Rabatòn

What the road brought through the Fraschetta

I found rabatòn alessandrini in a book during my research for the Forgotten Italian Classics series. Immediately the idea of making a type of gnocchi, something I’m really confident doing, but softer, with the identity of a ravioli filling, got my interest, so i took the challenge.

The dish is a dumpling with no outer dough. Just the filling, shaped and cooked directly. The texture is closer to ravioli filling than to a gnocco. The name comes from the dialect verb rabatare, to roll. It describes the gesture that forms them, pressing the soft mixture into a cylinder and tumbling it along the board until it holds.

Every spring, the Piedmontese shepherds passed through the Fraschetta plain on their way home from the winter pastures. They stopped in the villages, traded ricotta and wild herbs, nettles, dandelion, wild hops gathered from the field margins along the route, for bread and whatever else the farmhouses could spare. Then they moved on. The farmwomen kept the ricotta and the herbs, combined them with eggs, stale bread, and aged cheese from the pantry, rolled the mixture into rough cylinders on a floured board, and cooked them in broth.But the shepherds never ate what their barter became.