01-Peeling back the artichoke leaves symbolism and origin stories in Jewish-Roman Cuisine

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Peeling back the artichoke leaves: symbolism and

origin stories in Jewish-Roman Cuisine

Sean Wyer

To cite this article: Sean Wyer (2024) Peeling back the artichoke leaves: symbolism and

origin stories in Jewish-Roman Cuisine, Food, Culture & Society, 27:2, 537-554, DOI:

10.1080/15528014.2023.2297484

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/15528014.2023.2297484

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Peeling back the artichoke leaves: symbolism and origin

stories in Jewish-Roman Cuisine

Sean Wyer

Department of Italian Studies, University of California, Berkeley, USA

ABSTRACT

Jewish-Roman cuisine, the traditional food of one of Europe’s long-

est-standing Jewish communities, is among Italy’s most distinctive

hyper-local repertoires. Gastronomes increasingly acknowledge the

importance of Jewish foodways for Italian cuisine, but a few famous

“signature dishes” often dominate popular ideas of Jewish food in

Italy. In Rome, carciofi alla giudìa – deep-fried “Jewish-style” arti-

chokes – have long been used to symbolize the diverse and com-

plex Jewish-Roman tradition. Blending ethnographic methods with

discourse analysis, I ask how and why carciofi alla giudìa occupy this

role, and what this means for contemporary Jewish-Roman identity.

I then examine a selection of “origin stories” behind other dishes in

the Jewish-Roman tradition, arguing that going beyond the near-

ubiquitous artichoke can complicate and enrich our understanding

of Jewish-Roman history, culture, and identity. Rather than attempt-

ing to prove or disprove these stories, I analyze them as tools for

self-fashioning. I identify a variety of characteristics that these

narratives are used to communicate: including ancient roots; resi-

lience and resourcefulness; and an openness to new arrivals and

external influences. Finally, I interrogate the relationship between

the Jewish-Roman tradition and the city’s cuisine at large, arguing

that this too has important repercussions for Roman and Jewish-

Roman self-perception and identity.

ARTICLE HISTORY

Received 8 August 2023

Accepted 17 December 2023

KEYWORDS

Rome; Judaism; Italy; cuisine;

artichokes; identity;

tradition; stories; kosher;

urban

Introduction

The 1909 Baedeker guide to Central Italy and Rome lists a restaurant in Rome’s former Jewish

Ghetto alongside the following recommendation: “in April & May artichokes cooked in oil,

carciofi ‘alla giudìa’” (1909, 155). Artichokes cooked alla giudìa – “Jewish-style” – are deep-

fried twice: first at a lower temperature, to tenderize them, and secondly, after spreading out

their leaves, at a higher temperature. The resulting artichokes are golden, with their crunchy

leaves peeled open to resemble a flower. Carciofi alla giudìa are the emblematic dish of cucina

ebraico-romanesca, or Jewish-Roman cuisine: the traditional food of Rome’s Jewish commu-

nity. Although they are rightly famous, there is far more to Jewish-Roman cuisine than

carciofi alla giudìa. Jewish-Roman dishes, and the stories told about them, can teach us a great

CONTACT Sean Wyer wyer@berkeley.edu

FOOD, CULTURE & SOCIETY

2024, VOL. 27, NO. 2, 537–554

https://doi.org/10.1080/15528014.2023.2297484

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deal about the history and culture of a community, and a careful examination of Jewish-

Roman cuisine can also enhance our understanding of Rome itself.

In this article, I ask what kinds of stories Jewish-Roman dishes are used to tell,

investigating the complicated relationship between the capital’s food culture and its

Jewish culinary traditions. After providing some essential historical background, I then

critically examine the dominance of the artichoke: how are carciofi alla giudìa employed

to symbolize the Jewish-Roman tradition? Subsequently, I analyze the origin stories told

about some other dishes, asking what meanings they convey about Jewish-Roman

identity. Finally, I evaluate various ways of approaching the relationship between

Roman and Jewish-Roman cuisine. To what extent, if at all, can we draw a line between

these overlapping repertoires?

This article blends ethnographic methods – interviews and participant observation –

with discourse analysis. I undertook 15 weeks of fieldwork in Rome between 2022 and

2023. I interviewed owners of food businesses; chefs and waiters; and diners, both

Romans and visitors. My participant observation focused on dining establishments in

the former Ghetto, which for centuries was Rome’s sole Jewish quarter. In terms of

textual analysis, I examined guidebooks, recipe books, news media, and academic and

historic texts involving Jewish-Roman cuisine. My multimedia sources include oral

history projects and published recordings of cultural events. These were chosen to assess

how Jewish-Roman cuisine is perceived and represented by visitors, Romans, and

members of the Jewish-Roman community.

