Roman Holiday- Places to Eat in Rome
I have been in Rome for the past week and have been picking up a bunch of restaurant tips for people who might find themselves in the hungry in the "Eternal City". I have roamed (pun intended) around the main viales, narrow vias, and tiny vicolos day in and day out. Before coming I found a Gourmet Collector's Edition on Rome from 2003 and circled all of the places that I wanted to try. I also used a few of my family's trusted guidebooks, but those were not as descriptive or telling. Here are a few of my discoveries on where and how to eat in Rome. There will be more names and addresses to follow.
First, you must try all of the typical Roman pasta dishes. Cacio e Pepe is a simple dish of spaghetti with grated cacio, a local ewe's milk cheese, and black pepper. Amatriciana is a tomato-based pasta sauce with rendered guanciale (cured pork jowl). I have had spaghetti, penne, and rigatoni with this type of sauce and they are all great. Alla Gricia is also made with guanciale but with pecorino romano, and no tomatoes. And of course, carbonara. Carbonara is a heavier sauce of egg yolks and pancetta. It is hard to go wrong by eating one of those dishes, and they all usually come out to be about 8 or 9 euros.
For lunch I really would recommend sticking to panini and pizze if you are on a budget. Rome calls what we would think of to be focaccia "pizza bianca". You can find it "stuffed" with different ingredients and they make great sandwiches for no more than 3 euros. The best one I had was at the famous il Forno in Campo di Fiori. It was strozzaprieti cheese, walnuts, and arugula. Yum.
As for meat dishes, stick to simple things. Saltimbocca a la Romana, meat with sage and ham in a wine sauce is a sure bet. If you want to try some different traditional foods, head down to Testacchio, which lays to the south of the city on the Aventine hill. Besides visiting the Pyramid of Caius Calus and the tombs of Shelly and Keats in the Protestant cemetary, you should definitely make a stop at Checchino dal 1887 for Coda a la Vaccinara. It is an oxtail stew with tomatoes and spices and even some chocolate (apparently).
There is no need to eat dessert in a restaurant in Rome. We have been to many different places and the desserts are always average, yet they are almost always 9 euros (and very small). Instead, go to a gelateria and have an ice cream for about 4 euros. Our favorite of the week was Gelateria dei Gracchi located on the via Gracchi in Prati, a few blocks from the Vatican. It is a hidden parlor, more known to the locals than to tourists, and the flavors are phenomenal. The Ricotta and Pear, Chestnut and Rum, Persimmon, Apple and Cinnamon, Cream of Pinenut, and Date and Fig are ALL to die for.
Next time I will follow up with a short list of my favorite restaurants and shops to buy artisinal goods.
A dopo!
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
By Sophia Brittan
This is an objective account about the way people eat in the Aegean region of Turkey. The observations were made in the Summer and are specific to that season.
Turkey’s Aegean Coast stretches from just north of Izmir down to the Southwestern corner of the Western coastline. It is flanked by the Marmara region to the North, Mediterranean region to the Southeast, and the Anatolia region to the East. Layers upon layers of diverse populations have left their mark on the culture and traditions there, as Romans, Greeks, and Ottomans (to name a few) have all occupied the land over the past five centuries. The result is a very rich culinary tradition with a wide breadth of diverse recipes.
Due to its exceptional produce, the food of the Aegean coastal region is said to be the best of the country. The most notable ingredients are the tomatoes, olives, and olive oil, which are at the base of the diet. There are also many varieties of honey, fish, and nuts, as well as a myriad of fruits and vegetables. Driving around the coast one can see the groups of women working in the fields, for which they are not paid more than 10 Yeni Turkish Lira a day. Turkey is to Europe as California is to the United States; a land brimming with a wealth and diversity of fresh fruits and vegetables and oils that has enabled less agriculturally rich areas to enjoy its bounty.
