Cipolla Rossa di Breme
Breme Red Onion
Breme is a medieval village of 700 people in the lower Lomellina, where the Sesia meets the Po, and the sigulla starts at its 10th-century abbey of San Pietro: a chronicle of 906 has monks from Novalesa, in the Turinese, moving here away from Saracen raids and finding both a new house for their congregation and ground that suited their vegetables, the white or golden onion and the red. The red weighs six or seven hundred grams, squat and deeply coloured, and it has lasted on sweetness, crunch and digestibility; the village calls it dolcissima.
Designation
- Certification
- Slow Food Presidium
- Category
- Fruit, vegetables and cereals, fresh or processed
Where it is made
Breme, lower Lomellina, Pavia province
How it is made
Until the 1950s Breme was the kitchen garden of the Lomellina, its onions, peppers and cabbages helped by the soil, the river microclimate and the drained marsh. Rice took the fields, and the few market gardeners left grow for their own households. The red onion is the exception: abandoned in the 1980s, it came back on the interest of local cooks and producers and of some young growers.