Background

In recent decades, there has been increased public interest in Italy’s Jewish food tradi-

tions. There is a growing number of Jewish recipe books in Italian (Klein 2018, 194),

including some new editions of twentieth-century collections (see e.g., De Benedetti

2013; Passigli 2005; Vitali-Norsa 2019). In 2022 alone, two Jewish-Italian cookbooks were

released in English (Guetta 2022; Nacamulli 2022), and well-researched cookbooks

increasingly acknowledge the importance of Jewish traditions to local and regional

repertoires in Italy (see e.g., Gill and Parla 2016; Roddy 2015).

The dishes recognized as Jewish vary significantly within Italy (Roden 1996). Jewish-

Roman cuisine is relatively well known in Italy, and a number of Italy’s “signature”

Jewish dishes are Roman. Rome has had a Jewish community since pre-Christian times,

and by one metric is home to around half of Italy’s Jewish population (Tas 2018). The

recent interest in Italy’s Jewish cuisines is evident in Rome: kosher and “Jewish-style”

restaurants in Rome’s former Ghetto, for example, have proliferated in the twenty-first

century (Wyer 2023), and the international cookbook market is beginning to show

a specific interest in Jewish-Roman food (see esp. Koenig 2023).

Between 1555 and 1870, Rome’s Jewish population was forced to live in one

enclosed neighborhood, which became known as the Ghetto. Jews were banned

from almost all trades (Di Nepi 2020, 160), and as we will see, papal laws

restricted their consumption of many ingredients. If Jewish-Roman cuisine before

the Ghetto was “rich and aristocratic,”1 today its best-known dishes use

a relatively small range of historically inexpensive ingredients. Many attribute

the distinctiveness of Jewish-Roman cuisine to the ingenuity of the Ghetto’s

538 S. WYER

residents, who developed nutritious, palatable dishes within narrow constraints.

The Ghetto was disestablished in 1870, but after a brief period of legal emancipa-

tion, Jews in Rome were subjected to the antisemitic discrimination of Italy’s

racial laws, introduced in 1938, and to mass deportation and murder during the

Shoah.2 Rome’s Jewish community today lives in a globalized world, and Jewish-

Roman foodways continue to develop in this context. Nonetheless, some “tradi-

tional” dishes – the focus of this article – remain closely associated with the term

“Jewish-Roman cuisine.”

Many Romans insist that their city’s most “authentic” dishes constitute cucina

povera (“poor cuisine”). By that logic, the traditional cuisine of Jewish Romans,

whose average living conditions were historically poor, becomes a veritable treasure

trove of authenticity. Combined with a drive, across Italy, to promote site-specific

culinary practices (see e.g., Grasseni 2017, 150f), this partly explains the recent

interest in Jewish-Roman cuisine. Nonetheless, this attention is also part of

a broader phenomenon: “the embrace of Jewish culture by mainstream society” in

much of Europe (Gruber 2002, 18). In other words, it is significant that this interest is

directed at Jewish-Roman cuisine. Focusing for now on the artichoke, this cuisine’s

most recognizable symbol, the following section asks how this interest manifests itself

in Rome.

“Life is too short to have the wrong Jewish style artichoke”

The first Touring Club Italiano (1931) invited Italians to become gastronomic tourists

within their own country, encouraging a sense of national culinary identity (Montanari

2006). Alongside a poem dedicated to carciofi alla giudìa, it noted that “carciofi alla

giudìa stand out [. . .] a dish of Israelitic [i.e., Jewish] origin, [they] are prepared to

perfection in no small number of Roman trattorie.”3 Their renown has been international

for some time, too. A 1941 U.S. guide to “rare old recipes” observed that “nowadays this

specialty is no longer limited to restaurants in [Rome’s] Jewish quarter, it can be found

everywhere; but to taste the artichokes at their best, one should patronize one of the

Jewish restaurants” (Taylor 1941).

As well as being quintessentially Jewish-Roman, carciofi alla giudìa are quintes-

sentially Roman per se. Their name marks them not only as Jewish, but as originating

in Rome: “giudio” is the Roman dialect term for the standard Italian “giudeo”

(archaic), or “ebreo.”4 The 1976 recipe book Roma in bocca explains that, in Rome,

“this way of cooking artichokes is the most well-known, and of course, the most

widespread.”5 The artichoke is so well-established as the representative vegetable of

Jewish-Roman cooking, that in some Roman cookbooks, carciofi alla giudìa are the

only dish directly attributed to the Jewish tradition (see e.g., De Agostini 1977;

Laurenti 1986, CE.DI.ST 2000).

