Pea, Mortadella soup with home made pisarei (stale bread gnocchetti)

Silvia Colloca's Emilian soup of peas, mortadella and tiny stale-bread gnocchetti called pisarei, hand-rolled from flour, water and yesterday's loaf. The gnocchetti drink up the broth; the mortadella does the flavour. Cucina povera at its most clever.

Pisarei is the Piacenza speciality (the city on the Po river in Emilia-Romagna) of small breadcrumb dumplings hand-rolled into curls of dough using just the thumb. The defining ingredient is stale bread, soaked and mashed into the flour, which gives the dumpling its specific cushiony-soft texture (denser than gnocchi, lighter than orecchiette). The dish is the Italian household answer to wasting nothing.

The hand-rolling technique is the meditative part. A small piece of dough rolled out into a thin rope, cut into cherrystone-sized pieces, then each piece rolled away from the body with the pad of the thumb across a lightly floured wooden board. The thumb-roll creates the characteristic curled-shell shape that catches the broth. Time-intensive but straightforward; an excellent activity for a slow Sunday afternoon.

Mortadella (the Bologna sausage with cubes of white fat and pistachios suspended through the pink meat) is the regional flavour ingredient. Diced fine and sweated in the pan first, the mortadella renders its salt and seasoned-pork flavour into the base of the soup; the dish reads as deeply Emilian even before the peas join. Sweet green peas (fresh or frozen) folded through near the end stay bright and add the sweet counterpoint. Parmigiano grated over the top. Cold Lambrusco alongside.