Why Italians Love to Talk About Food by Elena Kostioukovitch

Author:Elena Kostioukovitch
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781429935593
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

TYPICAL DISHES OF LAZIO

Hot Antipasti Rice croquettes (arancini), rice balls (supplì) filled with meat, entrails, and mozzarella. The name supplì comes from the French word surprise. At times they are also called supplì al telefono (telephone-style) because of the strands of mozzarella that stretch out from the supplì when it is bitten.

First Courses Pasta with a sauce that is quick to prepare, such as amatriciana, the recipe of the five p’s: pancetta (bacon), pomodoro (tomato), peperoncino (red pepper), pecorino cheese, and pasta. Though originally from the village of Amatrice, in the province of Rieti, this specialty is now regarded as a typical example of Roman cuisine. Gnocchi alla romana, eaten on Thursdays by all Romans since the dawn of time. For Romans, gnocchi are made exclusively with semolina, flattened and cut with special round molds. These gnocchi are served with butter and cheese. In other Italian regions far from Rome, on the other hand, gnocchi are made with boiled potatoes, egg, and flour, forming little balls to serve with ragù sauce.

Pasta carbonara-style, introduced into the Roman diet by Abruzzese cooks (see “Abruzzo and Molise”). Sbroscia, a soup of freshwater fish. Pajata, or pagliata: milk veal intestine with onion, parsley, celery, garlic, and tomato. Sea urchins as an antipasto, or as a base for pasta sauce.

Second Courses Lamb, artichokes, oxtail stew, beans with tripe, fried brains alla romana. Saltimbocca alla romana: sliced beef or veal wrapped around pieces of prosciutto with sage leaves and fastened with toothpicks. Lamb chops a scottadito (hot from the grill). In Ciociaria, calf tendons (nervetti) with green parsley sauce.

Quail with herbs. Bass with porcini mushrooms (in the finest restaurants, near seaside resorts along the coast). Another typical dish of Ciociaria is cicoria pazza (crazy chicory), which is eaten in Alatri with garlic, hot red pepper, olive oil, and salt.

Rome probably offers the widest choice of salad greens. Batavia lettuce, Lollo Rosso lettuce, white, gold, green, and even red leaf lettuce, with a slight walnut taste. Roman lettuce, exquisite when just picked, accompanies the most unforgettable kind of Roman salad green, puntarelle, the name for catalogna sprouts cut into thin slivers, then soaked in ice-cold water (in the Italian climate, ice and, in general, any cold dish were luxuries in ancient times) and seasoned with olive oil, vinegar, anchovies, salt, and garlic. The red radicchio is different from that found in Treviso and Verona, and has a different flavor. Then there are the dark green Roman salad and Belgian endive (a type of chicory grown in the dark in caves, in which chlorophyll is absent; hence the leaves have a completely pale color). A typical dish of Roman Jewish cuisine is endive with anchovies. Salad greens are bought in markets in the city’s central piazzas: oak leaf, dandelion, escarole, and also rughetta (arugula), famous throughout the world, a variety of rucola (rocket). Incidentally, rocket in and of itself, which in recent times, thanks to the trend of nouvelle cuisine, has ended up on the menus of all

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