An Italian menu information with additional helpings of etymology.

First up is ‘a’ for abbacchio. Nowadays it means meat of a younger lamb, an Easter and Christmas favorite; much less appetisingly the phrase comes from the shepherd’s criminal – advert baculum – used to guide the creature to slaughter.

Baccalà (traceable to a Nordic phrase bakkeljauw / salted cod) is a standard aspect in Roman delicacies, typically mantecato / buttered. The cod delicacy, nonetheless, originates from Venice and past. Its story, mixing braveness with entrepreneurship, wouldn’t be misplaced in a Norse saga.

Within the winter of 1432 Venetian captain, Pietro Querini, was shipwrecked off the French coast, his lifeboat then drifting so far as Rost, an island off Norway. His Nordic rescuers hosted him for 3 months, time sufficient for Querini to watch a brand new means of curing fish.

Following his return to his Venice, he arrange an import enterprise of the identical product. In an age when meat was typically in brief provide, Querini’s fish turned a preferred substitute.

Served in paper cones, the fish, duly desalted and fried, is now a speciality of Rome’s Jewish Ghetto space. Relatively ungratefully to the fish, maybe from the convenience with which cod have been as soon as caught, “fare la figura di baccalà” connotes stupidity. Or typically thinness, as does its counterpart stoccafisso, additionally cod however dried on sticks fairly than salted. As within the outdated Dutch phrase stokvisch, referring to the racks upon which the fish have been laid out or the fishes’ ensuing stick-like hardness, the etymology having it each methods.

B can also be for bruschetta from the Romanesco adjective ‘brusco’, in normal Italian ‘abbrustolito’/ toasted. A type of bread, “as soon as for the poor, now a delicacy for probably the most subtle” to quote Giuliano Malizia’s Piccolo Dizionario Romanesco.

And so to pasta. Concerning each etymology and the way greatest to achieve the mandatory creaminess, some of the polemical of meals is the calorifically supercharged alla carbonara. The identify has been traced to Abruzzo woodsmen who would take with them into the hills a dish of pasta blended with eggs and cheese. The carbonara refers to charcoal, the top product of the woodsmen’s work. The mountain staple, some folks declare, solely reached Rome in 1944 when American troopers would add bacon to align it with their breakfast again dwelling.

A change in elements then, although the identify caught. Romans reappropriated the dish by substituting bacon/pancetta with the extra domestically genuine guanciale / smoked pig’s cheek, an ingredient most diners and cooks would agree makes all of the distinction. Sure, as utilized in pasta all’amatriciana, from Amatrice, a small city in Lazio’s north-east nook, whose pig-farms line the strategy roads.

Missing the wealthy tomato-based sauce of l’amatriciana, there’s a prototype in less complicated “white” model: spaghetti alla gricia – from, in a single entry, Grisciano, a tiny village close to Rieti. Others cite a similarly-named household of Swiss grocers. Regardless of. The dish, well-cooked, serves to minimise any lexical disputes.

The English-speaking world, to our loss, tends to make spaghetti and pasta synonymous. But Il Grande Dizionario Garzanti has a web page illustrating the totally different varieties distinguishable by size (pasta lunga or corta), thickness and above all form: butterflies/ farfalle, worms / vermicelli, snails / lumache; thimbles / ditali, pipes / pipe, tubes/ cannelloni; then helices / eliche, spirals / fusilli, stars / stellini (in a sky of soup); little ears / orecchiette.

All self-evident, in contrast to tonnarelli: Nothing to do with tuna however from tondo /spherical though the form is sq., if one get one’s abdomen spherical that. Then ravioli, etymologies referring to a Genovese prepare dinner of the identical identify, to rabiola, to our good outdated northern turnip or to groviglio / in fashionable Italian a tangle however in one other that means a kind of stuffing.

Equally elusive are strozzapreti / “priest-choker”. Dictionaries outline it as “pasta” or “a type of gnocchi” based on area: gnocchi close to Trento and in Alto Adige, the place it is usually often called strangolapreti, and pasta in central Italy and elsewhere.

Naples pins the time period, in its Neapolitan incarnation strangulaprievete, on a sure abbot, Galiani (1728-1787), who in his enthusiasm for the dish risked self-strangulation. On a equally anti-clerical be aware, the northern Emilia-Romagna area has a narrative that the identify displays a want, on the a part of impoverished parishioners, that voracious prelates would meet an identical destiny because the one in Naples.

