Lake Orta… let's taste it!

Lake Orta offers a broad choice of restaurants ranging from exclusive to rustic, from traditional to trendy: the common denominator is always the “taste of hospitality” of the lake’s cuisine, rich in typical dishes, both classic and creative, preserving the taste of genuine food from a past full of stories and human events.

Here are some typical dishes you can taste in our restaurants and trattorias or, if you prefer,  prepare at home according to the traditional recipes.

OUR RECIPES

Cuisine of the province of Novara

Rice is the main ingredient in the Novarese cuisine. The most classical recipe is “Paniscia”, a tasty risotto flavoured with chopped lard, onion and duja salami, slowly cooked, together with the vegetables, in the vegetable broth prepared beforehand.

Being a land of irrigation channels, rivers and rice fields, the cuisine of the province of Novara has many dishes arising from the local peasant tradition, based on frogs. Considered as something as a gourmet delicacy they can be cooked in different  ways: fried, in a soup or stewed in tomato sauce (guazzetto).

Another strong point of the Novarese cuisine is Gorgonzola. Although this blue cheese comes originally from Lombardy, this area offers ideal conditions for its production, so much that the quality level reached by the local Gorgonzola has earned it the DOP seal (Protected Designation of Origin).

And let's not forget meat-based preparations such as salami, that can be found in this area in a wide assortment. Among the most renowned kinds of salami are the “marzapane”, a typical blood sausage; the duja salami (“salame della duja”), owing its name to the jar where it is stored and preserved in lard; the “fidighin”, a mortadella of pork liver. Goose meat is also used in the production of salami, as in goose salami (“salame d'oca”) and “graton d'oca” (goose skin cut in small pieces along with the fat, boiled, squeezed and served cold).

Meat, and especially pork, is used to prepare dishes such as the “Rustida” with polenta or the “Cassöla”, different from the Milanese recipe because its preparation also requires the use of goose meat.
Another typical meat-based recipe, to be found mostly in the area around Borgomanero, is “Tapulon”. This dish was traditionally prepared with donkey meat, that can be replaced with beef. According to the recipe, the meat has to be thinly sliced and browned in oil, butter, chopped garlic, laurel and rosemary and then cooked with white wine and broth.
This region offers a varied range of local speciality cakes and biscuits, often originating from monasteries or aristocratic houses.
We can mention among them the famous “Biscottini di Novara”, that date back to 1500 and were made by the nuns in their convents. They are rather simple biscuits made from a fatless dough of just flour, eggs and sugar.
And also the “pane di San Gaudenzio” from the homonymous cathedral, a bread covered with almonds prepared according to a medieval recipe; the “brutti ma buoni” (“ugly but good cookies”), the “ossa da mordere” (“bone cookies”) made out of almonds, hazelnuts, sugar, eggwhite and lemon scent; and last but not least the focaccia with Concord grape.

Cuisine of the province of Verbano-Cusio-Ossola

This province boasts a particular tradition in baking bread, that risks to disappear little by little  due to industrialized production and growing widespread distribution of common white bread.
Wheat was not cultivated in the Ossola Valley, but imported from Milano or Novara; that is why the more commonly available rye flour (called “biava”) was used instead for baking bread.
Bread production in this area of Piedmont has very poor origins, but the very lack of basic ingredients sharpened the wits leading to interesting solutions.
The available flours were often mixed with bran and low nutritive value flours such as sorghum, acorn and berry flour.
That is how the Coimo “black bread”, also called “Pan Negar” was invented. Originally made of whole rye flour, it is nowadays produced with a mix of rye flour, wheat flour and bran, depending on the baker's recipe.
Another typical bread is millet bread, called “Pan ad Mèi”, that used to be baked once or twice a year in common ovens – which proves how “fine” a bread it was considered. A common oven  still exists in Macugnaga / Chiesa Vecchia.
In former times meat, especially pork, was a luxury and the poor could very seldom afford it. This is why nothing of the pig goes to waste: for instance, the different parts of the head were (and still are) used in the production of jellies, while the bristles make good brushes or paintbrushes.
Thanks to this old tradition in butchering and transforming of pork meat, the Ossola Valley boasts a very wide range of products coming from the processing of pork and of other kinds of meat.
We list among them:

-      “Prosciütt Vigezzin” (smoked raw ham from the Vigezzo Valley) – according to the tradition, the fine thigh meat coming from the best breeders was kept in brine for 40 days and then smoked with juniper.

-      Mortadella (“Mortadèla”) – preparation of lean meat marinated in red wine, pork liver fat, salt, pepper, nutmeg, garlic.

-      Mortadella of Orta (“Fidighin”) – made of a fine-grained mix of pork liver and beef or pork meat, throat latch fat and spices (salt, saltpetre, cinnamon, pepper, sugar).