Herbs & Spices

La Coscia della Sposa (The Bride’s Thigh). Once upon a time, the panarda was a rustic sort of feast hosted by a farmer for his neighbors and friends, for his tribe. A feast whose substance was bread and lard—pane e lardo—the words meshed, dialectically, as panarda. Lard was a precious comestible, a potent winter fuel that could keep a body whole up there in the mountains. Thus, if a family had a pig to slaughter, it was a family blessed. And if this family was wont to share its sainted beast, even if only the herb-scented renderings of his fat spread on a trencher of honest bread, it was a festival cheered. Time and greater plenty swelled the proportions of the panarda, it growing into a flushed reveling, a Pantagruelian episode staged by one who desired to give thanks for some plague disarmed, some spiritual wound soothed. The panarda became a gastronomic pageant, a devout rite of Christendom quickened with mystical invocations—a duality, then and now, with which the Abruzzesi are at their ease. A wake, a wedding, a generous harvest, an homage—all these became motives to unfurl the festival, to illuminate, throughout its thirty courses, the inextinguishable Abruzzese ebullience. So fraught is the feast with the host’s honor and the honor of his forebears that guests at his panarda must take to heart the intricacies of the culture into which they have entered. He who does not is imperiled. Stories are recounted of one or another unwitting stranger, who, by the twenty-fifth or twenty-eighth plate, begged his leave from the table. It was then that the barrels of primitive muskets were leaned against the temple of the blunderer, these inspiring, pell-mell, the rediscovery of his appetite. Still, today, when one sits at a panarda table, one is bound to partake of any and all that is set before him. To this, I make personal testimony. Our induction into the rites of the panarda was at a country wedding near the city of L’Aquila, its thirty-two courses presented to nearly two hundred celebrants. Here follow the two dishes I loved best, the first for its straightforward symbolism and display of the ticklish Abruzzese humor, the second for its pure, seminal goodness.

Perhaps until the beginning of this century, there came always, in the severe mountains of the Abruzzo, a haunting desperation with the first days of May. Bankrupt of the thin stores conserved to abide the incompassionate winter—their handkerchief-sized patches of earth sown a few weeks before—the contadini (farmers) waited then for the land to give up its first nourishment. Often it came too late and many died. And even as time brought more mercy, these terrible days were remembered, the pain of them soothed by a simple ritual. The story says that on the first of May, sette fanciulle virtuose—seven young virgins— went from house to house in a village in the Marsica, the area that suffered most in the past, and begged whatever handful of the winter food that might remain in the larders. And, then, in the town’s square over a great fire in a cauldron, the fanciulle prepared a beautiful pottage to share with all the villagers, to bring them together, to warm them, to keep them safe. The potion was known as la virtù—the virtue. The soup is still made, ritualistically, faithfully, each first of May in many parts of the Abruzzo—most especially in the environs of Teramo, as well as in the Marsica—now more extravagantly, brightening the humble dried beans with spring’s new harvests. Employing even a handful or so of all the ingredients results in a great potful of the soup, assigning it thus as a festival dish. On some sweet day in May, invite twenty-nine or so good people and make the soup for them. The tail of a pig and one of his ears, though they are traditional to the soup, seem optional to me.