A footnote factors out how the customized of church landlords was to partially settle their ground-rents within the type of meals; this “poor” dish was supplied as a very efficient means of doing it. A extra impartial etymology is the similarity of the pasta’s form to a cleric’s collar. Or perhaps the origin is phonetical: from Greek’s strongulos e preptos, that means round-shaped.

From pasta to pizza. Alberto Angelo in Gusti traces this quintessentially Italian delight to historic Egypt, at the least in its form and base. Then, etymologically, to Byzantine Greek: pitta, the bread these days spelt with a single t. Or to Longobard bizzo / a chunk. No matter, the primary recorded use of “pizza” was as early as 997 when the Bishop of Gaeta, north of Naples, stipulates that certainly one of his tenants ship him duodecim pizze /12 pizzas every Easter and Christmas. A pity the identical cleric was not round centuries later to preside over pizza’s marriage with the tomato. Or at the least its passata /paste/ id est handed by a sieve to take away seeds and pores and skin.

Tomatoes nonetheless complete on their plant have been initially prized for adornment fairly than for consuming. Add white mozzarella cheese and recent inexperienced basil and in Pizza Margherita you’re served up the colors of the Italian flag honouring the eponymous queen. Pizza Bismark, for its half, was named to rejoice the 1882 Italian-Austrian-German alliance.

Whether or not the fried egg within the center represents the Prussian emperor’s helmet is as much as the buyer. To not be outdone by Naples, pinsa and pinserie are Rome’s equivalents. Each, fittingly sufficient, from the Latin pinsere: to work dough into comparatively thick strips.

And so to porchetta. In England meat and the animal which it’s minimize typically have totally different names. The origin of this goes again to the Norman Conquest: Outdated English phrases for the cattle raised within the fields by the hapless Anglo-Saxon peasant, Norman French/Latinised equivalents for the meat as soon as it arrived on the (Norman) Lord of the Manor’s desk.

For instance, sheep-mutton, swine / pork, cow / beef, and so on. Right here, although, the animal arrives earlier than the diner each verbally and, aside from the absence of bones, bodily intact. Adjoining from Rome’s opera home is a restaurant just a little bigger than a cubbyhole. Three-wheelered in from the Colli Romani, the animal right here sports activities a pair of sun shades to draw clients. With a quarto of white wine, one can pattern slices of the identical spiced meat to order.

Elsewhere, in Rome’s Piazzale Prenestina, a kiosk sells at €3 every porchetta sandwiches, a super-snack to be consumed whereas ready for the bus? Again in Ariccia, its hometown, the animal/meat has its annual pageant, and likewise in Piglio close to Frosinone.

Equally-sounding scarpetta, as in “fare la scarpetta”, just isn’t a shoe, however bread formed into one to scoop up any left-overs out of your plate. “The final mouthful and probably the most beautiful,” enthuses Giuliano Malizia’s Piccolo Dizionario Romanesco.

Lastly dessert. From Treviso close to Venice comes tiramisù / choose me up. Fittingly for a dish from Casanova’s hometown, it was as soon as touted as an aphrodisiac. (cf. and extra respectably, the advert for espresso, a key ingredient, ‘Give your life just a little carry.’)

Otherwise you may strive a zabaione or zaglione, a type of custard / trifle with Marsala wine. The identify has been twinned with a mediaeval mercenary, Giovan Paolo Baglioni, or, extra peaceably, with Franciscan monk Pasquale Baylon, patron saint of pastry cooks. Different theories hyperlink it with the Illyrian phrase for barley beer or the Emilian one for meals (zibanda).

With so many etymologies, small surprise that within the broader sense the phrase connotes a random however completely happy combination. One other incarnation of the phrase, at the least based on some, is Zibaldone, as within the title of the notebooks by the famously sweet-toothed Leopardi, a form philosophical, literary and typically gastronomical ‘trifle’ the place, over a interval of 15 years, the poet jotted down his musings.

So, suggesting an agnostic’s “bread of heaven”, he writes on web page 4184, “Consuming, that the majority attention-grabbing of occupations, must be finished properly since on good digestion relies upon a person’s well-being, his good bodily state and thus his psychological and ethical well being as properly.”

By Martin Bennett

This text was printed within the June 2022 on-line version of Needed in Rome journal.