Today I will tell you about a traditional Ligurian recipe, served cold or warm, known for its characteristic meat flavour, and its unmistakable aroma of garlic, onion and marjoram – herbs ever present in our Ligurian cuisine – namely Cima alla Genovese.

Born as a poor man’s dish, nowadays it is enriched with sophisticated flavours and bright colours. In our region there are no cattle farms since the topology of the land doesn’t lend itself to pasture. That’s why traditionally red meat was precious and none of it was ever wasted.

Cima was a poor man’s dish with little meat but a tasty stuffing. It uses the stomach of the calf as a bag filled with all the ingredients. The recipe has ancient origins, from a time when the farmers lived a hard life in the terraced hillsides which neither plough nor cattle could access.

You can smell the scent of Liguria in the filling of eggs, vegetables, pine nuts and cheese: ingredients carefully selected from the plots or, as with pine nuts, picked in the forests of the hinterland. To properly describe to you a dish so important for our culinary tradition, I consulted the head chef Paolo
of the Art Hotel Garden.

Recipe

• Preparation Time: 1h + 2h cooking
• Difficulty: medium- high
• Servings: 8

Ingredients

• Stomach 500 g
• Eggs 10
• 1 bunch of Swiss chard leaves
• Cooked ham 100 g
• Pine nuts 25 g
• 1 head of lettuce
• Peas 60 g
• 1 small and 1 large onion
• Grated Parmesan cheese
• Olive oil, marjoram, celery, carrots, salt, garlic, ground white pepper

Procedimento

Prepare a saucepan of broth with the larger onion, two sticks of celery and a carrot.

For the Filling - Cut and steam the chard, dice the ham, wash the lettuce well and cut it coarsely.

Cut the onion, sautée it with olive oil, pine nuts and garlic, add the ham, then the lettuce, then the basil (washed, drained and cut into strips), the
chard, marjoram (preferably fresh), and add salt and white pepper, letting it cook for about 10/15 minutes, and then let it cool.

Stitching the veal stomach - during the cooling you can get on with creating the bag: using a kitchen needle sew up the stomach by bending it in half and sewing it on 2 sides. Once
the filling has cooled, add the grated Parmesan and fill the bag up to two thirds alternating with whole raw eggs. Having done that you can finish
stitching the upper part.

A tip from the Chef - before putting it in to boil in the pre-prepared broth, first wrap it up in a cloth and tie it. Turn the Cima in the pot at least 2 or 3 times.
After 25/30 min, make some little holes in the Cima to allow the pressurised air created during the boiling to come out – this helps to avoid unpleasant
splitting. After cooking, while the Cima is cooling down, rest a weight on top of it.

Recommended Wine

A good white or rosé goes well. Purists, however, recommend the red Rossese di Dolceacqua.

Enjoy your meal and we’ll see you next time for another Ligurian recipe.