5 INTO 4 WILL GO
“No guts no glory”? It’s never truer than in Rome, Italy’s capital of offal, writes JOHN IRVING.
“No guts no glory”? Never more than in Rome, Italy’s offal capital.
Italian 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.
It 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,
the people who had the job of skinning animals (the hides went to riverside tanneries) and splitting carcasses into sides. They either took the stuff home to their wives or to neighbourhood eateries, where the cooks were expected to turn it into something tasty. And this they did with remarkable inventiveness.
From her stall at the slaughterhouse gates, a certain Oberdana, nicknamed the Queen of the Fifth Quarter and now part of Testaccio folklore, cooked and sold padellotto, mixed calf’s offal – heart, liver, sweetbreads, spleen, kidneys, intestines – chopped and sautéed in white wine. Just a minute’s walk away, an osteria served all sorts of variations on the offal theme – and still does. The place is now a restaurant,
Checchino dal 1887, established in that year by Lorenzo and Clorinda Mariani, the great-great-grandparents of the present owners. It started life as a simple wine shop – its cellars are hewn out of the rock beneath Monte Testaccio itself – but a kitchen was added in 1887 to cater for the new trade from the men building the slaughterhouse, and, three years later, from the workers bringing their offal. It was here that many of the definitive dishes of quinto quarto cooking were elaborated upon, maybe even invented.
The upshot is that offal is a key ingredient of Roman cooking today. Arguably the most popular dish of all is coda alla vaccinara, oxtail butcher’s style, in which jointed oxtail is braised in white wine and tomatoes for hours until the meat falls away from the bone and the sauce is deliciously unctuous. A fundamental ingredient is celery of the campagna romana, the fertile Roman countryside, added in the final stages of cooking to take the edge off the richness. To give the dish extra lusciousness and colour, in some venues – like Agustarello, a Testaccio trattoria not far from the Tiber – they enhance it with pine nuts, raisins and grated chocolate, though such ingredients would have been well beyond the reach of locals in the old days.
The sauce is often served separately with pasta, and the Osteria del Velodromo Vecchio, in the north-east Tuscolano quarter, does a brilliant version with gnocchi. Other kitchens have created new twists on the original recipe, hence dishes such as ravioli stuffed with coda, terrine of coda and lasagne with coda meatballs.
If coda alla vaccinara is approachable for any palate, pajata is not for the squeamish, and requires some anatomical explanation. The word is the Roman dialect name for the abomasum, the fourth compartment of the stomach of a calf, lamb or kid. Cut into strips and tied at the ends to retain the chyme, the partly digested milk, it can be simply grilled – but it’s more commonly stewed with tomato, chilli and white wine to make a creamy ragù, usually served with rigatoni.
Other quinto quarto favourites include trippa alla Romana, tripe cooked with tomato, pecorino and mentuccia, or pennyroyal (a sort of wild mint); cotiche con i fagioli, a soup of pork rind and beans; and coratella con i carciofi, finely chopped lamb’s heart, lungs and liver stewed in wine and served with globe artichokes. Fried slices of bull’s testicles, sweetbreads, again with artichokes, and grilled or fried spleen, are also great delicacies.
These may be dishes born of necessity, but thanks to the ingeniousness of the intrepid cooks and housewives of 19th-century Testaccio, they exude flavours that verge on the luxurious. They obviously won’t chime with those who share the contemporary revulsion towards offal, but they do have a tale to tell and, self-confident and unsentimental as they are, capture the Roman character to perfection.
For the record, the old slaughterhouse was closed in 1975 after almost a century of sterling service, and its splendidly refurbished structure now houses a branch of MACRO, the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Roma. Another reason to leave the well-beaten tourist track and pay a visit to Testaccio.