Here at the eCool Compound, we love to eat! In fact, we’ve gone so far as to develop a theory about eating in Italy: we believe that Italians love their boot-shaped peninsula so much that they can think of no better homage than devoting serious time to eating it. For this reason, they developed a cuisine that tastes of the very places–the water, the earth, the air, and the sun–that bring Italy’s finest foods into being.
How did we come to this conclusion? We did so on the basis of the earthy dark greens that we love to saute in olive oil with a bit of garlic and pepperoncino, the still salty and just-out-of-the sea fish that are so full of flavor after a short sizzle on the grill, and the deep red wines that carry in them the tastes of the rich soil in which they began their lives.
Now that you know we spend a lot of time thinking about food, you’ll understand perfectly the excitement we felt when classicist, editor, translator, and food writer Maureen Fant (see photo above) agreed to answer some of our questions about eating and cooking Italy. Over her many years in Rome, Maureen has become a guru of Italian cuisine and she’s displayed her expertise by writing a number of books, such as Trattorias of Rome, Venice, and Florence (published by Harper Perennial) and Williams-Sonoma Roma: Authentic Recipes Celebrating the Foods of the World (published by Oxmoor House), as well as articles for such publications as The New York Times.
In addition to writing about food, Maureen spends lots of time thinking about the ancient world (that excites us too!) and teaches market and cooking courses. If you’re interested in learning about Roman food while visiting a fresh market with Maureen or you’d like to spend some time studying the Roman way of cooking, we suggest you contact Maureen through her website or by writing to info at maureenbfant.com.
In the meantime, enjoy the interview!
Tell us a bit about your background. How did you become interested in Rome and what brought you here initially?
I’m from New York, Manhattan, which I love with all my heart and never thought I would leave. But I spent a junior-year semester at the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies in Rome, and one thing led to another. I eventually married one of my classmates at the Centro, Clayton Fant, and we both followed one of our Centro professors, John D’Arms, to the University of Michigan’s graduate program in Classical Studies. Ten years later, Clayton took a job at St. Stephen’s School in Rome, and we moved here with the idea of staying a couple of years. That was in 1979 and I’m still here, but with a different husband, Franco.
If you began as a Classicist, how, then, did you make the move to food?
Many classicists, especially archaeologists, which is what I actually was (or at least training to be), travel around the Mediterranean on a tight budget, don’t do too many touristy things, stay for a while in one place (often Rome), and, especially on digs, eat local peasant food. You see local people doing local things and even talk to them. You can get very into authentic, traditional foods that way. Some of my early education in traditional Italian foodways took place in the summer of 1972 on a dig in darkest Lucania.
Back in Ann Arbor I practiced trying to reconstruct the foods I encountered on my travels. It was considered unseemly for graduate students in classics actually to have a life, but even our most terrifying professors conceded you had to eat and even enjoyed being invited to dinner once in a while. I read cookbooks and taught myself to cook. The D’Armses lent me a pasta machine, and I worked from the abridged English version of the Talismano cookbook. When Marcella Hazan’s first book came out, I really got going.
But there’s another connection. Both food and classical archaeology as disciplines make you study a whole civilization or society, all its aspects—both the written word and the material remains. My interest in the ancient world developed through my study of ancient inscriptions (my grand passion) to my work on the sources for women’s lives to a special interest in the ordinary people of ancient Rome. In the 1970s, that was a bit more cutting-edge than it sounds today. I mention it to show that even back then my interest was more in regular people’s lives than it great works of literature or important monuments.
Can you tell us about any interesting ways in which your two career tracks intersect? For example, are there fascinating inscriptions about Roman food? Or have you done any research on ancient Roman food markets and can you tell us how today’s open-air markets in Rome might compare to those of antiquity?
I’m flattered you think I’ve had even one career track, much less two. I’m still wondering what I’m going to do when I grow up, but I have had some very specific areas of interest, career-oriented or not. I regret that I took so long to look for the common ground—that is to get interested in ancient food. I do talk every year to the NYU food studies grad students about ancient food, but very briefly. I like to emphasize the evidence for ancient food habits, which is an angle that grew out of my work on Roman women—i.e., these are not mainstream topics; where are you going to go to find this stuff out about the distant past?
