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Popes, Peasants, and Shepherds

Popes, Peasants, and Shepherds: Recipes and Lore from Rome and Lazio

Oretta Zanini De Vita
Translated by Maureen B. Fant
With a foreword by Ernesto Di Renzo
Series: California Studies in Food and Culture
Copyright Date: 2013
Edition: 1
Published by: University of California Press
Pages: 322
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/j.ctt7zw1dz
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  • Book Info
    Popes, Peasants, and Shepherds
    Book Description:

    The food of Rome and its region, Lazio, is redolent of herbs, olive oil, ricotta, lamb, and pork. It is the food of ordinary, frugal people, yet it is a very modern cuisine in that it gives pride of place to the essential flavors of its ingredients. In this only English-language book to encompass the entire region, the award-winning author ofEncyclopedia of Pasta, Oretta Zanini De Vita, offers a substantial and complex social history of Rome and Lazio through the story of its food. Including more than 250 authentic, easy-to-follow recipes, the author leads readers on an exhilarating journey from antiquity through the Middle Ages to the mid-twentieth century.

    eISBN: 978-0-520-95539-4
    Subjects: History

Table of Contents

  1. Front Matter
    (pp. i-vi)
  2. Table of Contents
    (pp. vii-viii)
  3. FOREWORD: LAZIO’S GASTRONOMIC ROOTS
    (pp. ix-xi)
    ERNESTO DI RENZO

    The region of Lazio is a mosaic invented on paper between 1860 and the 1930s. The morphology, climate, and landscape of its territory are heterogeneous. Mountains alternate with plains, hills with coastal areas, valleys with lakes. Calcareous soils alternate with volcanic, woods with marshes, and maritime climates with continental.

    The interaction of these varied features, together with demographic dynamics that have more than once remade the ethnic composition of the population, has been felt in the economic-productive sphere as well as the gastronomic, predisposing the guiding principles of development in a fragmentary and heterogeneous sense. With the exception of the...

  4. TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE
    (pp. xii-xiv)
    MAUREEN B. FANT
  5. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
    (pp. xv-xvi)
  6. Introduction
    (pp. 3-96)

    The food of Rome and its region, Lazio, is redolent of herbs, olive oil, ricotta, lamb, and pork. It gives pride of place to the genuine flavors of foods, making it a very “modern” cuisine. It is the food of ordinary, frugal people and had no role in the development of the kind of cooking that over time became elaborated and codified in the palaces of the nobility and later in the temples of haute cuisine. The introduction of products from the New World, such as the tomato, the potato, and corn (maize), did not transform the hearty popular cuisine;...

  7. Recipes

    • THOUGHTS ON THE INTERPRETATION OF ITALIAN RECIPES
      (pp. 97-99)
      M.B.F.

      In the individualistic and imaginative world of Italian cooking, the metric system always strikes me as discordant. It sounds so precise and scientific. Our antiquated American system of measurement, with its fractions and its dashes and pinches, seems better suited to the freewheeling Italian cook who measures by look and feel, experience and instinct. In most of the recipes in this book, I have rounded the English equivalent of the original metric measurement to something credible and manageable and have tried to render the metric equivalent equally friendly, without straying too far from what the author wrote. Both sets of...

    • PRIMI PIATTI • FIRST COURSES
      (pp. 99-149)
    • SECONDI PIATTI • MAIN DISHES
      (pp. 149-204)
    • VERDURE E LEGUMI • VEGETABLES AND LEGUMES
      (pp. 205-239)
    • SFIZI • SAVORIES
      (pp. 239-251)
    • CONDIMENTI • SAUCES AND CONDIMENTS
      (pp. 251-254)
    • DOLCI • SWEETS
      (pp. 254-272)
  8. GLOSSARY OF TERMS AND INGREDIENTS
    (pp. 273-276)
  9. NOTES
    (pp. 277-286)
  10. GENERAL INDEX
    (pp. 287-294)
  11. RECIPE INDEX
    (pp. 295-304)
  12. Back Matter
    (pp. 305-306)