Having a distinctive and well-regarded culinary tradition is a matter of pride for many

Jewish Romans. Rome’s Chief Rabbi, Riccardo Di Segni, cites food as an important

example of the community’s cultural heritage: “we are the people of the artichoke, not

just of the Shoah” (Gagliardi 2018).6 But how have carciofi alla giudìa come to stand

metonymically for Jewish-Roman cuisine? In the following subsection, I explore the

significant extent to which carciofi alla giudìa are used to symbolize the cuisine as

FOOD, CULTURE & SOCIETY 539

a whole. I then suggest some reasons for this association, before examining how, despite

being synonymous with Jewishness in Rome, the religious permissibility of carciofi alla

giudìa has nonetheless been questioned, albeit by authorities based outside the city.

“Why are they called alla giudìa?”

The gift shop of Rome’s Jewish Museum sells small glossy postcards depicting

a deep-fried artichoke, glistening in oil. A restaurant in the former Ghetto, which

prides itself on its fidelity to the Jewish-Roman tradition, uses an artichoke

emblem on its business cards, alongside the words “life is too short to have the

wrong Jewish style artichoke,”7 in Italian and English. This is repeated on the

menu, and on signs outside the restaurant. The implication is clear: we know

what brought you here, and are happy to oblige. Although the dish is particularly

sought-after in spring, it is common in restaurants, especially in and around the

former Ghetto, to “store them partially cooked in the freezer to serve when

artichokes are not in season, because that is what tourists invariably ask for”

(Roden 1996).

At neighborhood markets, it is common to see greengrocers trimming artichokes,

ready to be cooked in one of the styles to which Romans are accustomed. Artichokes in

Rome are also often cooked alla romana, “Roman-style,” stuffed with herbs and boiled

slowly in olive oil, water, and/or white wine. Both methods require a great deal of

preparation before cooking. The Italian verbs pulire (“to clean”) and capare (“to peel,”

in dialect) describe the act of trimming artichokes in this way. “Cleaning” artichokes is

not straightforward for the uninitiated; many prefer to leave it to the experts. It requires

precision: it can be time-consuming, not to mention dangerous. An expert works quickly

with a short, sharp paring knife, using the other hand to turn the artichoke, bringing the

uncut leaves to the blade.

Many Romans admire this craft when expertly carried out, and some described this

local savoir-faire to me with pride. It is sometimes suggested that if you want a really well-

prepared artichoke, you are safest in the hands of a Jewish chef who has been taught the

traditional method. In a 2011 recording for an oral history project, the Banca della

Memoria Ebraica (“Bank of Jewish Memory”), the Jewish-Roman cook and recipe writer

Donatella Limentani Pavoncello gave her rationale for the way the carciofi alla giudìa got

their name: “Why are they called alla giudìa? Because only the Jews knew – the Jewish

women, that is – knew how to clean them, capare, we say, in a certain way.”8 Some

Romans I spoke to suggested that this embodied knowledge was dwindling, with fewer

market vendors performing this service expertly. It is not uncommon in Rome to

encounter nostalgia for the food culture of past decades, and it is difficult to assess

objectively whether the practice is declining. Such anecdotal observations are nonetheless

interesting, because they show that this is perceived to be an endangered craft. Handling

artichokes is therefore seen as a Roman tradition that the Jewish community is specifi-

cally credited with maintaining.

In the former Ghetto, artichokes are sometimes prepared out in the street, in front of

a restaurant: not to be sold raw, but for use in that same restaurant. Some restaurants

display a bouquet of uncut artichokes, to emphasize their reliance on fresh produce.

Similarly, sending a chef outside to “clean” artichokes acts as a food theater amuse

540 S. WYER

bouche. It is intended to entice potential diners here, rather than to one of many nearby

competitors. The gesture suggests that this restaurant, perhaps unlike others, has staff

trained in this delicate and difficult craft. Diners are in safe, experienced hands: display

a mastery of the artichoke, and the rest will follow.

Why artichokes?

A number of factors reinforce the close association between Jewish-Roman food and

artichokes. Jewish-Roman food, and Roman cucina povera in general, historically relied

on non-written transmission, resulting in ambiguity about the origins of various dishes.

The carciofo alla giudìa does not suffer from this ambiguity: its very name marks it as

a Jewish preparation.

It is equally important, however, that carciofi alla giudìa at some point ceased to be

unique to Rome’s Jewish community. In the first half of the twentieth century, for

instance, Ada Boni included carciofi alla giudìa in her landmark collection of traditional

Roman recipes (1929). As Alberto Capatti and Massimo Montanari note:

The “local” product, if consumed only at a local level, is devoid of geographical identity,

since identity comes into play through a process of relocation, of “delocalization.”