The transumanza is all but a faded pastoral ritual in the Abruzzo. Once three million sheep and lambs were guided each year from summer mountain pastures to the winter lowlands and back again, but now—with the flocks reduced to several hundreds of thousands—they are transported in huge, canvas-roofed vans. And thus the pastoral life is in suspension, lulled into a smaller, less dramatic sort of existence that permits the shepherd to stay fixed, to have some dwelling or other as a home. Before, he lived with only the sky as refuge. His nobilities and his indignities, his dreaming and sleeping and, often, his dying, were fulfilled in the open air. But to hear stories from old men who, as boys, were raised to be shepherds, whose youth, nomadic and primitive, was spent in the waning epoch of the transumanza, one thinks it might hardly have been a life of desperation. Its very solitude was often its gift, say the old men. In his aloneness, the shepherd honed a curiously grand capacity to listen and discern. He became a piper of sorts, free to move about from village to village, and thus to transport to the hungry ears of each place his accumulation of stories. He was a folkloric hero, an exotic who lived by the graces. The old men smile deep in their eyes when they speak of they who live and die hanging tight to the fancy that security is palpable as a jewel. And, so, having heard the dusty memoirs and the swollen legends recounted by the old shepherd romancers, of the austere dishes they recall being cooked out in the open over their fires or under the shelter of some ruin, we wondered if someone, somewhere, might be cooking them still. Having just billeted ourselves at a modest hotel, La Bilancia, in the environs of Loreto Aprutino, spurred by the repute of its kitchen and cellars, we approached our host. Sergio is a gallant man with a burly sort of gentility. He said how strange it was that the circle had closed so quickly, that in his own lifetime, foods representing poverty had come to be of historical, gastronomic, interest to a stranger. We followed him into the kitchens, the parish of his wife, Antonietta. It was she—one who had every comestible at her disposal, kitchens with the square footage of a small village, four chefs at work under her soft-spoken guidance—who offered to cook the old dishes. They were, after all, her childhood food, the consoling plates of her grandmothers. She explained that the Abruzzesi, even when their means invite them to eat more extravagantly, still cook the old dishes at home. “They still comfort,” she said. “They are cherished, they are our nostalgia.” Too, she mused, this was not so true in some other regions where the foods a people ate when they were poor were fast set aside in better times. And so, because her clients partake of these dishes at home, it is other foods they long for when they sit in her dining room. Hence, it was a somewhat singular occasion for Antonietta to prepare the old foods. She set to making her lists, dispatching us on a mission to the nearby town of Penne to find a certain flour, a certain dried bean. Antonietta cooked two of her own preferred dishes from the traditions of the transumanza, from la cucina povera. And that evening, the immense room filled with guests vanquishing great hefts of roast lamb and fricasseed veal and saddle of hare and generous plates of maccheroni alla chitarra with a sauce of wild boar. She sat with us, her impeccable white cook’s bonnet always in place, eating the simple food with an unembarrassed appetite. We, too, loved the dishes, as much for their own goodness as for the images they lit. The rough pasta dough is made from three flours and hand-rolled. Cut into rustic strings, this is not the ethereal pasta of the refined cucina whose destiny it is to linger about with shavings of white truffle or the belly of some poached lobster. It is the coarse stuff that is homey sop fo...