A typical breakfast for people here is bread, a selection of a few goats and sheep’s milk cheeses, hard-boiled eggs, sliced tomatoes, cucumbers, olives, fruit preserves, and honey. The bread can either be a sliced sandwich bread, simit, or poca.
Simit is a round bread covered with sesame seeds with a hollow center. It is a staple at breakfast, but is also eaten at other times of the day as a snack. One can find men with their carts selling simit all over the towns and cities of Turkey. Simit goes very well with a soft spreadable cheese and Ayran, a popular salted yogurt drink.
Poca is a soft and moist bread, which is made with a good amount of butter and oil, and stuffed with a mixture of parsley and white cheese.
Beyaz peynir, or white cheese (often translated as feta), is always in the selection of cheeses present at breakfast, and can be accompanied by kashkaval, ezine, and Izmir tulum, as well as any other local cheese.
Sometimes there are other condiments at breakfast, including tahin (tahini), pekmez (a molasses-like syrup), and rose petal jam. In the summer, watermelon slices are also served.
As far as breakfast meat goes, sometimes people eat sucuk, a spicy sausage, with scrambled eggs. Another typical Turkish egg dish is menemen, in which many finely chopped tomatoes and vegetables are cooked down, and then beaten eggs are scrambled with them. The result is a tomato-dominated dish of scrambled eggs with a lot of vegetable juice running through.
Tea or coffee is drunken in the morning, but tea is the more popular breakfast beverage. Tea is grown in Turkey, and has a very important role in Turkish culture. They use a double-decker teapot to brew the tea, with one of the pots holding the concentrated steeped tea, and the second full of boiled water to dilute the former. It is sweetened with sugar, and never honey. Usually Nescafe is taken in the morning, not Turkish coffee, which is why it is not mentioned in this account.
Depending on the day or type of work one does, lunch can consist of anything from a salad to grilled meat or tost. A formal meal, for either lunch or dinner, consists of a variety of cold and hot appetizers, known as meze, followed by a meat or fish dish. Common cold mezes are artichoke hearts with peas and dill, grated carrots in yogurt, roasted eggplant puree, roasted eggplant with chopped tomato and peppers, purslane in yogurt with garlic, spicy pepper and tomato paste (aci ezme), and coban salatasi (Shepard’s salad). I was happy to find deniz fasulyasi, or sea beans/vegetables, which were salty and delicious. Hot appetizers include green beans cooked in olive oil with tomato, fried eggplant with yogurt, börek, fried calamari, and fried mussels. Börek is a common type of dish, but can take many different forms. It is made up of layered flaky pastry dough that is stuffed with a variety of different fillings, and is either baked or fried. For example, cigar böregi are filled with cheese, rolled up to look like a cigar, and then deep- fried. Other times rectangular layers of dough are filled with spinach and cheese and baked.
Mezes are followed by a main dish of either meat or fish. Köfte are grilled meatballs made of ground beef or lamb, or a combination of the two. Different spices and seasonings are added to the meat mixture to give the ground meat its characteristic flavor. Urfa köfte, for example, is made with ground red pepper and is spicy. Kebabs are skewered meats that are cooked on the grill. Köfte are often skewered and can also fall into this same category (i.e. köfte kebab). Cubed eggplant is often interspersed with lamb cubes on a kebab skewer for a delicious grilled combination. Fish depends upon the season, but sea bass, sea bream, shrimp, octopus, and anchovies are all quite common. Fish is simply grilled and served with lemon, olive oil, and herbs. There are rarely heavy sauces that go on top of the grilled meats and fish; the flavor is to come through with the freshness of the ingredients. Manti are little pasta dumplings filled with ground lamb and served in a yogurt sauce with spiced butter and are very popular. Quite often manti is served in restaurants that specialize in the dish.
