While cook recipes of Chiusi are poor and not very labored, flavours are definite and well calibrated.
Plates to taste are for example "brustico" and "tegamaccio", based on fish, or "pici", a kind of long pasta made of flour and water. The name "pici" comes from "Il Vocabolario della Crusca" (The Dictionary of Bran in English), that calls "pinco" a type of cucumber. They are usually flavoured with tomato sauce with meat of duck, garlic and pepper or freshwater fish. Moreover, there are "polenta", made of potatoes and flavoured with meat of pig, spelt soup, grilled meat and the last but not the least the famous "cantucci", dried biscuits with almonds, to be savoured soaked in the delicious wine called "vinsanto" from Tuscany.


Brustico:
It is mostly perch grilled on fire, made of reeds, lit on the lakeside. Its particularity is the smell of smoke that comes from the wet reeds used for cooking. It is served  in small pieces without fishbones, flavoured with extra virgin olive oil, a little vinegar, salt and pepper. The term "brustico" comes from tuscan slang "abbrusticare", which means "to roast". Three different kinds of fish are used to make this plate: royal perch, pike and bass. It is served as starter or main course.  

Tegamaccio:
Delicious freshwater version of the more famous "cacciucco" from Livorno, it is based on fresh fish caught in our lake. The eel, the pike, the tench, the sun and royal perch and the catfish, cut in pieces and cooked in a pan (in Italian "tegame" from which "tegamaccio") are added, in this plate, to ripe and fresh tomato.

Pici:
It is a particular sort of crafted pasta, typical of the south of Tuscany. The recipe is extremely easy: water, flour and a bit of egg. The housewives "appiciano", which means they craft pasta until a long and full-bodied spaghetto is created. The traditional relish of this kind of pasta is the bolognese sauce or "aglione", a tomato sauce with garlic and pepper.


Cantucci:
The name "cantucci" came from the past, when poor people who couldn't afford to buy good biscuits, ate the final part of tuscan bread loaf, called "cantuccio".
It is a recent biscuit, it was created in the middle of the XIX century. A lot of cities all around Tuscany claim they invented the delicious biscuit. They should be eaten with a glass of good vinsanto, where they are dipped to make them a little more soft. The German writer Herman Hesse wrote in a letter of the book "Dall'Italia"  that the "cantuccini" were so good that were able to put him in a good mood. Even the famous chef Pellegrino Artusi in his book "La scienza in cucina e l'arte di mangiare" says that the biscuit with almonds (cantucci) is one of the sweet product he most appreciates. Cantucci are made with sugar, eggs, flour and almonds.

Vinsanto:
The Vinsanto in Tuscany is an important and particular wine, considerated the wine of welcome and courtesy. It is produced choosing the best grapes during the grape picking (Trebbiano, Malvasia and Grechetto). The bunches are laid down in leaves and carried on wooden crates and after that they are wilted in big ventilated rooms. Here they remain for four months, during which windows are opened to the dried northern winds; when the wind comes from the south, windows are closed and a bit of  sulphur is burnt. On January, the intact grapes are separated from the stalk and trodden: the liquid obtained in this way is put in small barrels called "caratelli". Afterwards, in rooms under a roof, the wine is left in sealed "caratelli" for three years, untouched. Not rarely it happens that the entire content of one caratello has to be thrown away. For this reason the Vinsanto is always produced in small quantities and it is as much valuable as long it remains in the barrel. The Vinsanto is of an amber and bright yellow colour and contains 16% alcohol. 
This kind of wine has to be served at 5-7°C as aperitif , at 16-18°C  with a dessert and at 20°C as a meditation wine. Gastronomy matching: it's a wine for desserts, perfect with cantucci, for aperitif,  for cheeses like "pecorino" (sheep's cheese) and "gorgonzola" (very similar to blue cheese), for meditation and every other occasion. There are different hypothesis about the origin of its name. A legend from Siena says that during the XIV century a friar distributed a wine able to cure ill people, from which the belief that it was a miraculous wine, "Santo". It is also said that the name "santo" comes from the use of it during the Holy Mass, or from the fact that the treading is carried out on proximity of the Holy Week (Settimana Santa).