Shapes: Cortecce – The Bark That Became Pasta

Cortecce – The Bark That Became Pasta

The rugged Lucanian shape that tastes like the forest it came from

Some pasta shapes seem designed by geometry; others feel carved by nature.
Cortecce — whose name means “barks” — belongs to the second kind.
Small, rough, and slightly cupped, each piece looks like a scrap of tree bark, a curled leaf of wheat dough pressed and dragged until it folds inward like a canoe.
It’s the kind of pasta that doesn’t pretend to be elegant; it speaks of hands, wood, and time.

A Shape Between Forest and Table

Cortecce is part of the great southern family of hand-formed semolina pastas — the ones made only from grano duro and water, shaped by the push of fingers rather than the bite of metal dies.
It comes from the borderlands between southern Basilicata and northern Calabria, where forests meet wheat fields and the mountains of the Pollino stand between two seas.
Here, wheat dough is not rolled thin like in Emilia but worked thick and heavy, pressed against rough wooden boards until it develops texture — that vital roughness Italians call ruvidità, which makes the sauce cling.

In dialect, cortecce are sometimes called cortece, cortecci, or bark pasta.
The shape is simple: a strip of dough, about the length of a thumb, dragged under three fingers and slightly rolled at the edges. The result is not open like lagane nor tubular like maccheroni, but something in between — a groove, a pocket, a half-shell.

Its name, cortecce, says everything: bark, the skin of the tree, the texture of the land itself.
Lucania, after all, is a region of forests — beech, oak, chestnut — and it’s easy to imagine a cook finding the metaphor irresistible.

A Cousin to Cavatelli and Strascinati

In the great family tree of southern pasta, cortecce sits between cavatelli and strascinati — perhaps closer to the former in size but to the latter in spirit.
Like cavatelli, it is finger-formed; like strascinati, it’s “dragged” (strascinare) across a board.
In Campania and Cilento, some families use the names interchangeably.
In Basilicata, it has a distinct identity: thicker, broader, with two raised lips that curve inward, creating a small trough.

While cavatelli are often smooth inside, cortecce have edges that catch and hold — perfect for rustic condimenti like mushroom ragùs or tomato sauces with chunky vegetables.
If you laid all three side by side, you’d have a visual map of the southern hand’s movement: pinch (cavatelli), drag (strascinati), fold (cortecce).

The Border Shape

Cortecce are a true frontier pasta — born where Basilicata touches Campania.
In the Cilento National Park, cooks make almost identical pasta, also called cortecce cilentane.
In the Vallo di Diano and Potenza areas, it becomes cortece lucane, part of the Lucanian home-made repertoire.
It’s one of those shapes that refuses to belong to a single province: a word carried by hands rather than by borders.

Historically, there’s little documentation. You won’t find it in Artusi or early 20th-century cookbooks. But that doesn’t mean it’s new — only that it lived in kitchens where recipes were never written down.
Women shaped pasta by gesture, not by instruction, and what mattered was that the dough spoke back — the right drag, the right fold, the right resistance beneath the fingers.
Cortecce are the memory of that motion.

A Texture Built for Substance

Cortecce are not delicate.
They are pasta for the condimenti di sostanza — sauces that cling and bite back.
In Campania they’re tossed with ragùs or sausage and tomato; in Lucania they often meet what the land provides:

• Wild mushrooms from the Pollino forests,

• Cruschi peppers fried to a sweet crackle,

• Legume sauces made from chickpeas or fava beans,

• Or even just olive oil, garlic, and parsley, when the cupboard is bare.

Because the edges of cortecce curl slightly, the sauce gathers inside like a secret.
Each piece carries its own micro-landscape — rough outside, tender within.

Hand and Board – The Making of Cortecce

To form cortecce, the cook rolls a rope of dough, cuts it into thumb-length pieces, and presses each piece beneath three fingers, dragging it lightly forward on a rough wooden board.
The friction lifts the edges, creating a natural fold.
No tools, no knives — only hand, wood, and patience.
The technique is almost meditative. It’s easy to imagine generations of women shaping them while stories and gossip pass around the kitchen table.

