Storzapreti

Storzapreti belong to the cuisine of the Bastia region and the Cap Corse, the part of Corsica most marked by centuries of Pisan and then Genoese rule. The recipe is a cousin of the dumplings of the Italian Alps — strangolapreti of Trentino — carried into Corsica's Italian-speaking culinary world. The teasing name shared across the Tyrrhenian, "priest-strangler," is usually explained by a tale of a greedy cleric who ate himself into a fit; the true origin is undocumented and best read as folklore. Note that despite the shared name, the Corsican dish is not the Italian strozzapreti pasta: it is a poached-then-baked chard-and-cheese dumpling, not a rolled flour noodle.

Forkable ovals the green of cooked chard, soft and ricotta-tender, sitting in a tomato sauce that has cooked down sweet and slightly jammy, with a thin browned skin of grated cheese on top. Inside, the brocciu keeps the dumpling loose and milky against the herb-bitter chard. The first bite is delicate, almost like a baked gnocchi; the sauce and the salty cheese crust do the heavy lifting on flavor.

Two things make or break the dumpling. First the chard must be blanched and then wrung bone-dry and chopped fine; any retained water loosens the mix and the dumplings disintegrate in the poaching water. Second, brocciu (fresh whey cheese) carries no gluten and little binding power, so the egg and a restrained dusting of flour are what hold the shape — too much flour turns them leaden, too little and they fall apart. They are poached only until they float (about a minute), set, then finished in the oven so the sauce reduces onto them and the cheese top takes color from the dry heat.