Popes, Peasants, and Shepherds

The University of California Press recently republished Popes, Peasants, and Shepherds – Recipes and Lore from Rome and Lazio (2013) by the great Italian food historian Oretta Zanini De Vita and translated by Maureen B. Fant. This book, originally published in 1994 in both English and Italian by Alphabyte Books, explores the Eternal City and its region’s gastronomic history and character. Although not cookbooks, both the original and the reworked and expanded editions include traditional regional recipes—nearly 250 recipes in the latest version—that compliment the author’s research. Like Zanini De Vita’s Encyclopedia of Pasta (2009), Popes, Peasants, and Shepherds will sate both scholars and lay readers interested in the food of Rome.

In Popes, Peasants, and Shepherds, Zanini De Vita explores the social history and geography that define cucina romanesca. Chapters include: The Agrarian Landscape of the Campagna Romana; The Tiber and Fish in Popular Cooking; Water and Aqueducts; Mills on the Tiber: Bread and Pasta in Rome; The Jewish Kitchen of the Roman Ghetto; The Papal Table; Hollywood on the Tiber; and Coastal Lazio and the Sea. The original version of the work interspersed recipes throughout its chapters; the revised edition collects all of the recipes in the book’s second half. These recipes fall into six categories: Primi piatti (First Courses); Secondi piatti (Main Dishes); Verdure e legumi (Vegetables and Legumes); Sfizi (Savories); Condimenti (Sauces and Condiments); and Dolci (Sweets).

Regular readers of A Serious Bunburyist might expect me to dive right into Popes, Peasants, and Shepherds’ pasta offerings, but first permit me to briefly digress. One of the many pleasures of Popes, Peasants, and Shepherds is Fant’s introduction to the book’s recipes entitled Thoughts on the Interpretation of Italian Recipes. As someone new to translating, I found her two-page discourse useful and entertaining. Consider this excerpt:

The verbs of Italian recipes can be delightful—you accommodate the fish in a pan, you moisten or bathe with wine—but, after a flirtation with this colorful vocabulary, I reverted to the prosaic “put” and “add.” I felt enough was being left to the imagination without having to worry about making the fish comfortable.

So now on to the pasta. Zanini De Vita supplies 28 recipes. Although all are traditional, none of these recipes would feel terribly out of place on today’s modern table. That said, if you want to make Rigatoni con la “pajata” (Rigatoni with Veal Intestines) you might have some trouble finding pajata, the “Roman name for the first section of the intestine of the milk-fed calf, used with its chyme.” Instead, you might consider another straightforward and simple recipe. One of my favorites is Spaghetti al pomodoro con le alici (Spaghetti with Tomatoes and Anchovies). This recipe serves 4.

2 garlic cloves

¾-inch (2-cm) piece dried chile

4 tablespoons intensely fruity extra-virgin olive oil

4 salt-packed anchovies

9 ounces (250 g) canned tomatoes

14 ounces (400 g) spaghetti

Crush the garlic cloves and put them in a skillet with the chile and oil. Sauté over medium heat for a couple of minutes. Add the anchovies and cook until they are completely dissolved. Now add the tomatoes and cook the sauce over a lively flame for about 20 minutes, mashing the tomatoes with a folk as needed to break them up. Discard the garlic and chile.

Drop the spaghetti into about 4 quarts (4 liters) boiling salted water. When al dente, drain, transfer to a warmed serving bowl, and toss with the sauce. Serve immediately.

In addition to its recipes, Popes, Peasants, and Shepherds also contains an excellent Glossary of Terms and Ingredients. Its anchovy entry explains how to prepare the salt-packed version for cooking: “rinse off all the salt and divide the fish (which will be headless) into two fillets, discarding the skeleton.” No need to be afraid of salt-packed anchovies ever again.

Warm thanks to the University of California Press for continuing to present Oretta Zanini De Vita’s work to an appreciative English-speaking audience. Happily, the Press plans to follow up Popes, Peasants, and Shepherds with the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Italian Pasta Sauces. I can scarcely recall the last time I heard such exciting news!

Gramigna al Ragù di Salsiccia

My February 2013 post (here) covers making fresh gramigna in a torchio pasta press. Home kitchens, restaurants and cookbooks typically pair the sprout-like shaped gramigna with a sausage ragù. I listed a number of gramigna recipes from various sources including a recipe from Trattoria da Gianni a la Vécia Bulàgna in Bologna that Slow Food Editore published in its Italian-language cookbook entitled La Pasta [2010]. Of the sauces that I have tried with gramigna, this version remains one of my favorites. The simple ragù, although rich, tastes bright and not heavy. Here’s my translation of Gramigna al Ragù di Salsiccia from La Pasta.

Time to prepare and cook: 1¼ hours

Serves: 6

800 grams gramigna

600 grams pork sausage

1 small carrot

½ onion

½ celery rib

500 grams tomatoes, peeled

a glass of dry white wine

Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese

extra virgin olive oil

salt

Prepare a battuto with onion, celery and carrot and lightly brown in a frying pan with a little oil. In the meantime, skin the sausage, break it up in the pan, brown it for a few minutes over medium heat, mixing to combine the ingredients and pour in the wine.

Once the wine has evaporated, purée the tomatoes, pour them into the pan and simmer over low heat, covered, for one hour, checking that the sauce doesn’t get too dry and adding a little water, if necessary. Taste the sauce and season with salt.

Boil the gramigna in a large pot filled with salted water for 5 to 6 minutes, draining when al dente. Coat with the sauce and finish with a generous grating of Parmigiano-Reggiano.

