What to eat in Molise - Cavatelli, ventricina, tintilia

The cooking of Molise is divided the way the land is: on the coast you eat fish, inland mutton, pork and cheese. It has no dishes famous beyond its borders, and the result is that in the trattorie you still find what used to be cooked at home, without the postcard version.

The pasta

Cavatelli are made with water and flour, no egg, and hollowed with the fingers. Fusilli are wound round a knitting needle, which is exactly what it is called here, and come out with a hole through them. They are dressed with lamb or pork ragu, or with salted ricotta. Every village claims to make them differently, and is generally right.

Dried durum wheat pasta, the long shapes and the short ones

Pork and mutton

The ventricina of Montenero di Bisaccia is a large salami, made only of lean meat cut into big pieces, with sweet pepper and wild fennel. The pampanella of San Martino in Pensilis is pork baked with red pepper and garlic and wrapped in vine leaves. The pezzata of Capracotta is boiled mutton with little more than celery and bay, and it is the village's August feast.

The cheese and the fish

Agnone makes caciocavallo, aged and hung in pairs; Boiano and the Biferno valley make mozzarella and scamorza. On the coast the dish is brodetto alla termolese, with Adriatic fish, pepper and tomato, and at Christmas baccala arracanato, baked with breadcrumbs, raisins and pine nuts.

There is no guidebook restaurant in every village, and there is no need to look for one: the rule here is the village trattoria, often with no written menu, where you ask what there is and take it. On the coast the fish is eaten in the places around the port at Termoli; inland it is worth asking at the campsite, because many osterie open only at weekends out of season.

What to drink

Tintilia is a red grape that exists almost nowhere else: nearly lost in the nineteen sixties, it was recovered and has had its own denomination since 2011. It gives a dark hill wine, not a soft one. Alongside it are montepulciano and falanghina, and the olive oil, which Molise makes well and nobody knows about.