As Manuel Vazquez Montalban said, “we don’t know of anyone who has managed to seduce with what they had to eat; but there is a long list of those who have seduced by explaining what they were about to eat”. Narration has an evocative power that is known to psychological, anthropological and marketing studies. Meaning is, after all, what we look for in the things of life. In most cases, the narration of products is entrusted to clever storytelling strategies. It is often effective, because it is built around the aspects that are most marketable on the market, but it lacks substance. Thus, the outcome is sometimes a nostalgic idealization of a certain activity or practice, which has little connection with reality. of the facts and that sometimes lacks originality: "things of the past" (without thinking for example that "once upon a time", in the reality of sharecropping, land and workers were exploited without too many scruples, or that, as contemporary winemakers know well, making wines as they were once made means making them basically bad).
In Mugello, substance is not lacking. Fascinating stories of goldsmiths diverted to viticulture or merchants devoted to the most refined cheese-making techniques, ancient realities that are handed down, young people who become farmers and who passionately follow not only dreams, but also ethical principles, moral values, community aspirations, companies that work according to principles inspired by "tradition" but also oriented towards product quality and respect for the territory. Orme's goal is to give voice to these stories, documenting them rigorously, and then return them to a wide audience in a usable, immediate and ironic format. Because we are convinced that in the case of Mugello the charm already lies in the raw material, and that reality does not need great rhetorical constructions or captivating formulas (in short, smoke and mirrors) to seduce and arouse interest. In this sense, we do not simply propose to use history as a reservoir of traditions. On the contrary, we want to document the vicissitudes, processes and people who make history, even in our day.
In this area halfway between Florence and Bologna, the traveler will be able to discover a variety of local products that have preserved the authenticity of their traditions over time. The dishes inherited from Mugello cuisine are important and typical, with "natural" flavors because they are seasoned with traditional aromas and never contaminated by richer ingredients that are often overused today. Particularly important for the area, both as basic products and through processing and transformation, are meat (especially beef), spelt, milk (both cow's milk, especially High Quality, and sheep's milk), the Mugello IGP chestnut, honey, Mugello bread, white truffle, Mugello wines (pinot noir and vin santo), beer, and saffron. The first courses are often “potato tortelli”, tagliatelle with mushroom, wild boar or hare ragù, farinata, soups, aromatic minestrone and baby food; meat plays an important role in the Mugello table today: steaks two fingers thick, but also rosticciana and sausages or stuffed rabbits and the special boiled duck. The cheese is pecorino, pure sheep or mixed, and the side dishes are beans in oil, the thousand vegetables from the garden, delicious when fried (artichokes, aubergines, courgette flowers). The desserts are simple like the “pan di ramerino”, the “schiacciata con l’uva”, classics like the tarts with all the jams, elaborate like the cake or the Marradi pudding made with the delicious Mugello PGI chestnut.
The gastronomic tradition of Mugello is the result of a complex and articulated history and the fruit of interesting contaminations - the same ones that characterize the territory, straddling the Apennines, a border land between Tuscany and Romagna. In recent years, many of the production companies of Mugello have undertaken a virtuous path towards quality, which has led them to rediscover or deepen production techniques and products of the past, but at the same time to question, where necessary, that stereotyped vision of tradition that often ends up producing sterile clichés. Like the one who wanted that to drink Mugello wine you had to be two: one who drinks it and the other who "holds" it (that is, supports it). Thus, alongside the gastronomic pillars described in the previous paragraph, a series of new production areas have been defined (or recovered), such as the wine-growing one, with the discovery of a particular vocation of the territory for pinot noir and important recognitions for some excellences at an international level. Or that of hemp, whose presence in the territory, significant in times not too remote, seemed to have disappeared from the collective memory.
With innovative techniques but in full respect - increasingly urgent - of environmental sustainability and the climatic and historical peculiarities of the territory, many producers have moved, often independently, in the direction of a valorization of biodiversity and the most ancient vocations. promising of these border lands, whose history does not stop at the Renaissance but involves the whole contemporary reality. The local cheesemaking tradition, for example, has a long history in the area with the farmers who, unable to preserve the milk they had milked and not used or sold for long, had begun to transform it into various types of cheese, as also demonstrated by the characteristics of certain homes. It is a production sector that is placed on a constantly rising organoleptic and nutritional level, and to whose quality an essential contribution was made by the knowledge and experience of the Sardinian families who arrived here and in other Tuscan countryside in the second part of the twentieth century, also bringing with them the Sardinian sheep breed, now the most widespread in the area. These stories tell of a countryside that has never been immobile and isolated, but always a place of exchanges, relationships, movements, abandonments and returns.