In any case, I have found some points of intersection between food and antiquity, though so far epigraphy has proved disappointing in this respect. The few food-related inscriptions I know about are not really about eating. There’s the tomb of the baker Eurysaces at Porta Maggiore, including the epitaph of his wife Atistia (“in this breadbasket”). There are inscriptions of legacies for food grants for children, always more for the boys than for the girls, or banquets for associations. There’s an epitaph of a girl who choked to death on a fishbone, which would have to be considered food related, and various minor epitaphs naming the deceased’s job, such as wine merchant or baker, but I haven’t actually found a huge number of these in comparison with other jobs. Nor have I found an inscription recording the best way to cook a mullet. For that sort of thing, we have to rely on the literary evidence (as far as I know).
Archaeology is about food is so many ways. Pottery is all about food and drink and cooking and dining. Archaeological museums are full of tableware and kitchen utensils. And today great care is taken to preserve seeds, pollens, animal bones, and any sort of organic material that can shed light on food habits. I teach traditional Roman cooking (not ancient) to foreign visitors. We always start in Testaccio, and I explain the thread that connects the import of foodstuffs from around the Mediterranean to the river port commemorated in Piazza dell’Emporio to the amphora disposal of Monte Testaccio to the wine vendors beneath it to the mattatoio.
As for markets, there are certainly similarities between ancient and modern food markets. The whole idea of a marketplace is ancient, and many of the piazzas around Italy where markets are held started as the forum of the Roman town. There are lot of ancient depictions of market life, such as the little reliefs from Ostia—the ones with women selling bread or chickens—that remind me of markets today, with the small stalls and meat and fish right out there, not disguised in neat packages. You know the monkeys in one of those reliefs? A woman is selling chicken and eggs, but there’s a pair of large monkeys sitting on the counter. Twice—once in Perugia, once at Testaccio—I’ve found market stalls with large stuffed monkeys. Mind you, I’m not sure there’s anything in it (though I’d love to know if anybody thinks there is), but it amuses me to think of generations unto centuries of market vendors with simian companions.
What must we know about Rome’s past and present in order to understand its cuisine? Or, put another way, what about Rome’s history and location have affected the traditional cuisine?
We can’t talk about a continuity from antiquity to the Roman trattoria, but there are similarities—sheep meat, fresh cheeses (sheep’s milk ricotta, say), wild greens, plenty of legumes, olives. When I think about food in antiquity, I think about those foods, plus spices, garum, and sweet-and-sour sauces, and all the rustic foods that are gourmet, or at least chichi, items today, like insalata di campo and zuppa di farro. Post-Columbian imports like potatoes and tomatoes are important foods, but they aren’t that important in the scheme of how, rather than what, people eat. Roman food today is in transition and I’m waiting to pass judgment, but the traditional food still served in hard-core trattorias is what’s left of a popular tradition that drew on wild plants and well-watered gardens inside and outside the walls, fish more from the Tiber than the sea, and sheep, not so different from what the ancients had. One could possibly talk about the triumph of the diet of the urban poor and the decline of the effete papal aristocracy, but I’m not going to start because I would probably get in over my head.
What’s the art of Roman cooking? Can you describe a few skills that one must develop in order to cook well in Rome?
You don’t need great dexterity in the kitchen. Even the traditional homemade pastas are pretty simple. There are two areas where you need some know-how, however—shopping and prepping the vegetables. Roman cooking begins at the market, where you choose your seasonal produce. By rights, you shouldn’t even hardly have a menu in mind till you get there. And as for the prepping, there are a few skills anyone serious about Roman cooking should learn. For now there are still people at the markets who do it right, but an increasing number who do it wrong, and I’m concerned that in a few years we’ll be on our own. I’m talking about trimming artichokes, puntarelle, and broccoletti. I also recommend learning to turn a frittata instead of using the broiler, for crying out loud, the way American cookbook writers would have you do it. But mostly it’s a matter of developing the right attitude. Buy decent ingredients—go to the markets, not the supermarkets—and respect them. Don’t try to think of what else you can add to a dish; think of how few ingredients you need. As far as technique is concerned, Roman cooking is very forgiving in general, except for a few things, such as spaghetti alla carbonara, which is intransigent. To make good carbonara, or cacio e pepe, however, you just need to practice a few times, preferably alone in your own kitchen in a very relaxed frame mind. You’ll get the hang of it.