Caligola, Caligula—the diminutive in the dialect of the Empire for shoe—was the name given to Caio Cesare, despot of the Empire in A.D. 37. And it was under the murky waters of the small volcanic lake of Nemi, south of Rome, that were excavated, earlier in this century, two of the emperor’s small sailing ships—toy boats, really—from which his madness commanded droll, demonic games played in the shadows of the lake forest, the once-sacred woods of Diana’s mythical hunts. Now the pine and oak forests about the little lake of Nemi seem serene enough, whispering up nothing of the old horrors of the place. There, in May, begin to push up from the velvety black earth the most gorgeous and tiny wild strawberries. We like to go there then, for the festivals that celebrate them, to eat them, cool and fresh from their woodsy patches. And on a Sunday last June, as the season for them was ending, we lunched in the town of Nemi, hoping to find one last dose of the berries for dessert. Sitting out on a shaded terrace that looked to the main square, we watched the promenading of the few citizens not yet seated at table. A little ruckus came up behind us from two boys jousting with silvered plastic swords. One of them was a robust sort of chap, thickset, his patrician black-eyed face in profile to us. His adversary was a waif of a boy, a miniature of the other with the same legacy of splendid form and feature. The small one was losing the battle. I tried not to feel every blow I saw him take, the bigger one thrusting the blunted end of the toy sword into his spare middle over and over again. The little one was crying, then, but hardly in surrender. His pain was evident, his fear, too, I thought, yet he stayed to fight. Then, throwing his weapon to the side, the victor began to use his hands to pummel him. The diners around were unmindful. I begged Fernando to do something, to stop them. He told me sternly with his eyes that we must do nothing. I got up and walked, nonchalantly, over to them. “Buon giorno, ragazzi. Come stiamo? Come vanno le cose?” “Hi, boys. How are you? How are things going?” I asked inanely, as though they had been shooting marbles. Gentlemen to the core, the bigger one said, “Buon giorno, signora. Noi stiamo bene, e lei?” “Good day, my lady. We are well, and you?” “What is your name?” I asked, playing for time so the little one might catch his breath. “Io sono Alessio e lui si chiama Giovannino.” “I am Alessio and he is called Giovannino,” offered the big one. I ventured further. “Alessio, did you know that you were hurting Giovannino, that you were hurting him so terribly?” “Sì, signora. Lo so di avergli fatto un pò male.” “Yes, my lady, I know I hurt him a bit,” he answered willingly. I asked him why he would want to be so violent with his little friend. Alessio looked at me full face: “Signora, siamo romani. Combattere è nel nostro sangue.” “We are Romans, my lady. To fight is in our blood.” Educated by the eight-year-old gladiator, I could only shake his hand, then shake the hand of Giovannino and walk back to our table. Fernando told me quietly that a Roman boy could never be Huckleberry Finn. During the lunch, I noticed that Alessio, now sitting on a bench between two people who were likely his grandparents, kept looking at me, waving once in a while, smiling at me with sympathy for my unworldliness. He strolled by the table a little later and asked if we were going to taste the gelato di fragole. It’s made with basil and pepper and vinegar, he proclaimed, as though that composition might be as difficult for me to comprehend as was his penchant for rough sport. He went on to assure us it was the best gelato in Nemi. We asked him if he might like to join us. He said he couldn’t, but thanked us, bowed rathe...

The cooling green tint of the sauce, its reserved, sensual sort of piquancy, make this a pasta good for high-summer lunch or supper after insalata di cantalupo (see page 22).

Should there be, one day in your life, both a handful of still-warm-from-the-tree ripe figs and the juice-dripping flesh of a melon, go quickly to find leaves of mint, some good green olive oil, and the juice of a lemon to make this little salad. Use only flawless components and arrange them for someone wonderful with whom to rhapsodize over it. You might, then, need heady, appropriate conversation. You could choose to speak of Platina—one Bartolomeo Sacchi—the Vatican librarian and author, in 1475, of Platine de Honestate Voluptate. The work’s argument concerns the history of Roman cuisine and was the first officially published cookbook since those written during the Republic. Or you might want to chatter a bit about Cantalupo in Sabina—the Singing Wolf of the Sabines—once a papal garden property outside the Roman walls where a strain of tiny, orange-fleshed melons were cultivated, they, no doubt, being the precursors to those we call cantaloupe. Perhaps you might choose not to speak at all, thus distracting nothing from the sweet little figs.

