Popes, Peasants, and Shepherds. Oretta Zanini De Vita
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and the artichokes and romaine lettuce of Rome.
Ever since antiquity, stock raising has symbolized Lazio, and it remains an important source of income for the region, though it employs many fewer people than in the past. Animal-related activities provide the inhabitants of Lazio with essential sources of nourishment, which the local cuisines have turned into a multiplicity of dishes, such as the abbuoti of the Ciociaria, flavorful rolls made from the intestines of Roman milk-fed lamb and filled with lamb innards, onion, parsley, and pecorino.
In the region today, such so-called typical products are at the center of a renewed collective interest following a lengthy cultural renewal that began with the post–World War II boom years. It was a period that saw the depopulation of the rural world, the growth of urban sprawl, the introduction of food-preservation methods that ensured supply far from the time and place of production, and the acceptance of women in the workplace. Naturally, there were consequences for food preparation.
The combination of these factors sparked the irreversible decline of peasant-pastoral culture, with its precarious existence and limited resources, and transformed traditional gastronomy, bringing an abrupt halt to the transmission of culinary know-how. A corollary has been the disappearance of centuries-old foodways and the establishment of new ones. The gradual acceptance of the new ways has increasingly restricted the space afforded to local flavors, considered synonymous with an archaic world from which it was felt necessary to take as great a distance as possible. It evoked poverty and could not guarantee modernity.
In the last two decades, as often happens when deculturation is excessive, the need not to lose oneself, or to return to being oneself, has activated a growing movement of identity revival. A similar operation has brought about the rediscovery of foods, recipes, and eating habits “of the old days,” as evidenced in the widespread phenomenon of gourmet shops, agriturismi, farmers’ markets, and peasant lunches. Thus in Lazio, as in the rest of the Western world, genuine, authentic, typical, and home style have gradually become the features of a manner of eating that is healthful and consistent with traditional values, as well as with the found-again balance between man and the environment.
This pastoral and agricultural heritage is an inextricable part of Rome itself, as well. Albeit residence of kings, emperors, and popes, seat of government and its bureaucracy, the capital’s genetic imprinting has ensured that the peasant soul of Rome coexists with its urban dimension. Rome has always contained gardens, meadows, and places for food storage. Even the place names from the historic center to the periphery echo the themes of rural life. Such street names as Via dei Fienaroli (hay sellers), Via dei Caprettari (goat sellers), Via dei Fienili (haylofts), Via degli Orti (vegetable gardens) di Trastevere, Via del Frantoio (oil press), or Via dell’Aratro (plow) are not chosen arbitrarily by the ruling class, but capture true aspects of the agropastoral sphere existing within the city.
However, the reason why Rome can still be considered the most “peasant” of European capitals is something else. There are agrarian estates even inside the roads that ring the city. Sheep still graze along the urban stretch of the Aniene River and the Via Appia Antica. Green spaces have everywhere insinuated themselves into the city fabric, even right up to the arches of the Colosseum. Numerous small neighborhood markets still survive, their vegetable stalls often managed by farm women from the agro romano. Thanks to their presence, such dishes as carciofi alla giudia, cacio e pepe, aliciotti all’ indivia, coda alla vaccinara, and pajata still constitute the “markers” of a kitchen that, although simple, expresses intense and original tastes.
Traditional Roman gastronomy (cucina romanesca) in fact represents a puzzle characterized by its creativity and its heterogeneity, in which the products of the countryside coexist with the specialties of the forests, the fish caught in the rivers with the cheeses of the pastures, the typical products of the coastal Maremma with the dishes of the urban Jewish tradition. The latter custom contains that arithmetical paradox known as the quinto quarto, the “fifth quarter,” which comprises everything edible that remains after the animal has been quartered and the more prized cuts removed. From this offal (tripe, heart, liver, spleen, thymus gland, brains, tongue, tail), cucina romanesca has managed to derive flavorful dishes to offer to gourmet palates from the world over in the trattorias of Testaccio, Trastevere, and San Lorenzo.
