SECRETS OF THE ROMAN KITCHEN

There are two kinds o cookbooks: the sort that focuses solely on “What’s for dinner tonight?” and the sort that provides an escape from the everyday dinner grind, focusing instead on faraway cultures. The latter tends to be the type you save for weekend cooking, or even just bedside reading—rarely do the two types mix. But that is why Tasting Rome, a new book out from Katie Parla and Kristina Gill, is so compelling.

Parla is the go-to source for countless food-obsessed travelers to Rome, Italy, where she lives, including food-world royalty Mario Batali and Andrew Zimmern, who she recently led around for an episode of Bizarre Foods. She is also a sought-after writer, the author of more than 20 food and travel books for the likes of National Geographic, Fodor’s and the Rough Guides, and writes frequently for The New York Times, Saveur, Food & Wine and Bon Appétit, just to name a few of her American outlets.

Gill is a photographer from Nashville, Tenn., who has lived in Rome since 1999, shooting pictures of her adopted hometown as well as exotic locales for a host of food and travel magazines, and covers food in words and pictures for the website Design*Sponge.

I missed Gill when she came back east this past spring, but Parla landed for a tour of what amounted to the best Italian restaurants in the U.S.—from Frankie’s 570 Sputino in New York City and Frasca in Boulder, Co., to Tratto in Phoenix, Monteverde in Chicago, Locanda in San Francisco and many more. When I caught her one morning, she was pausing for some downtime in New Jersey, where she grew up. “Next time I do a book tour, I have to remember I’m not 22,” she says dryly.

She is actually not even 40, which brings me to the question: How did a woman from New Jersey become a font of knowledge about Italian cooking—and so quickly? It is true that her dad runs a restaurant, Clydz, in New Brunswick, N.J., but the place specializes in wild game, not Italian food.

She laughs and admits she can’t really explain what drew her to Italy in the first place, but the attachment is strong. “When I landed in Italy for the first time—as a [high school] sophomore in 1996—it was an immediate reaction,” she says. “I have to admit it wasn’t exactly logical—this was Fiumicino airport, which was a disaster back then—but it was almost like it was something about breathing the air; it was an instantaneous reaction.”

Back in the States, Parla went on to study art history at Yale, and returned to Rome to continue her studies. “But I immediately got distracted by food and wine,” she laughs. “Growing up in an Italian-American family, food was always at the heart of everything I did. It translated quite easily when I moved there.” She got in at the right time, too, she adds. “The euro had just been introduced and the dollar was strong; even a recent grad could afford a pretty nice meal.”

While the density and complexity of Rome can throw many visitors off, Parla found it only drew her in more. “There are roughly 125 districts, each with its own reality. And I loved the idea that you can really only know a handful; unless you live there, your knowledge will remain only superficial.” Parla delved in deeply, befriending butchers and bakers, fishmongers and chefs. When she discovered she could even take formal academic courses in Italian food at the University of Rome, she jumped at the chance. “I didn’t even know you could study [food] as an academic!” She ended up focusing on the influence of Arab agriculture and irrigation on Sicilian food culture, and graduated with a Masters in Italian Gastronomic Culture.

In many ways, though, what Parla has learned over the years is that the reality of life for Romans isn’t in fact all that different from Americans. The idea that everyone shops at farmers markets and butchers, for instance? Parla sighs. “There’s a huge number of romantic stereotypes of Rome,” she says. “The farmers markets lead you to believe there are these tight connections between farmers and the city, but in fact, there was a big shift in the 1970s when supermarkets were introduced as an option. Now the vast majority who shop in produce [farmers] markets are 50 and over.” (Except, of course, for Parla, who is in there chatting all of the sellers up, and Gill, who is busy capturing them in photos.)

There is also the idea that Roman cuisine is a stable concept that is steadfast in the face of globalization. There are, Parla says, certainly customs that have held on, such as Giovedi gnocchi, which is eating gnocchi on Thursdays—a tradition both home cooks and restaurants still embrace. But it is the changes she finds exciting as well. For example, she points to the Jewish quarter, where Pope Paul IV segregated the city’s Jews in the early 1500s. Between their religion’s dietary rules and poverty, they developed their own distinct take on Roman cuisine. To this day, you will find dishes that hark back to those days—inexpensive vegetables such as artichokes were turned into delicacies through deep-frying, and tough cuts of meat were used in long-simmered stews. But some surprised Parla. “I noticed other dishes that kept popping up, like these aromatic spiced cookies that look as though they are right out of a Sicilian pastry shop window,” she says. “Only after research did I realize there are Jews from Sicily here, too.”

She and Gill devote an entire chapter to cucina ebraica, documenting the cuisine as new immigrants added their own flavors to the mix such as the vinegar tang of fried and marinated zucchini, which is the lasting influence of Spanish Jews who arrived in 1492. And Libyans, who took refuge there in the 1960s, brought the cumin, caraway and hot pepper that flavor a fish couscous.

Even more recently, Parla says, you can see the cuisine evolving. “Over the last decade, even the structure of meals has turned pretty dramatically,” Parla says. “Ever since the euro was introduced, the disposable income has really dwindled, and it’s only exacerbated by the youth unemployment rate.” At the same time, people still want to go out. “So now when you go out for a meal, rather than going out for a full-blown meal, people get just a couple of dishes. And the restaurants, to compete, are blowing up the pasta dishes in size.” It used to be that five ounces of pasta fed two people, she explains; now that is a serving for one.

The normal reaction is to blame the American tendency to super-size everything, but Parla says this is purely locally driven. “Initially, to me, it felt like an American influence, but over time I’ve realized that really it’s arisen out of an internal change in local culture.”

You could live in the past, regretting what was lost, or you could embrace the positive aspects of the change—like Parla and Gill have—extending the variations on rice balls in their book to three (including a purple-tinged radicchio and blue cheese), and celebrating the genius of the trapizzino, a three-cornered portable sandwich made of pizza bianca, which was invented at a pizza joint in 2009, and they consider it already part of the Roman culinary canon.

The most important take-away for Parla and any reader of Tasting Rome is, in fact, the personal realization that comes out of understanding that “authentic” is, in a healthy, thriving culture, an ever-morphing concept—one that leaves room for personal interpretation. “The idea that there are no historically documented recipes for what we consider Roman cooking is proof that we can make our own choices in the kitchen,” Parla says. People may argue over whether spaghetti or rigatoni in your carbonara is “correct,” but in fact, there’s no right or wrong; Gill and Parla’s favorite recipe uses a highly unusual but foolproof technique for getting the eggs to coat the pasta rather than clump—and suggests saving some of the pork fat for making a Carbonara Sour, a cocktail they teased out of the barkeep at a Roman bar called Cocktail & Social. Is either dish less Roman for being a modern interpretation?

Well, consider this: Carbonara—that quintessentially Roman dish—has in fact been around for little more than 50 years. If you want something with a longer history, Parla says, it would be spaghetti alla gricia, one of the simplest recipes in Tasting Rome, an uncannily satisfying mix of rendered pork fat and cheese.

In her own private Rome, however — the one that consists of a busy working life in a bustling, ever-changing city—the dish that she whips up most often is cacio e pepe — pasta tossed with grated Pecorino Romano cheese. “It’s super-fast, primal and basic,” she says. “It’s basically mac and cheese.”

By Tara Q. Thomas in " Lunds & Byerlys Real Food", USA, Fall 2016, volume 12, n. 3, excerpts pp. 52-55. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.