Roma: La Cucina Ebraica
by Joseph Harris
Rome is where tourism becomes history.
Every other city in this book gathers its own people around its own table. Bologna feeds the Bolognese. Orvieto eats cooked water on top of its rock because that is what Orvieto has always eaten. That is the pattern of Italy, twenty countries each convinced it has the best of everything, and this series has been cooking its way through it since March. Rome breaks the pattern. Rome did not gather its own people around its own table. Rome gathered every culture of the empire around the Roman table.
It was a metropolis before anyone had a word for one. Under Augustus a million people lived inside the walls, and they had come from everywhere the roads went: Greeks and Syrians, Gauls and Spaniards, Egyptians with their grain, Africans, Germans, Jews. The city fed them from three continents, wheat from Egypt, oil from Spain, fish sauce from Lusitania, wine from wherever the wine was good, and the Roman kitchen is what happens when all of that arrives at one table for five hundred years. Apicius, the only Roman cookbook that survives, is full of pine nuts, raisins, honey, vinegar, cumin, and pepper from India. Nothing in it is local. Rome was never local. It began by taking from Greece whatever it judged best, the gods, the philosophy, the cooks, and it never stopped taking.
The Romans have a reputation for eating their neighbors, and that is not what they did. Rome did not eat the Etruscans; it invited them to the table. Rome was an Etruscan town before it was anything else. Its last kings were Etruscan, and the drain that made the Forum possible, the temple on the Capitol, the toga, the fasces, the augurs, the alphabet itself all came down the road from Etruria. Rome fought them for two centuries, beat them, and then made them Romans. It gave them the vote, then gave it to all of Italy, then to every free man in the empire. It seated Gauls in the Senate. It put a Spaniard on the throne, then another, then an African, then a Syrian. That is not how an empire behaves. Rome was not so much an imperial empire as a global union, with itself at the head of the table and a chair for anyone who would sit down.
The exception was for those who declined. Carthage declined, and Cato ended every speech he gave, on any subject, with the same sentence, and in 146 BC Carthage was destroyed and the ground sown. The lesson was clear enough. You could keep your gods, your language, and your kitchen. You could not keep your own table. There was one table now, and it was Roman.
This is why Rome seems less particular than the other cities in this book, and why it was harder to write than any of them. The history of Bologna belongs to Bologna. The history of Rome is the history of us all, and it belongs to all of us. Its law is our law, its language is under our language, the columns on every courthouse in America are its columns. Rome is the foundation of the Western world, and foundations are hard to see. I said in an earlier chapter that I have never been there and that it seemed like too much. The trouble was not that Rome was too much. It was too familiar. It is the one Italian city that does not belong to Italy. Rome is where tourism becomes history.
At its core it is two cities. There is the capital, the Rome of the Forum and the Senate, of the republic and the empire and, since 1870, of the Italian state. And there is the Vatican, the Rome that put on different clothes when the empire fell and kept going, with its own walls and its own passport and its own head of state. They have shared the seven hills for seventeen centuries and have never been the same city. You cannot understand what happened to the Jews of Rome unless you keep them apart, because one of those cities built the walls and the other one tore them down.
The Roman kitchen ate every kitchen in the empire and made one kitchen out of them, which is why so little of it is Roman and nowhere else. Cacio e pepe is a shepherd’s dish; the shepherds are in Abruzzo too. Amatriciana is from Amatrice, which was in the Kingdom of Naples until 1927. The one particular Rome kept, the one kitchen that is Roman and only Roman, belongs to the one guest who came to the table and never sat all the way down. It is the kitchen of the Ghetto.
The Jews were in Rome before the Church was. There was a Jewish community on the Tiber when Judah Maccabee sent an embassy to the Senate in 161 BC; there was one when Cicero complained about the size of the Jewish crowd at a trial in 59 BC; there was one in Trastevere when Peter and Paul walked in. It is the oldest Jewish community in Europe and it has never left, not for a single year in twenty-two centuries. Pagan Rome had a hundred gods and did not much mind a hundred and one.
Then there is the arch. Walk up the Via Sacra from the Forum and you pass under the Arch of Titus, and carved on the inside of it, in the year 81, is the most famous relief in Rome: the soldiers of Titus carrying the spoils of the Temple in Jerusalem through the streets, the silver trumpets, the table of the showbread, and on their shoulders the seven-branched menorah. The year was 70. The captives were marched to Rome, and some of the people in the Ghetto today will tell you their families came in that procession. For nineteen hundred years the Jews of Rome walked around that arch rather than under it. In 1948, when the State of Israel was declared, the community walked through it together, in the opposite direction. Every visitor to Rome photographs the arch. It is the tourism. The kitchen four hundred yards away, on the other side of the Capitol, is the history.
The walls around that kitchen were not Rome’s walls. The empire never built a ghetto. The Church did. In July of 1555 Pope Paul IV, two months into his reign, issued a bull that began Cum nimis absurdum, since it is absurd, and gave the Jews of Rome a few acres of low ground the Tiber flooded every spring; walled it; locked the gates at night; put yellow hats on the men and yellow veils on the women; forbade them to own property or to practice any trade but rags and used clothes; and allowed them one synagogue. The Venetians had invented the word forty years earlier.