But studying cucina romanesca does not mean only taking into account its innumerable horizontal layers that are the result of contributions from its surrounding area. We must also consider its age-old history, during which many food products and recipes were handed down both through oral tradition and in writing. The latter, an extensive literature, includes the names of Horace, Cicero, Columella, Apicius, Juvenal, Martial, and Petronius. They speak of an extraordinarily imaginative gastronomic culture that distinguished everyday meals from festive banquets, the tables of the rich from those of the poor, the emperors’ menus from the parvae cenulae of the citizens. It is also possible to outline a picture of a diet in which the range of the courses alternated from antipasti to soups and from roasts to vegetables—without disdaining snails, cabbages, fava beans, chicory, and borage. Some combinations of ingredients survive to our own day, such as olives spiced with chile or fennel or aniseeds; the custom in the fiaschetterie (wineshops) of eating hard-boiled eggs with Frascati wine; the persistence with which the padellotto (mixed offal), arzilla (skate), animelle (sweetbreads), or trippa (tripe) are cooked along the lines of dishes described in the pages of De re coquinaria, the Satyricon, De re rustica, or the nineteenth-century sonetti of Gioacchino Belli. Think, finally, of all the cheeses, such as caciofiore, marzolino, caciotta, or pecorino, that grace the tables of the capital every day.
Of this gastronomic universe that embraces in a single, organic reconstruction of Rome and its region, past and present, the tables of popes and common people, the work of Oretta Zanini De Vita constitutes an important and complete account.
TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE
MAUREEN B. FANT
It was only when the supply and prices of farmhouse fixer-uppers in Tuscany and Umbria reached a critical point, twenty or so years ago, that English-speaking visitors to Italy began to notice the large region to their south. In addition to affordable real estate, it offered rugged natural beauty and inhabitants who couldn’t have cared less about attracting tourism, a refreshing alternative to the manicured, Anglophone Chiantishire model. Those of us who hiked the region’s hills and mountains, explored its wilder Etruscan rock-cut tombs, admired its medieval towns, and kayaked in its volcanic lakes felt adventurous even just knowing this wonderful land existed. The food was good too and in many ways indistinguishable from that over the border. The region’s olive oil was often better than that of its more famous neighbors, as were the many local beans, greens, and mushrooms. Meanwhile, in the southern part of the region, adjacent to Campania, water buffalo gave excellent mozzarella. The political and geophysical-gastronomic distinctions were similarly blurred on the mountainous east, where there is a long border with Abruzzo and short ones with Molise and the Marche. But since the region’s restaurants and trattorias until recently largely ignored its rich gastronomic heritage, food tourism continued to go elsewhere.
As a result, when, in the early 1990s, I would tell friends that I was translating a gastronomic history of the Lazio region, the usual response was, “Huh?” I’ve been explaining the Lazio region to English-speaking visitors ever since. Allow me to summarize. The regional borders of Italy can, with a moderate stretch, be compared to the national borders of Africa: just substitute “foods” for “tribes.” They often represent political boundaries that may work on paper but do not necessarily reflect the divisions practiced by the actual people who live there or cut much ice with the sheep in the Apennines and the water buffalo in the former Pontine marshes. Like all Italian regions, Lazio is divided into provinces: Rome, extending in all directions from the national capital; Viterbo and Rieti to the north; Frosinone and Latina to the south. Unlike, say, Tuscany and Emilia-Romagna, which contain numerous cities with strong identities of their own (think Pisa and Arezzo, Parma and Modena, in addition to Florence and Bologna), the small provincial capitals of Lazio have always been overshadowed by the Eternal City. How could they not be? Thus we have a region—one of tremendous natural variety dominated by agriculture and pastoralism—at the service of a capital city ruled for much of its history by emperors and popes. In this book (a greatly revised and expanded