Notes

As used in the above recipe, a battuto is a finely diced mixture of vegetables that, once cooked, become the flavor-base of countless Italian soups, stews and sauces. In her Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking [1992], the great Marcella Hazan writes: “At one time, the nearly invariable components of a battuto were lard, parsley, and onion, all chopped very fine.” Today, more often than not, a recipe calling for a battuto dispenses with the lard and cooks the chopped vegetables in olive oil or butter. Hazan continues: “When a battuto is sautéed in a pot or skillet until the onion becomes translucent and the garlic, if any, become colored a pale gold, it turns into a soffritto.”

When I make Gramigna al Ragù di Salsiccia, I cook the vegetables for about 10 to 15 minutes over medium-low heat. After creating the soffritto, I turn the heat up to medium to brown the crumbled sausage. I use a dry Orvieto, about 200 ml or so, to deglaze the pan.

Finally, the La Pasta recipe suggests cooking the gramigna for about 5 to 6 minutes. That time frame sounds a little too long to me. Taste the pasta as you go. I typically cook fresh gramigna for about 3 minutes after the pasta water has returned to a boil.

Gramigna

Gramigna, like toppe (here), traditionally contains a blend of durum-wheat flour, type 00 flour and eggs. In her Encyclopedia of Pasta [2009], Oretta Zanini De Vita writes that you find the fresh version of gramigna (“little weeds” in Italian) in Emilia-Romagna and in its neighboring regions of the Marche and Friuli-Venezia Giulia. Outside of Italy, the small, sprout-like shape rarely appears as fresh pasta. Even finding the dry, factory made version can prove difficult here in the states. Why seek it out? The shape has an affinity with its traditional sauce—a sausage ragù(here)—and makes a unique and deeply comforting dish. As Lynne Rossetto Kasper writes in The Splendid Table [1992], gramigna is “Emilian coming-home-to-mother food.” Who wouldn’t want to eat Bolognese comfort food?

Like many Italian pasta shapes, gramigna evolved over time. The earliest homemade version was shaped by rubbing a hard dough over a large-hole grater. Graters gave way to home pasta presses mounted on walls or tables. When extruded, the fresh homemade and dry factory versions look similar, but expect the homemade pasta to look less uniform.

Luckily, making fresh gramigna at home is remarkably easy with a torchio or other type of pasta extruder. The bronze die does all the tricky work of creating a thin, curvy tube. Emiliomiti (here) in San Francisco sells a number of gramigna dies; I use No. 138. The only real secret to making gramigna in a torchio—like most extruded shapes—lies with the dough: it must be dry or the gramigna will stick to each other when extruded and cut.

The following dough represents somewhat of a departure from other torchio dough recipes I have shared on this site. The ratio of flour to liquid for my gramigna dough is 2 to 1. This mixture starts out extremely dry and I only knead the dough for 20 seconds or so. The approach in a nutshell: mix the flour and eggs together and wrap the dough in plastic wrap to hydrate for approximately an hour. Here are the ingredients and a detailed description of the process that I use to make gramigna in a torchio.

150 grams Caputo tipo 00 flour

50 grams Giusto Extra Fancy durum flour

100 grams of a beaten egg mixture comprised of 1 medium egg and 2 medium egg yolks

1) Weigh out the flour and sift into a heavy mixing bowl.

2) Place a cup on a scale and tare the scale. Crack and add the whole egg and two egg yolks into the cup. If the eggs weigh less than 100 grams, add egg whites or water to reach a weight of 100 grams. Remove the cup from the scale and mix to blend the whole egg and egg yolks (and water, if using).

3) Make a well in the flour and add 100 grams of the egg mixture. Incorporate the mixture into the flour with the fork until a crumbly mixture forms. Clean the dough off your fork and add it to the bowl.

4) Holding the bowl with one hand, reach into the bowl with your other hand and continue to mix the dough by hand. The goal is to incorporate all of the flour in the bowl into a rough dough that holds together. (If this mixture remains too dry and will not come together, add a quick spritz or two of water from a spray bottle.)

5) Turn your dough onto a clean work surface. Knead the dough a couple of times and tightly wrap the dough in plastic wrap. Let the dough rest at room temperature for about 1 hour.

6) Attach your torchio to a work surface and insert your gramigna die. Unwrap the dough and lightly dust it with flour. Roll the dough into a thick cylinder and slide this into the torchio’s chamber. Insert the torchio’s piston into the machine’s chamber and turn the torchio’s handle until the pasta extrudes from the die. (Don’t be surprised by the amount of effort necessary to operate the press. The dough that travels through the bronze die is hard and dry.) Cut the gramigna into approximately 1½-inch long pieces and place on a baking tray covered with semolina flour. Continue turning and cutting until the dough runs out. You will have enough pasta to serve 4 as a starter or 2 to 3 as a main course.

To cook the pasta, bring a large pot of salted water to the boil. Add the fresh gramigna, stir the pasta and when the water returns to the boil, cook for approximately 3 minutes. Taste to determine if the pasta is ready. If so, drain and add the gramigna to your ready sauce, mix the two together and cook the pasta and sauce for a minute or two.

More often than not the sauce accompanying gramigna contains pork sausage. Kasper’s The Splendid Table contains a recipe for Gramigna alla Salsiccia e Vino (Gramigna with Wine-Braised Sausage). Giuliano Bugialli’s Bugialli on Pasta [1988] features a recipe for Gramigna al Sugo di Salsicce (Gramigna with Sausage-flavored Sauce). In The Geometry of Pasta [2010] Jacob Kenedy serves gramigna in a cabbage and sausage sauce made with milk and butter.  The Italian-language La Pasta [2010] from Slow Food Editore includes a recipe from Trattoria da Gianni a la Vécia Bulàgna in Bologna entitled Gramigna al Ragù di Salsiccia (here) that features—surprise—sausage. Vegetarians take heart: Zanini De Vita writes that during the summer the pasta may be cooked directly in a light (sausage-free) tomato sauce.