Rome did it more thoroughly. The gates stayed locked for three hundred and fifteen years. Then in September of 1870 the army of the Kingdom of Italy blew a hole in the wall at Porta Pia, took the city from the pope, and made it the capital, and one of the first things the capital did was open the gates of the Ghetto. The walls came down in 1888. The Vatican built the Ghetto; the capital tore it down. Two cities. The Jews of Rome built the great synagogue with the square aluminum dome on the ground where the rag market had been, and it is the one dome in Rome that is not the Church’s.
Three hundred years inside a few acres, with no land, no money, and no trade but rags, will produce one of two things: nothing, or a cuisine. It produced a cuisine, and it is the most Roman thing in Rome. Every dish of it is a solution to a problem the walls created. The Portico d’Ottavia, the ruin at the Ghetto’s edge, was the city’s fish market for centuries, and a marble slab set into it still lays down the rule: any fish longer than the stone owed its head to the city fathers. The big fish went up the hill. What came into the Ghetto was the small fish, and the bones, and the heads, and out of them the Ghetto made a fish broth to cook pasta and broccoli in, which is the first course on Tuesday night. The artichoke, the cheap vegetable of the Roman spring, was opened like a flower and fried twice in olive oil, oil and not lard because the pig was out of the question, and it was the Ghetto’s frying that taught the rest of Rome to fry: cod in batter, zucchini flowers stuffed with mozzarella and a piece of anchovy, sold from the windows of the Via del Portico d’Ottavia to this day. Anchovies baked with endive on the poorest Friday nights. Zucchini fried and put down overnight in vinegar and mint, concia, so it would keep without a fire on the Sabbath. The walls came down. The fried artichoke did not. The artichoke won.
The beef is the Sabbath. No fire may be lit from Friday sundown to Saturday sundown, so the Ghetto cook put a tough cut of beef into a pot on Friday afternoon with red wine and tomato and a few cloves and let it go, five hours, six, and the pot had to feed the family twice. So she took the sauce first and dressed the pasta with it, and served that as one course, and then sliced the meat and served it after, with what was left in the pot poured over. Stracotto, overcooked, the word means, and it is the most Roman of all the Sabbath dishes because it is exactly how the Romans have always eaten, the pasta and the meat as two courses out of one pan. There is no cheese on that pasta. The Ghetto kept the law, and the law does not put milk and meat in the same dish. We will put the Pecorino on the table, because this is Fort Bragg and you are not required to keep the law. But the plate comes out the way the Ghetto sent it.
When Spain expelled its Jews in 1492, and Sicily the next year, and Naples a generation later, many of them walked to Rome, because Rome was where the Jews had always been. They brought the Sephardic pantry with them: pine nuts, raisins, the sweet and sour of the Arab kitchen that had been Spain’s for seven hundred years. Apicius would have recognized every bit of it. It had been Roman once, gone out with the empire, and come home through Spain. The pine nuts and raisins on the concia on Tuesday night are the Sephardic signature, and they are also the last of Apicius, back on the table by the long way around.
So this is what we cook. A soup, because the soups in this series must be spectacular and the Ghetto’s is: broken spaghetti and broccoli in a broth made from the bones of the fish that came into Noyo Harbor this week, with garlic, tomato, white wine, and a salt-cured anchovy melted into the pot until you cannot find it and cannot do without it. Beside it, the concia, over arugula, with pine nuts and golden raisins and one marinated white anchovy laid across the top. The same fish, cured two ways, the salted one hidden in the soup and the vinegared one in plain sight on the salad, which is a pun the Ghetto would have understood. Then the Sabbath pot, served the Sabbath way: rigatoni with the braise’s sauce reduced until it clings, no cheese, the cheese on the table. Then the beef itself, sliced, with its unreduced pot liquid poured over, on a bed of chicory with artichoke hearts, garlic, and a spoon of bomba, the artichoke getting into the dinner the only way it can in September. And for the book, the tart from Boccione, the bakery with no sign on the Via del Portico d’Ottavia: ricotta and sour cherry under a lid of pastry baked until the top is nearly black, and next to it in the window the pizza ebraica, which is not a pizza at all but the Sephardic pantry pressed into a bar. Ask for both if you are ever there. I intend to.
The wine is not from Lazio, and that is on purpose. Rome drank the provinces’ wine; that was the whole point of having provinces. Tuscany was where Rome’s wine came from, and it is where we go: a Vermentino from the Etruscan coast with the fish broth, a Chianti Classico from Pasqua with the beef, and between them, with the rigatoni, our own Pinot Noir from the hill at Comptche, because Rome set a place for every province and on Tuesday night Fort Bragg is a province, and it has brought a bottle.
The roads were the invitation, built outward so the provinces could come in, and every dish on Tuesday’s table arrived on one: the anchovy, the raisin, the pine nut, the fried artichoke from Spain by way of the Sephardim. I will go to Rome in the spring, when the artichokes are right, and I will walk up the Via Sacra and look at the soldiers carrying the menorah, and then I will walk down the other side of the Capitol to the Ghetto and eat. That is the order. The arch first, because it is what Rome shows you. The kitchen after, because it is what Rome kept. All roads lead to Rome. One of them ends at the Ghetto. The roads still lead here, and for one Tuesday one of them leads to Laurel Street.
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124 East Laurel Street, Fort Bragg, California