Il Pane della Ninna Nanna (Lullaby Bread). Neither very sweet nor pizzalike in the flat, savory pie sort of way, this is a gold-fleshed, orange-perfumed cakelike bread that, if baked with care, will be tall and elegant, its crumb coarse yet light and full of the consoling scents of yeast and butter. Fabriziana is one of the several “middle” names of the Roman countess with whom I learned to bake the confection in the cavernous old kitchen of her villa that looks to the gardens of the Borghese. Ours were clandestine appointments, with our yeast and our candied orange peels and the tattered recipe book of her mother’s cook. You see, Fabriziana had never cooked or baked in her life, had never made anything from a pile of flour and a few crumbles of yeast. Forbidden in the kitchen as a girl, her adulthood has been always too fraught with obligations to permit interludes in front of the flames. But in the years we have been friends, she has always demonstrated more than a kind interest in my cooking, sitting once in a while, rapt as a fox, on an old wrought-iron chair in my kitchen as I dance about. And one day when I told her I was searching for a formula for an ancient, orange-perfumed Roman bread, she knew precisely where to find the recipe. Trailing off in some Proustian dream, she said she hadn’t thought of the bread in too many years, it having been her favorite sweet at Christmas and Easter. Once she even requested that it—rather than some grand, creamy torta—be her birthday cake. She told of poaching slices of it from a silver tray during parties and receptions, stuffing them deep into the pockets of her silk dresses to eat later in bed, after her sister was safely asleep, so she might share them only with her puppy. So it was that we decided to make the bread together. Wishing to avoid the chiding of her family and, most of all, her cook, we chose to do the deed on mornings when the house would be safe from them. It was wonderful to see Fabriziana at play. Flour and butter were forced under her long, mother-of-pearled nails, and her blond-streaked coif, mounted to resist tempests, soon fell into girlish ringlets over her noble brow. With a few mornings’ worth of trial, we baked Fabriziana’s lullaby bread, the bread of her memories. And once, on a birthday of mine, the countess came fairly racing through my doorway proffering a curiously wrapped parcel that gave up the telltale perfumes of our bread. The countess had learned to bake indeed.

Abbacchio, a long-ago Roman term for a newborn lamb, is the prescripted dish of Easter. And older than history is the innocent, rousing scent of it roasting with branches of wild rosemary, curling out from the kitchen doors of the trattorie in the Trastevere on Sundays in the spring, beckoning one to table together.

Here is a simple presentation of the components of Rome’s saltimbocca embroidered with spring peas and tomatoes.

These are Rome’s other artichokes. Softened rather than crisped in their oil bath, they are of an extravagant goodness.

Not so many springtimes ago, I knew it was a Roman birthday for which I yearned, convinced that the salve of the place would soften the edges of a long sadness. Arriving crumpled and unslept on that morning, I slid my two dusty bags under the purple flounce of the bed in my genteelly shabby room at the Adriano and bolted off to the Campo de’ Fiori. I needed lilacs. I explained to the flower merchant in the market my desire to bring più allegria—more cheerfulness—to my little hotel room, that I was preparing for a sort of birthday party. He amplified the girth of the sweet-smelling sheaves I’d chosen and dispatched his helper to carry the towering bouquets through the twisting streets back to the Adriano. His field of vision completely contained inside thickets of blossoms, the porter left me to play front guard, to scream commands and admonitions back at him, staging a droll farce that could happen only in Rome. Safe inside the hotel with the lilacs, I purloined a large metal wastebasket from the reception hall, tied up its middle in a length of green silk, and installed the great, weeping blooms at the foot of my bed. I raced back to the market to fill two baskets with tiny, blushed velvet peaches still on their branches and hung them from wall sconces and draped them over mirrors and bedposts and on the roof of the dour, mustard-colored armoire. I collected breads from the forno (bakery) in Via della Scrofa, not so much to eat but for the comfort of their forms and their scents. I unwrapped the Georgian candlesticks I always carry with me from their cradle in my old taffeta skirt, threw open the shutters to beams of a rosy moon, and the birthday room was ready. I’d collected a beautiful supper at Volpetti: a brace of quail, each reposing on a cushion of roasted bread—depository for their rosemary juices—olives crushed into a paste with capers and Cognac, a stew of baby artichokes, new peas, and fava beans scented with wild mint and called, mysteriously, la vignarola—the winemaker’s wife—and a small, white, quivering cylinder of sweet robiola (fresh handmade cow’s milk cheese). I laid the feast on the dressing table, serving myself only bits of it at first. But little explosions of goodness insinuated themselves, and the quiet supper urged me into the goodness of the moment. Hungers found, strategies resewn. Happy birthday. During the time I lived at the Adriano, I went each morning to the market in Campo de’ Fiori, stopping to chat with my flower man, he introducing me to the lady with the slenderest, most delicate asparagus, which I devoured raw, like some earth-scented bonbon, and the one with the baby blood-red strawberries collected in the forests of Lake Nemi up in the Alban Hills. A ration of these beauties I vanquished each afternoon between sips of icy Frascati from my changing caffè posts along the campo. With those weeks as initiation, I might have stayed the rest of my life in the lap of that neighborhood, that village within Rome so contained and complete unto itself, and surely would never have known a single lonely day. More than she is a city, Rome is a string of small provinces, fastened one to the other by old fates.