Pides fall into their own category. They are easily described as being similar to pizza, but are quite different in shape and toppings. Pides are made with a very thin dough that is rolled out and then formed in an oblong shape with pointed tips and rolled up sides, similar to the bottom of a boat. Finely ground lamb with spices and herbs is one topping, and crumbled feta cheese with tomatoes and herbs is another one. Because they are very long, they are often served sliced into two or three pieces. Lahmacun should be mentioned here. It is made with finely rolled out circular dough that is topped with a thin layer of finely minced lamb, herbs, and spices. It is baked in an oven and then served with fresh parsley and lemon juice.
Dessert is an important aspect of Turkish cookery, and is far too wide of a topic to cover in this simple observation. The basic common desserts are baklava, mühallebi, and revani. Baklava is made of flaky pastry dough layered with syrup and ground nuts. Mühallebi is a sweet milk pudding made with rice flour that is either served in individual dishes or made large and turned out upside down to serve. Revani is a semolina cake soaked in lemon scented simple syrup. There are a myriad of sweets from the Aegean region, including a pudding that is made by boiling down chicken.
I hope this account was helpful, and we hope to continue with our What People Eat accounts as much as possible, so that we can objectively observe the habits of the people we meet.
Carciofi a la Giuda
Being in Rome has given me some new perspective on the food situation in the United States. They say that the Jewish food of Rome is the oldest and most authentic, because it has stretched back so many thousands of years. Carciofa a la Giuda (Jewish style Artichokes) is a must-eat dish in Rome and is served in almost every food establishment. What is interesting about Roman Jewish cuisine is that it was born in the Ghetto, and is some of the simplest Italian fare that there is.
Street food in the Ghetto was a necessity. Many people did not even have kitchens, and would have to buy their food from the streets. Most of the food was fried, and just seasoned with salt and lemon.
It almost makes perfect sense right now to see how being strapped to the bare necessities brings out what is really important for nutrition and what is really convenient for preparation, in order to produce a real traditional recipe. I would not go so far to say that the present-day situation in the United States could ever be compared to the misery of life in the Jewish ghetto, where people were only let out between from dawn to dusk, but there is something to be learned from the example.
Lately there has been so much hype in the US about the economic crisis. Newspapers and magazines want to publish stories on “how to eat on a budget”. It seems almost ludicrous to me to look at the way we sensationalize the situation, but never really get down to the bottom of it. Americans are so used to eating whatever they want whenever they want, that we do not come close to having an equivalent to Carciofi a la Giuda. “Experts” say eat locally and seasonally- well that seems obvious to me. We should have been doing that all along. Everywhere else in the world (before the influence of the SAD-Standard American Diet), people eat locally and seasonally because it is the only way to eat. There is nothing else available. Why should we pat ourselves on the back for that concept? It has to be more than that. We cannot try and “invent” a real traditional Fillinyourregionorcity dish; that is superficial and gross.
It will be interesting to see how we come out of this, what foods become important to us, and what we become famous for. If hamburgers and fries symbolize our domination of modern convenience, what will symbolize our economic collapse?
A Truffle Mishap
Boy, do I feel stupid. I guess my New York mentality got the best of me today. I wanted to eat at this restaurant in the Piazza Navona, because I read that they specialized in truffle ice cream. That was a bad literal translation that I should have been more aware of. Or maybe I was just in denial. Tartufo is a very common dessert in Italy. It is made of chocolate ice cream layered over a filling of either vanilla ice cream, real chocolate, or candied cherry to form a little rounded mound. The outside is covered in powdered chocolate. It is called “tartufo”, because it resembles truffles, those special delicacies found on logs. Even though I have eaten the dessert tartufo many times in my life, I trucked myself over to the piazza for what I thought would be truffle flavored ice cream. It’s the season, right? Boy did I feel dumb. The waiter proudly set in front of me their specialty of the house- tartufo. A little dome of dark chocolate ice cream with a candied cherry filling covered with roughly chopped chocolate. Ah yes, a 9 Euro treat not nearly resembling the truffle- flavored ice cream that I had hoped to find. I guess in Italy I should only look for truffles on pasta dishes, and not in my desserts.
COOKING SHOW
RECIPE
