Ravioli, Tortelloni and Agnolotti

Appears in
Alastair Little's Italian Kitchen
Alastair Little's Italian Kitchen

By Alastair Little

Published 1996

  • About
Three names for the same dish from the same region of Italy: Emilia Romagna, home of Parmesan, Parma ham, Gorgonzola and Bolognese sauce. Italians regard any food produced more than 10 km from their birthplace as foreign, so even localised specialities can arrive under a bewildering array of names. Don’t try to sort all these names out; try to cook them all and wonder at the marvels of fresh pasta cooking from the heartland of Italian gastronomy. From here on I will refer to the dishes as ravioli, but I wish to point out that these recipes bear no resemblance to the rather fatuous overstuffed pillows now being offered in Michelin-starred restaurants. These blobs usually filled with over-processed mousses of seafood are not pasta dishes in that they reduce the pasta itself to an incidental ingredient. I’ve said it before and will again: the point of a pasta dish is the pasta itself, any other part of the dish is mere flavouring. Nor do these ravioli bear much resemblance to the small meat-filled pasta envelopes of southern Italy, delicious though many of these are.