Casoncelli

Casoncelli, casonsèi in the Bergamo dialect, are egg-pasta parcels with a filling that catches most people off guard. Braised beef and pork, local salami, grated Grana Padano, breadcrumbs and nutmeg go in, and so do crushed amaretti biscuits, sultanas and sometimes grated pear. The sauce is butter melted with sage leaves and cubes of pancetta fried until they crackle.

The shape matters as much as the filling. A rectangle of pasta is folded over the meat and pinched hard in the middle, leaving two ruffled wings on either side, so the finished piece looks like a wrapped sweet. The wings are double-thickness pasta that stays firmer in the water, giving the parcel a bite that an ordinary raviolo does not have.

The sweet-savoury profile is not a modern flourish. It is what survives of Renaissance Lombard cooking, when sugar, cinnamon and dried fruit went into meat dishes as a matter of course. Casoncelli and Mantua's pumpkin tortelli are the two best-known holdouts of that taste.

Rich, meaty and unexpectedly perfumed. The first impression is braised beef and cheese; a second later the amaretto arrives, almond and a faint bitterness, and then the sultanas give small bursts of sweetness. The butter and sage round it off and the pancetta adds salt and crunch.

It is not a sweet dish. Someone tasting it blind would call it savoury with an aromatic edge, closer to a Moroccan pastilla than to a dessert. The balance depends entirely on restraint: too many amaretti and it tips over, too few and it becomes an ordinary meat raviolo.

Texture-wise, expect a soft belly and firmer pleated edges in the same mouthful, with the butter clinging rather than pooling.

Cook them in plenty of salted boiling water for three to four minutes if fresh, five from frozen. They are done when the pinched centre no longer looks pale. The pasta is thin and forgiving for about thirty seconds either side of that window, then it starts to split.

While they boil, cube 80 g of pancetta per four people and fry it dry until it crisps. Add 80 g of butter and six sage leaves and let the butter turn pale gold, not brown. Nut-brown butter overwhelms the amaretto, which is the point of the dish.

Drain the casoncelli, tip them into the pan with a spoonful of the cooking water, toss once and serve with plenty of grated Grana Padano and black pepper. Count ten to twelve pieces per person.

Do not add tomato, cream or garlic. Bergamo serves this one way, and the restraint is deliberate: the filling is already doing several things at once.

Fresh, they hold two days at most in the fridge, spread on a floured tray under a tea towel, and never in a sealed box, where the trapped humidity makes them stick to each other and to the tray. A shop pack in modified atmosphere runs to its printed date, which is the maker's reference, and once it is opened the sheet starts drying at the edges within hours while the filling goes on wetting it from inside, so the pasta near the crimp turns translucent and slack.

Freezing is the right way to manage them. Space them out on a tray, freeze for an hour until firm, then transfer to a bag: three months, dropped into boiling water still frozen with barely a minute added. Thawing them first gives you a single glued mass. The filling on its own keeps two days in the fridge and improves overnight, as the amaretti finish drawing moisture out of the meat. Cooked and dressed they do not keep at all, since the butter sets and the pasta swells into something else.

A well-made casoncello has clearly crimped wings and a full but not swollen belly: a spherical parcel is overfilled and will burst in the water. The pasta is a deep yellow, which is what real yolks look like, and slightly rough to the touch rather than shiny. Cut one open and the filling should be compact but moist, with dark specks of raisin and pale grains of amaretto spread evenly through it; pale and uniform is the industrial filling, where the meat has been stretched with bread and potato.

At a Bergamo pasta shop you can spot them by how they are laid out, single on floured trays and never heaped, because the central fold is fragile. Modified-atmosphere packs are a fair compromise; anything dried for long shelf life has nothing to do with the original. Abroad the word rarely appears at all, and what sits nearest on the chiller shelf is generic meat ravioli, which is flat, square and filled with meat alone: the raisin and amaretto sweetness is the whole point of this one and no substitute carries it.

Fresh casoncelli travel badly, so outside Lombardy the realistic options are frozen or homemade. In Italy, any pastificio in Bergamo sells them fresh at 14 to 20 euro per kilo, and vacuum-packed versions turn up in supermarkets across the north at 9 to 13 euro per kilo.

Abroad, Italian delis and online importers occasionally stock frozen casoncelli: expect 14 to 22 dollars per pound in the US and 18 to 28 pounds per kilo in the UK. Check the ingredient list for amaretti: without them, you are buying generic meat ravioli under a Bergamo name.

Making them is the better plan, and the only unusual ingredient is amaretti biscuits, sold in most supermarkets and every Italian deli at around 15 to 25 euro per kilo. Everything else (beef, salami, breadcrumbs, sultanas, Grana Padano) is already in a normal kitchen.

Bergamo is the place, and the best versions are not in the tourist heart of the upper town but in the trattorie of Borgo Santa Caterina and Longuelo, and in the villages ringing the city.

Go up into the valleys (Val Brembana, Val Seriana, Valle Imagna) and almost every osteria makes them in-house, usually followed by a board of mountain cheeses: branzi, formai de mut, taleggio from the valley that gave the cheese its name.

In Brescia province, the village of Barbariga holds a summer festival dedicated to its own leaner version, which is worth the detour precisely because it tastes so different.

Milan, an hour away by train, has Bergamo-run trattorie that do them properly, though the price roughly doubles.