As a cook and a food critic, you must spend lots of time in the markets of Rome. Surely one learns about more than food there. Can you give us an idea of what you’ve learned about Roman culture by means of its food markets?
I feel as though I spend half my life in the Testaccio market, and I love it. I’ve been going there since about 1981, when I rented a very unattractive apartment on the Piccolo Aventino. That was long before I met Franco, and long before Testaccio was on the foodie maps. No, it was before there were foodie maps. Real food lovers were well aware of it.
But when I first moved to Rome, I lived in a part of town still at the time populated by old Fascists evidently with money. You could see these old retired military men walking around the neighborhood with their ramrod-straight backs and supercilious looks. The shops and local market were pretty nasty too. I did think it might be just because I didn’t speak Italian very well, but when I moved briefly to Monteverde Vecchio, it was like breathing a different air. For example, I once asked a fascist market person if I could possibly have large mushrooms instead of small—they were all in the same bin at the same price—but she yelled at me. I thought of that incident just the other day when a roadside vendor north of Rome politely asked me if I preferred small, medium, or large potatoes. Then there was the lady in my early days at Testaccio who was the first vendor to seem to recognize me from week to week and who was actually nice to me. I figured she was charging me double because I was foreign and unable to follow her calculations (nor can I today, but at least I can speak Italian), but it was worth it to be treated like a regular, which, of course, is your goal. So anyway, one day I wanted spring onions, but they looked ratty and I found the courage to say so. “Oh, those aren’t for you,” she said, “these are for you,” and she uncovered a whole new case of beautiful fresh ones.
Important lesson about Roman retailers: they think if a customer didn’t come yesterday, he’s not going to come tomorrow; the only customers considered worth treating right are your regulars. I wish I could say the markets tell us that Roman shoppers are exigent defenders of tradition, and many are, but all those hothouse peppers and waxed oranges get sold to somebody.
What should one eat in Rome? Can you give our readers some advice about what to look for on the menu?
This is important. I’m trying to remember to keep up with this on my blog. I’m pretty good about reporting what’s fresh at the market, and my next goal is to write up what to order in each season. Please order prosciutto e melone in summer, carciofi and puntarelle in winter. My advice is to visit a market your first morning and see what’s around and what the local housewives are buying. Look for the same things on the menu. Another tip: if you see spaghetti Bolognese on the menu, go elsewhere. Don’t order complicated dishes in simple restaurants. Roman food is what it is. It contains three ingredients? You taste three ingredients. Don’t expect a lot of subtlety, but don’t underestimate its sophistication just because you can tell what’s in it.
Typical Roman pastas include what I call the Gang of Four—carbonara, matriciana, cacio e pepe, and gricia—and spaghetti alle vongole, which should be oily and garlicky, no tomato. Go to restaurants specializing in Roman Jewish food for fried fiori di zucca, zucchini blossoms, but skip them in the pizzeria, where they will almost certainly be frozen. Coda alla vaccinara, oxtail stewed in tomato sauce with a ton of celery, is a fabulous and traditional dish certainly worth a try in one of the few restaurants that still bother to prepare it.
What’s your favorite Roman food?
I love it all. I love the variety. But I actually think I can single out a favorite meat and veg dish that for me typify what I love about Roman food. The preparations are simple, the ingredients local, completely delicious and impossible to find very far from here. And yet “simple” is an unfair adjective. It’s eloquent.
The meat dish I’d choose is abbacchio scottadito, baby lamb chops grilled till they’re cooked through and all crunchy around the edges. They’re just one thing, lamb chops, but with different tastes and textures and no good if the meat wasn’t good to start with.
The other is the wild salad greens of the campagna romana, with all the hairy, spiky leaves and oniony-tasting roots. It has become very hard to find, and so for me represents everything I love about old-style Roman home cooking, and everything I will fight the future to defend.
