Eating - Rome - page 88

Roman Cooking
Like many other Italian cuisines, Roman cooking was born of careful use of local ingredi-
ents, using cheaper cuts of meat, such as guanciale (pig's cheek), and greens that could be
gathered wild from the fields. Other local ingredients include olives, olive oil, pulses,
cured pork, lamb, offal, vegetables grown in Lazio, pecorino (sheep's milk cheese),
ricotta, wood-baked bread, pasta and fish. There are certain staple, classic dishes that are
served by almost every trattoria and restaurant in Rome.
CLASSIC DISHES
The Roman classics are all comfort foods that are seemingly simple (yet notoriously diffi-
cult to prepare well) and remarkably tasty. In the classic Roman comedy I Soliti Ignoti
(Big Deal on Madonna Street; 1958) inept thieves break through a wall to burgle a safe,
find themselves in a kitchen by mistake, and console themselves by cooking pasta e ceci
(pasta with chickpeas). Other iconic Roman dishes include carbonara (pasta with lardons,
egg and Parmesan), alla gricia (pasta with guanciale and pecorino ), amatriciana (inven-
ted when a chef from Amatrice added tomatoes to alla gricia ) and cacio e pepe (pasta
with cheese and pepper).
ROMAN-JEWISH CUISINE
Most entrenched in culinary tradition is the Jewish Ghetto area, with its hearty Roman-
Jewish cuisine. Deep-frying is a staple of cucina ebraico-romanesca (Roman-Jewish
cooking), which developed between the 16th and 19th centuries when the Jews were con-
fined to the city's ghetto. To add flavour to their limited ingredients - those spurned by the
rich, such as courgette (zucchini) flowers - they began to fry everything from mozzarella
to baccalà (salted cod). Particularly fantastic are the locally grown artichokes, which are
flattened out to form a kind of flower shape and then deep-fried and salted. The season to
eat these is from February to May, but you will find artichokes out of season too;
however, this means they've been imported or frozen.
OFFAL SPECIALITIES
For the heart (and liver and brains) of the cucina Romana, head to Testaccio, a traditional
working-class district, clustered around the city's former slaughterhouse. In the past,
butchers who worked in the city abattoir were often paid in cheap cuts of meat as well as
money. The Roman staple coda alla vaccinara translates as 'oxtail cooked butcher's
style'. This is cooked for hours to create a rich sauce with tender slivers of meat.
A famous Roman dish that's not for the faint-hearted is pasta with pajata, made with
the entrails of veal calves, considered a delicacy since they contain the mother's con-