Strangolapreti

Break the stale bread into cubes and soak it in milk.

Carefully clean the spinach and place it in salted water. Drain, squeeze well, and pass through a sieve.

In the bowl with the milk, where you have placed the stale bread, break the eggs, add the spinach, and mix well, binding with the flour. You need to obtain a soft, not watery, elastic, and uniform dough.

Put a pot of salted water on the stove. When it comes to a boil, use a spoon to scoop from the dough, compacting the portion with your hand. Then detach the “strangolo” from the spoon, dropping it into the water. When it floats to the surface, it is cooked. To detach the dough from the spoon more easily, simply dip the utensil in cold water each time.

Remove the strangolapreti from the pot with a slotted spoon, drain well, and place on the serving dish. Drizzle with melted butter flavored with onion and sprinkle with grated cheese.

A cult dish of Trentino tradition. Regarding the origin of the name, a popular legend circulates, already disseminated in the mid-nineteenth century by scholar Giambattista Azzolini, referring to the gluttony of a priest who was a passionate hunter. After a tiring hunt in which he had also found himself “poorly supplied with provisions,” he returned to the rectory “so ravenous that he would have devoured not only a fat chicken, but even a large plain and dry polenta.” The housekeeper had prepared “this dish of dumplings with herbs, which he began to eat with such voracity that, with a lump forming in his throat, he would have suffocated, had the compassionate servant, seeing no other remedy, not made him expel the tangled food from his gullet through his mouth by repeatedly striking him harder and harder between neck and shoulders.”