter e sughè col formaj — essentially drowned in butter and dried with cheese.

Hot tortelli arrive glossy with melted butter, their delicate pasta barely containing the creamy, green filling, before Parmigiano Reggiano falls over everything.

This isn't complicated cooking.

But when the pasta is handmade, the ricotta is good, the butter is hot and the Parmigiano has spent years becoming Parmigiano, complicated would only get in the way.

And on important family occasions, another pasta often appears: anolini in brodo, little stuffed rounds served in steaming chicken or capon broth, a Parma tradition stretching back centuries and particularly associated with Christmas.

Apparently Parma believes one extraordinary stuffed pasta isn't enough.

Fair.

4. Malvasia & Nocino

With all that pork, butter and cheese on the table, Parma wisely produces wine that knows how to keep up.

Malvasia di Candia Aromatica from the Colli di Parma can be fragrant, floral and fresh, while the surrounding countryside also produces Lambrusco, Sauvignon and other local wines.

Malvasia beside prosciutto is particularly good: aromatic fruit and freshness against that sweet, silky pork.

Then dinner ends. Or at least everyone claims it does. That's when Nocino appears.

Green walnuts are traditionally harvested around the night of San Giovanni — June 23–24 — and infused into a dark, bittersweet liqueur scented with walnut and spice.

Parma also has other wonderfully local digestivi made from quince and wild blackthorn berries.

A tiny glass arrives. Someone pours another. The plates have been cleared for forty minutes. Nobody has moved.

Now we're speaking our language.

5. Why Bar Corso Loves Parma

Parma understands something we believe deeply at Bar Corso:

luxury doesn't have to look luxurious.

It can be a slice of properly aged prosciutto. A piece of Parmigiano broken from the wheel. Fresh pasta, butter and cheese. A cold glass of wine. An amaro after dinner.

The sophistication isn't necessarily in adding more. Often, it's knowing when you've already got enough.

That's a philosophy you'll find throughout Corso's menu. We love beautiful ingredients, handmade pasta, salumi, Italian wine and drinks with enough bitterness to make you want another bite.

But more importantly, we love what Parma does with them.

Put good things on the table. Pour something delicious. Let everybody share. And don't be in such a hurry to leave.

Because the best Italian meals rarely end when the food does. Neither should ours.

Mangia. Bevi. Stay awhile.