Читать книгу Popes, Peasants, and Shepherds - Oretta Zanini De Vita - Страница 15

Introduction

The food of Rome and its region, Lazio, is redolent of herbs, olive oil, ricotta, lamb, and pork. It gives pride of place to the genuine flavors of foods, making it a very “modern” cuisine. It is the food of ordinary, frugal people and had no role in the development of the kind of cooking that over time became elaborated and codified in the palaces of the nobility and later in the temples of haute cuisine. The introduction of products from the New World, such as the tomato, the potato, and corn (maize), did not transform the hearty popular cuisine; they merely enriched it.

From earliest antiquity, Roman and Latian cooks were thrifty¹ and remained so even in the period of the famous Lucullan banquets—rare privilege of the wealthy few. The most important meal for the ancients consisted of puls (plural pultes), a porridge based on a grain, notably far, or emmer, to which fava beans, chickpeas, or lentils were added. With it, they ate mostly vegetables and to a lesser extent milk and cheese. Meat was extremely rare, and what little was used was from chickens, rabbits, or game.

In the last centuries B.C. and the first centuries of our era, the typical daily menu consisted of bread, oil, milk, olives, honey, and eggs. On those few occasions when meat was served, it was almost exclusively in soups seasoned with garlic and onion. Meat did not include beef or veal, since oxen were too valuable as work animals to slaughter them for the table. Protein content was provided mostly by eggs, which the Romans loved.

A primitive unleavened bread was made by mixing water and flour and then shaping the dough into a flat focaccia. The same dough could be used to make what was probably a sort of tagliatelle or maltagliati, called laganum in Latin. A simple recipe using lagana has come down to us.

Meals always included vegetables, most commonly turnips and cabbage. Every family, even the poor, had a little garden sufficient for the daily requirement of greens. Salt for food preservation came from immense deposits under the southernmost of Rome’s canonical seven hills, the Aventine,² which were in turn restocked from the salt marshes at the mouth of the Tiber.

Even the common people’s kitchen enjoyed the effects of contact with Greek civilization and trade with the East. The Sabine hills, northeast of Rome (bordering present-day Abruzzo), came to be covered with olive trees, and the use of olives and olive oil was introduced. To this day, the oil produced there is one of Italy’s best.

By the height of the empire, the middle and upper classes were consuming more meat. But in the countryside, people went on as before and continued to eat simply, relying above all on homegrown fruits, legumes, and vegetables.

In the Middle Ages, the struggles among baronies caused hard times, including famine, in Rome and Lazio, both city and country.³ The splendid gardens that had adorned houses within the city walls under the empire were converted to the growing of vegetables. These kitchen gardens contributed to feeding the people of Rome until the mid-nineteenth century, when they were swallowed up in the building frenzy that accompanied the arrival of the Kingdom of Italy.

With the Crusades, contact with the East was reopened. The tables of the rich became laden with such exotic products as sugar, spices, and oranges, all of them imported by the maritime republics (Genoa, Venice, Pisa, and Amalfi), which dominated trade in their day, and not just in the Mediterranean. But unlike them, Rome remained highly conservative in its cuisine and anchored in tradition. Romans continued to make their sweets with honey and ricotta, to make their wine with the grapes grown in their own vineyards, and to cook their vegetables, fish, and meat in lard, guanciale, or olive oil.

For centuries to come, the population of Rome was only a few tens of thousands. Cut off from the political scene and its troubles, the people continued to live and cook simply, bringing in most of their food needs from the various surrounding zones that today form the region of Lazio—Tuscia and Sabina⁴ to the north, Campagna to the south, and Marittima,⁵ or coastal area. The rural population and the people in the small surrounding towns had thus maintained and cultivated a cuisine that remained very close to that of the city: a roast kid cooked near Sora, in southern Lazio, or one in Amatrice, at the region’s northern tip (and formerly in Abruzzo), differed little from what was eaten in Roman homes. For this reason, many of the recipes in this book can be considered as belonging to the region as a whole.

The same holds for pasta: poverty and imagination lay behind the proliferation of all the many types that changed name from town to town: the stracci of one become fregnacce of another, and the Sabine frascarelli differ little from the strozzapreti of the Ciociaria, the region’s southern hinterland. The popular imagination gave whimsical names to the simple paste of water and flour, and only rarely eggs, worked with the hands or with small tools. Thus we have cecamariti (husband blinders) and cordelle (ropes), curuli, fusilli (also called ciufulitti), frigulozzi, pencarelli, manfricoli, and sfusellati, as well as strozzapreti (priest stranglers), the lacchene of the town of Norma and the pizzicotti (pinches) of Bolsena, while the fieno (hay) of Canepina has, accompanied by paglia (straw), been absorbed into the repertory of the pan-Italian grande cucina. All these pastas were served with much the same sauce, plain tomato and basil, though on feast days, pork, lamb, or beef would be added. It is impossible, as well as historically incorrect, to make hard-and-fast distinctions among the dishes of the region’s separate geographical areas—whether Tuscia, Sabina, or the Ciociaria—since by this time the Roman popular cuisine had adopted and absorbed almost all these dishes and made them its own.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, residents of Rome’s Prati quarter—in the shadow of Castel Sant’Angelo—could still see the Tiber flow and hear the crickets and cicadas inside the fortress. Public transport from there to Viale Manzoni was a horse-drawn trolley that started at Piazza Navona. The best salamis came from Ignazio in Via della Scrofa and the finest fresh cheese from Bernardini, the milkman in Via della Stelletta. The best panpepato was from the baker Gioggi at the Circo Agonale (Piazza Navona), and lamb and sweetbreads were booked ahead with Giorgi, the butcher.

In the evening, people dined at home by gaslight, and after dinner they went out to the caffè to chat with friends till late. In summer, there were concerts in Piazza Colonna or at the Caffè Guardabossi in Piazza Montecitorio. But those with a sweet tooth left the music to others and concentrated on the famous cassata siciliana or sorbets at Aragno.⁶

And that was decades, not centuries, ago.