Calabria Food & Traditional Cuisine

Two coasts, a mountainous interior and a long history of poverty produced a cuisine built on preservation and on heat. Chilli is used as a seasoning rather than an accent; pork is cured into forms found nowhere else; and the Ionian and Tyrrhenian coasts each have their own fish traditions. Several of Calabria’s ingredients are grown in such a small area that the region has a near-monopoly on them.

Calabrian food is hot, preserved and specific. A striking number of its products come from a single town or a single stretch of coast.

’Nduja

A soft, spreadable pork salume the colour of brick, made with a very high proportion of chilli, from Spilinga on the Monte Poro slopes. It melts rather than slices, and it has become Calabria’s best-known export in the last twenty years.

Cipolla rossa di Tropea

The red onion of the Tropea coast, protected by IGP, sweet enough to be eaten raw and used in marmalade, in salads and with fish. The sandy coastal soil is the reason it tastes as it does.

Swordfish from the strait

Caught in the Strait of Messina from boats with long bowsprits and high lookout masts, a technique that is centuries old. Bagnara and Scilla are the swordfish towns, and it is eaten grilled or in involtini.

Fileja

Hand-rolled pasta twisted around a thin rod, served with goat ragù or with ’nduja. The shape exists to hold a heavy sauce.

Liquorice

Calabria produces a large share of the world’s liquorice root, and the Rossano area has been processing it since the eighteenth century. It is sold as hard black pieces, pure and unsweetened.

Peperoncino, everywhere

Dried, in oil, in salami, on the table as a matter of course. Diamante on the Tyrrhenian coast holds a festival for it, and the regional identification with chilli is genuine rather than marketed.

Calabria’s food culture is agricultural and domestic, organised around preservation and around a handful of towns that specialise completely.

Towns that make one thing

Spilinga for ’nduja, Tropea for onions, Rossano for liquorice, Diamante for chilli, Bagnara for swordfish. Each has a festival and a set of producers, and the concentration is unusual even by Italian standards.

Bergamot, almost exclusively here

Around ninety per cent of the world’s bergamot grows on a narrow strip of the Reggio Calabria coast. Almost all of it goes to perfume and to Earl Grey tea, and the fruit is rarely eaten.

Pork preserved in winter

The household pig and the making of soppressata, capocollo and ’nduja remain a winter practice in the inland villages, and the cured meats hang in cellars through the year.

Mountain cheese and transhumance

Caciocavallo silano is made in the Sila highlands, and the seasonal movement of animals between mountain and coast shaped the food of both.

Calabria has been making wine for longer than almost anywhere in Italy — the Greeks planted here — and produces small quantities of genuinely distinctive reds and one very old sweet wine.

Cirò

The region’s best-known denomination, on the Ionian coast, made from Gaglioppo. Light in colour and firm in tannin, it was reputedly given to victorious athletes at the ancient games, and the area was Greek long before it was Italian.

Greco di Bianco

A passito from the far south, made from grapes dried on mats, produced in tiny quantity from a very small area. It is among the oldest wine styles still made in Italy.

Magliocco and the revival

Native red grapes that were nearly abandoned are being replanted, and a generation of small producers is working with them rather than with international varieties.

Altitude on a southern latitude

Vineyards on the Sila and Pollino slopes sit high enough to keep acidity despite the heat, which is what makes serious wine possible this far south.