Traditionally, the pasta was eaten fresh, never dried. Modern artisans like Biopasta SRL in Basilicata now offer it semi-fresh or dried, reviving the shape for a broader audience while keeping the texture alive.
Their description calls it “typical Lucanian artisan pasta” — not an exaggeration but a rediscovery.

Cortecce and the Seasons

Like most southern pastas, cortecce follows the rhythm of the year.
In autumn, they pair with porcini and black truffle — a specialty of the Pollino woodlands.
In winter, with beans and greens or the remnants of Sunday ragù.
In spring, with wild fennel or borage, sautéed in olive oil.
In summer, with tomatoes dried on rooftops, almonds, and basil.
It’s not a fixed recipe but a logic: whatever grows near the ground will end up on it.

The Forest and the Field

Lucania’s landscape gives cortecce its symbolism.
The mountains of the Vulture and the Pollino are covered with trees, while below lie fields of durum wheat.
Cortecce is where the two meet — wheat transformed into something that looks like wood.
It’s a small metaphor for the region itself: hard and tender, rural and poetic, resilient and textured.

Eating it feels like tasting the geography — the edge where bark meets grain.

Relatives Across Italy

Italy is full of cortecce’s cousins:

• In Molise and Abruzzo, cavatelli fill the same role.
• In Calabria, ferrazzuoli and filateddi twist in similar shapes.
• In Puglia, strascinati stretch wider, smoother.
  But cortecce keep their own dialect: thicker, heavier, more vertical in spirit — as if they were cut from a trunk rather than rolled from a sheet.

Their shape, more than any other, carries the gesture of southern Italy’s inland kitchens: firm, unpolished, full of touch.

A Shape for Modern Revival

Today, cortecce are being quietly revived by small pastifici in Basilicata and Campania.
Artisans recognize that pasta shapes are cultural fossils — they tell you how people lived, what they grew, what textures they loved.
And cortecce, with its rustic folds and forest name, speaks to a desire for authenticity, for imperfection, for the memory of hands.

It’s also wonderfully photogenic: a shape that looks carved rather than extruded, matte rather than shiny.
In the age of smoothness, it celebrates roughness.

What to Pair It With

Cortecce’s personality calls for depth and contrast. It thrives with:

• Earthy sauces: porcini, lentils, chickpeas, eggplant, truffle.
• Sweet contrasts: pumpkin, caramelized onion, or roasted pepper.
• Spicy Lucanian notes: a crumble of cruschi or a drizzle of Aglianico reduction.
• Simple oils: just garlic, oil, and herbs — letting the shape do the talking.

In the Pasta Love collection, it could become the forest counterpart to the sunlit strascinati — a dish that smells of woodsmoke and autumn.

Fun Facts & Curiosities

• The name cortecce comes from corteccia, meaning “bark.” No other pasta carries such an organic, tactile name.
• In the Salerno and Cilento areas, cortecce is rolled using three fingers; in Lucania, sometimes just two.
• The rough wooden board used to shape it is called tavoliere rigato — its grooves are as important as the hand itself.
• Some families in Vallo di Diano still make cortecce for Palm Sunday, saying it recalls the texture of olive leaves.
• In dialect, a woman skilled at shaping cortecce was once praised as having “le mani giuste” — “the right hands.”
• Artisans note that when cooked, cortecce curl slightly tighter, concentrating the sauce inside.
• Despite its obscurity, cortecce has quietly appeared on menus in Matera and Senise, paired with mushrooms or Aglianico wine sauce.
• In Cilento, “cortecce” is sometimes considered a variant of cavatelli, while in Basilicata it’s treated as distinct — proving how pasta can cross borders like dialects.
• The plural “cortecce” sounds feminine, but locals often use the masculine article — il cortece — another small rebellion of dialect.
• Modern artisans like Biopasta SRL and Sapori del Vallo have given it a second life, listing it proudly among traditional southern shapes.

Closing Note

If Italy’s pastas were voices, cortecce would be the baritone — deep, rough, grounded.
It doesn’t sing of sea or sun but of trees, stones, and fields.
It belongs to the shade rather than the glare, to mountain kitchens rather than coastal ones.
In its folds you can almost taste the gesture that made it: the press of fingers, the drag of dough, the patience of a quiet afternoon.

Cortecce is the bark that became pasta — and in its roughness, it still remembers the forest.