I
talian cities such as Palermo and Naples, former capitals
of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, and Turin, the first
capital of unified Italy, have inherited food traditions
that are a combination of élite recipes and cucina povera.
But Rome, the Eternal City, capital of the country since
1870, has hardly any of the former and a great deal of
the latter. Roman cooking, in fact, is essentially of the people.
Seasoned gastronomes will be familiar with dishes born
in the Roman Ghetto, such as carciofi alla giudia (deep-fried
globe artichokes) and broccoli con brodo di arzilla (skate
and romanesco soup). Added to that are imports brought
in by peasants from the surrounding Lazio region and
neighbouring Abruzzo, such as bucatini all’Amatriciana,
nicknamed the pasta of the five Ps (pomodoro, pancetta,
pecorino, peperoncino and, naturally, pasta), or abbacchio alla
cacciatora (suckling lamb with sage, rosemary and anchovies).
There’s also a third culinary strand that hails from Testaccio,
a working-class Roman neighbourhood on the left bank of the
Tiber, south of the city centre.
Testaccio is built around the hill of the same name, Monte
Testaccio – not a real hill at all, but a mound formed by neatly
piled fragments of olive oil jars, testae, discarded by merchants
from the Emporium, the river port of Imperial and Republican
Rome, over more than 250 years.
Testaccio is not without sights of its own, both ancient and
modern – the Pyramid of Cestius, the former stadium of the
AS Roma football team, the Rome War Cemetery, a snazzy new
covered market – but its main claim to fame is being home to
a very Roman gastronomic tradition. The style is named for the
quinto quarto, or fifth quarter, a butcher’s term to refer to all the
bits not included in the four quarters (two fore and two hind) into
which a carcass is normally cut. In other words, offal. It’s a style
of cooking tantamount to what we now refer to as nose-to-tail.I
t was in 1890 that a monumental mattatoio, or
slaughterhouse, opened on the neighbourhood’s
Piazza Giustiniani. In those days the choice cuts from
the butchered animals were reserved for nobles and
cardinals, and the second-best earmarked for the middle
classes. Partly to supplement wages, the odds and ends of
the fifth quarter were given to the scortichini, or flayers,“No guts no glory”? It’s never truer
than in Rome, Italy’s capital of
oal, writes JOHN IRVING.
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into
will go
IllustrationsEMMA DIBBEN