Winter weekend in Rome. Little (very tall) Brother came to keep me company. I rented an apartment in Trastevere and a moped and when it rained we took shelter in a corner cafe and had a shot of expresso chased with a dose of engine-oil grappa. By the time we had paid, the sun had come out and everything sparkled wet and the ruins were all pink and cheery. Of course the Eternal City is eternally beautiful. I don’t think the food ever changes either.
Roman cuisine is a style of cooking not so much honed as worn-in by generations. Each dish seems to reflect the patina of the doorpost that leads into the typical trattoria, smoothed by many hands into the touchstone contours. These family run restaurants, still numerous and easy to find among the trendier joints obsessed with carpaccio, are comfortably undecorated; a few mismatched pictures on the walls, a photograph of an old lady eating spaghetti, a copy of a 19th-century print of the Colosseum. The menu is similarly homey: minestra (any-kind-of vegetable soup heavy with beans); carbonara; bucatini all’Amatriciana (tomato spiked with chilli and porked with pancetta); polpettine which sound like they should be baby octopuses but which are meatballs; slow braised offal. Many dishes carry the imprimatur of “alla Romana”: lumache (snails); gnocchi (made locally without potato since the time of Apicius); abbacchio (month old lamb). Rome even has its own cheese, pecorino Romano, carried by legionnaires marching to fight the barbarians; and its own brassica, the most beautiful vegetable in the world with its architectural spirals of green nobbles, known as broccolo Romano. These are meals of happy winter stodge, layers of carbs like cosy layers of woolly jumpers.
“The cuisine comes from poor people in ancient times,” explained Daniele Gennaro, one of the proprietors of a trattoria just off the Piazza Navona called Ditirambo. “They were eating the same meal two or three or four times in a row and you need the kind of dish you can reheat many times easily.”
Little Brother smiled contentedly. We had eaten well and heartily: a thick khaki coloured lentil soup that occasionally yielded a gift of a soft slither mushroom or a whole chestnut; sformatino di carciofi, a tart of julienned artichoke and potato, baked so that the edges were a little crispy; taglioni with more artichokes (a Roman favourite whatever the season) and cured pig cheek; and the best pappardelle with rabbit I had ever eaten and which I didn’t want to share with Little Brother except I had to because my cash card didn’t work and he was paying.
Over several meals of Roman winter comfort food I had come to appreciate the deep, richly satisfying, moreish flavour of dishes that were unadorned: no acid notes, no herbs to brighten, no drizzle nor spice. Daniele said the technique was low and slow, flavours built on a foundation of time, with a structure supported by the two pillars of broth and sugo. Sugo, pasta sauce, is what Italian-Americans call red gravy, unctuous and sweet and sour. It is ubiquitous: add it to ragu, to minestrone or any kind of pasta sauce, and you have an instant alla Romana.
Marcella Hazan, the great Italian cookery writer who died this year and will be greatly missed, writes many variations of how to make sugo: cook a soffritto (the triumvirate base of Italian cookery, finely chopped onion, celery and carrot, lightly browned in a little oil or butter), then add the tomato; or cook the tomatoes and add the soffritto. Tomatoes can be fresh or canned, cooked down for 15 minutes or an hour. Add perhaps half an onion for aroma, or a little sugar, pepper, garlic (or not). It turns out that there are so many ways to make it that you might as well make it the way you want.
Our last day was a Sunday and Little Brother and I wandered by chance into an unpreposessing restaurant in Monti called Osteria Della Suburra. It was obviously good because, despite the down at heel decor, it was full. We ate roasted porcini, perfectly soft and edged in brown crisp char and full of warm olive oil. We ate more pasta and oxtail braised with celery and sugo. And then, most serendipitously, we bumped into an old friend of mine, Imma Vitelli, who had just moved back to Rome from Milan. We went for a cup of tea at her apartment around the corner. She was in the middle of the whole-day-long process of making minestrone. “Rome is a traditional city,” she told me, stirring in chopped tomato. “It’s a conservative city. The Italians want to eat what they ate at nona’s (grandma’s).” This is exactly right, I thought. Roman winter dishes make you feel taken care of, because care has been taken in making them.
Wendell Steavenson is an Associate Editor of Prospect
Wendell Steavenson: Rome’s happy, cosy winter food
January 23, 2014
