Lombardy Food & Traditional Cuisine

Three landscapes feed Lombardy, and each cooks differently. The plain grows the rice and raises the dairy herds that made this the country's largest cheese producer. The lakes add freshwater fish and, on the warmest shores, olive oil. The Alpine valleys work with what will grow high up — buckwheat, potatoes, cabbage — and with the cheese and cured beef their cold, dry air makes possible.

What unites them is fat and time: butter rather than olive oil, and dishes that cook slowly. The three sections below cover the dishes themselves, where people buy and eat them, and the wine regions that grew up alongside.

Lombardy eats like a cold-country region that happens to be in Italy. Butter and lard do the work olive oil does further south, rice outranks pasta, and the defining dishes are slow ones.

Milan

• Risotto alla milanese — rice with beef marrow and saffron, which gives it its colour. The usual explanation ties it to a glassmaker colouring the Duomo's windows in the 1570s; whatever its origin, the saffron is the point.
• Ossobuco — cross-cut veal shank braised until the marrow can be scooped out, traditionally finished with gremolata (lemon zest, parsley, garlic) and served with the risotto above.
• Cotoletta alla milanese — a bone-in veal chop, breaded and fried in butter. Distinct from a Wiener schnitzel in both the cut and the bone, and the subject of a long, unresolved argument about which came first.
• Cassoeula — pork cuts and cabbage stewed together, a winter dish traditionally made after the first frost.

The mountains

• Pizzoccheri — short buckwheat noodles layered with cabbage or chard, potato and Valtellina Casera cheese, finished with butter and garlic. Buckwheat grows where wheat will not, which is why it anchors this valley's cooking.
• Polenta taragna — buckwheat and maize polenta beaten with butter and cheese until loose.
• Bresaola della Valtellina IGP — beef salted, spiced and air-dried in the cold, dry valley air, sliced thin.

The plain

• Tortelli di zucca — Mantua's pumpkin pasta, sweetened by amaretti and mostarda, a sweet-savoury combination that surprises first-time eaters.
• Risotto alla pilota — Mantuan rice cooked dry rather than stirred loose, with crumbled salami; named for the piloti who husked the rice.
• Casoncelli — Bergamo's filled pasta, dressed with butter, sage and pancetta.
• Mostarda di Cremona — whole candied fruit in a mustard-sharp syrup, eaten with boiled meats and aged cheese.

Cheese and sweets

Lombardy produces more cheese than any other Italian region: Gorgonzola, Taleggio, Grana Padano, and the rare alpine Bitto, made only in summer at high pasture. Panettone is Milanese and now national; Cremona makes torrone, and Mantua the crumbling almond sbrisolona.

Lombardy's food culture is less street-facing than the south's — much of it happens in covered markets, in trattorie that do not advertise, and around the aperitivo hour.

Aperitivo

Milan's contribution to how Italy drinks. A drink bought in the early evening comes with food, and at many bars that food is a buffet substantial enough to replace dinner — the apericena, a word the city invented and half regrets. The Negroni Sbagliato was made at Bar Basso, reportedly by mistake, when prosecco replaced gin. Campari is Milanese, and the brand's original bar stood in the Galleria.

Markets

• Milan — the mercati comunali are neighbourhood covered markets; the one on Piazza Wagner is the most complete. Street markets rotate by district through the week, and the Navigli hold a large antiques market on the last Sunday of the month.
• Bergamo — the produce market sits in the lower town, while the Città Alta above keeps the older food shops.
• Cremona — a Wednesday and Saturday market on the piazza in front of the cathedral, and torrone shops that have operated for generations.

Where people actually eat

The traditional Milanese institution is the trattoria, often family-run and unchanged for decades, serving the four or five dishes above and little else. In the mountains the equivalent is the crotto — a cellar built against rock, using natural air currents to keep food cool, now usually a restaurant. The crotti around Chiavenna are the best known.

Seasonal food events

The Valtellina's sagre run through the autumn around pizzoccheri and cheese; Cremona holds a torrone festival in November; Mantua's pumpkin harvest shapes its autumn menus. These are local events first, advertised on paper rather than online.

Lombardy makes less noise about its wine than Piedmont or Tuscany, but it produces Italy's most serious traditional-method sparkling wine and one of its most difficult mountain reds.

Franciacorta

South of Lake Iseo, Franciacorta DOCG is made by the traditional method — second fermentation in the bottle, as in Champagne — from Chardonnay, Pinot Nero and Erbamat. The denomination is young by Italian standards, established in the 1960s, and its rules are stricter than most: longer minimum ageing than Champagne requires for its equivalents. Satèn is the local style, a blanc de blancs at lower pressure and noticeably softer.

Valtellina

Nebbiolo — called Chiavennasca here — grown on terraces above the Adda, held up by dry-stone walls maintained by hand. Valtellina Superiore DOCG covers the sub-zones of Sassella, Grumello, Inferno and Valgella. Sforzato di Valtellina DOCG is made from grapes dried after picking, the same appassimento principle as Amarone, and was Italy's first dry passito red to receive DOCG status. These are lighter and more mineral than Piedmont's Nebbiolo, and they suit the valley's own food — bresaola, pizzoccheri, aged Casera.

Oltrepò Pavese and the smaller zones

South of the Po, the Oltrepò Pavese hills are one of Italy's largest plantings of Pinot Nero, much of it turned into sparkling wine. Lugana, on the southern shore of Garda, is shared with Veneto and made from Turbiana. Moscato di Scanzo DOCG, a sweet red passito from a few hectares near Bergamo, is the smallest DOCG in Italy.

At the table

Franciacorta with lake fish and with the aperitivo hour; Valtellina Superiore with braised meats and mountain cheese; Sforzato with aged Bitto; Moscato di Scanzo on its own after a meal.