For nearly a century, the mattatoio, the slaughterhouse, of Rome was fixed, south of the city’s center and flanked by Porta San Paolo and the Piramide di Caio Cestio, in the quarter of Testaccio—a hillock formed by the dross of terra-cotta amphorae that held olive oil and other comestibles imported into the city. Of an eloquent, uncompromised Roman character, the quarter grew up simple little houses in whose kitchens were cooked the humble remains of the butchers’ art, transforming the offal into i piatti fortissimi—the strongest plates—to serve to the workingmen for lunch. Il mattatoio has long since been relocated, but the Testaccio still practices the most orthodox Roman gastronomic traditions, building dishes such as nervetti in insalata, a salad of poached calves’ feet, coda alla vaccinara, (see page 4), pajata, the grilled or braised intestines of a calf or an ox, and trippa. As prosaic as are the formulas for these dishes, the manner in which they are presented is also prescripted. First, if the proprietor in any one of the neighborhood’s tabernae—Romans swing easily in and out of Latin, as in this usage for taverns—doesn’t approve one’s general look or demeanor, he will point, steely, to a little sign marked COMPLETO, reserved, that is fastened, permanently, handily for such occasions, to a rope of salame suspended from the rafters. If he does deem to seat one, neither he nor his colleagues will be charmed if one speaks Italian. It is only the dialect of Rome that is shouted in the Testaccio. It seems best to communicate, through eye-rolling and hand-flailing, that one wishes all decisions to be made by the house, that one is armed with magnificent appetite, and that one shall remain serene and unrepining at whatever part of whatever animal may be set before one. Our place of choice to be fed like a Roman is called Da Felice, an unsigned post in Via Mastro Giorgio. We go always of a Saturday so we can always eat tripe. Soaked in water and vinegar, urging the nastiness from its pores, the tripe is poached before it is sautéed in a battuto (the fundamental vegetable, herb, and fat flavoring for a sauce) of pancetta, olive oil, and garlic, then braised overnight on the quietest flame in tomato, white wine, and wild mint. A Saturday ritual in the Testaccio, as well as in every genuine osteria and trattoria in Rome, la trippa is served in deep bowls, under a dusting of pecorino, with chunks of rough bread and a jug of Frascati. Food of the poor is this tripe, flotsam conjured into a flavorful, cockle-warming stew, one that a sage Roman wouldn’t trade for a big, bloody beefsteak, not even one flounced in truffles.

Roman ox butchers, known as i vaccinari, have been attributed authorship for this most characteristic dish of la cucina povera romana. Honored as savvy, inventive cooks, the butchers were and are wont to pot up the most particularly toothsome nuggets plundered from the great beasts. The tail of an ox, though it surrenders inconsiderable flesh, is of the tenderest texture and most delicate savor to be gleaned from the whole hulk of him.

My ongoing quest to find new ways to eat butter, sugar, and nuts together resulted in this happy discovery: sbrisolona. A regional specialty of Mantova, Italy, this cookie gets its name from its crumbly texture. The dough is worked together by hand into a dry, coarse meal, pressed into a cake pan, and baked until it’s very firm. I follow the Italian tradition and break the giant cookie into rough, jagged pieces. Like biscotti, its dense, nutty quality makes it the perfect vehicle for scooping up zabaglione. This old-fashioned Italian custard is traditionally made by whisking egg yolks, sugar, and Marsala wine over simmering water. In this festive version I’ve substituted slightly sweet sparkling Moscato d’Asti for the Marsala.