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By Root 4104 0

out on it. Dust your hands with flour and use the palms to flatten the dough to a thickness of about 1½ inches. With both hands, lift the edge of the dough furthest from you and fold it toward you, stopping about one-third of the way from meeting the edge close to you. Stick your thumbs out straight and horizontally, parallel to your body, bringing their tips together, and use them to push out the folded-over dough toward its original position. Perform this operation 3 times, then rotate the dough a one-quarter turn, and repeat the step 3 more times. Periodically you will need to dust the counter and your hands with flour.

8. Rotate and pat the dough to form a more or less round shape. Turn a bowl upside down over it, covering it entirely, and let it rise for 1 full hour. At least 30 minutes before you will be ready to bake, put the baking stone in the oven and preheat oven to 425°.

9. When the final rising time is over, spread cornmeal thinly over the baker’s peel, put the ball of dough on the peel, and slide it into the oven onto the preheated stone. After 3 minutes, turn the oven down to 400°. In 20 minutes, turn the oven down again, to 375°. Bake for another 40 minutes. Let the bread cool down completely on a rack before using. When it has cooled off, you can freeze it, if you like. This bread seems to mature in the freezer and once it is reheated in a very hot oven, it tastes even better, if possible, than when it was just baked.

Piadina—Flat Griddle Bread

Piadina is a thin flat bread, chewy, but tender and not brittle. Until quite recently, it was the everyday bread for Romagna’s farmers, whose women baked it in the hearth on a terra-cotta slab over hot coals. It goes well with prosciutto or country ham, with salami, with pan-fried sausages, but it is at its surpassing best with these garlicky, sautéed greens.

Farm women in Romagna—the narrow, fertile plain between the hills and the sea on the northern Adriatic—still make piadina. Sometimes, on a Sunday, they make it for themselves, but more frequently they cook it on street corners for the summer people who crowd the seaside towns of Rimini, Riccione, and Cesenatico. It has now become the smart thing for Italian families in Romagna to dine in nostalgically rustic style at some converted farmhouse, where the standard menu of homemade pasta and roast chicken or rabbit is invariably preceded by platters piled high with wedges of piadina, accompanied by thick, hand-cut slices of salami or coppa. It is the kind of meal I put together for my own family from time to time, and for those friends on whose appreciation of casual, earthy food I can count.

What to cook piadina on Even in Romagna, the original, but fragile terra-cotta slab called testo on which the thin disk of dough was grilled, is being replaced with heavy, flat steel griddles. At home, one can use a heavy, black, cast-iron skillet. Heat it up gradually until it becomes very hot, but not fiery. It must be hot enough to cook piadina quickly, but not so hot that it merely scorches it.

For this purpose, however, metal can’t quite match earth or stone. If you travel to Italy, traditional housewares shops in the towns of Romagna, and in Emilian cities such as Bologna, still carry the terra-cotta testo. Since it is fragile, but cheap, it is a good idea to buy at least two. In North America, Vermont soapstone griddles do the job every bit as well as terra-cotta, and are much sturdier. One mail-order source that Julia Child originally put me on to is the Vermont Country Store, Weston, Vermont 05161.

For 6 servings

⅓ cup shortening, preferably lard, but extra virgin olive oil is an acceptable substitute

4 cups unbleached flour

⅓ cup milk

2 teaspoons salt

½ teaspoon bicarbonate of soda

½ cup lukewarm water

A 10-inch cast-iron skillet or a soapstone griddle (see introductory remarks)

1. If using lard, heat it gently in a small saucepan until it has melted completely, but do not let it simmer. If using olive oil, proceed to the next step.

2. Pour the flour onto a work surface, shape it into a mound, make