Mortadella from Bologna is called “Bologna” only when it leaves the city where it is

produced. “Ascoli-style olives” (olive all’ascolana) assume this name when they travel

beyond the borders of Ascoli, even if they are promptly shipped back there, bearing this

name, in a kind of boomerang effect. (2003, xiv)

If carciofi alla giudìa had never been popularized outside the Jewish community, Jewish

Romans would likely refer to them as artichokes, or at most, fried artichokes: to call them

Jewish-style would have been unnecessary. In a 1982 collection of Jewish-Roman home

recipes, Donatella Limentani Pavoncello calls them “carciofi arrosti (alla giudìa).” This

implies that alla giudìa is a secondary name, and that, at least in the author’s lexicon,

carciofi arrosti are the dish’s primary name. Arrosti can mean “roasted,” but here it clearly

means “fried.” Pavoncello calls for one liter of oil, and gives a standard recipe for carciofi

alla giudìa. Even down to the “boomerang effect” described by Capatti and Montanari,

a near-identical movement has taken place for carciofi alla giudìa. Having been “deloca-

lized” – acquiring city-wide popularity, and with it the alla giudìa moniker – the dish has

now “boomeranged” back to Rome’s former Ghetto, whose restaurants attract customers

on the basis of their reputation for this prized dish.

Carciofi alla giudìa reinforce an association in Rome’s collective memory between

Jewish Romans and deep-frying. Homes in the Ghetto were cramped, with little room to

cook; fast-spreading indoor fires were a very real risk. A number of Romans suggested to

me that this led to the diffusion of friggitori – “friers” – in the streets of the Ghetto. The

association between “old Rome” and fried street food surfaces regularly in accounts of

historic Roman foodways. These vendors took cheap vegetables, including broccoli and

cardoons, and foods considered off-cuts or discards, like zucchine flowers, and dipped

them in batter. They then fried them, wrapped them in a cartoccio – a paper bag or cone –

and sold them at an affordable price.

Open-air frying was not restricted to the Ghetto, but vats of hot oil remain closely

associated with Jewish-Roman cooking (Manodori et al. 1995, 542). This association is

FOOD, CULTURE & SOCIETY 541

strengthened by the fact that observant Jews, unlike many other Romans, would never

cook in pork fat. As a result, a vegetable dish cooked with olive oil was liable to be

adopted by observant Jews, if it had not originated within the community in the first

place. In Rome’s former Ghetto, these dishes remain available for purchase, but primarily

as antipasti: ordered from a waiter, cooked in an indoor kitchen, and delivered to

a neatly-laid restaurant table. This context may differ from the casual “street food”

context of yore, but carciofi alla giudìa nonetheless recall this culinary heritage for

some diners.

A close geographical connection to Rome gives carciofi alla giudìa an aura of

exclusivity. The variety traditionally used, the romanesco artichoke (Santolini 1976),

holds a “Protected Geographical Indication” from the European Union, acknowl-

edging its specific link with the Lazio region, of which Rome is capital. The large,

round heads of these artichokes, also known as mammole or cimaroli, are especially

suited to cooking alla giudìa: without the inedible hairy “choke” found in most

varieties, they are ideal for frying whole. Although these artichokes can be frozen

or transported internationally, carciofi alla giudìa are nowhere near as common

outside the region. For a culinary tourist, little is more enticing than a food experi-

ence that cannot quite be replicated elsewhere. For a Roman restaurateur, and

especially for a Jewish-Roman restaurateur, it is a source of local pride to offer

these as a “destination” dish.

The relationship of carciofi alla giudìa to Rome’s former Ghetto is one of perceived

tipicità, or “typical-ness.” In light of common ideas about Jewish-Roman food – its

calorie-laden efficiency, its use of humble ingredients, and a widespread expectation

that it often involves frying in olive oil – carciofi alla giudìa fulfil certain expectations of

what Jewish-Roman food is or ought to be. Tipicità is valued by many diners in Italy, to

the extent that “it seems impossible in Italy to find foodstuffs that do not claim to be

‘typical’” (Grasseni 2017, 28). Not all vendors in Italy are equally adept at convincing the

crowded market of their product’s tipicità, but carciofi alla giudìa have succeeded.

An artichoke war?

“Jewish food” and “kosher food” are not always perfectly aligned (Toaff 2011, 10). In

2010, the spiritual leader of the Sephardic Jewish community in Israel9 declared that

Rome’s long-standing practice of preparing sweet ring-shaped biscuits, ciambellette, for

Passover, contravened kashrut. Cooks risked producing chametz – leavened food, for-

bidden during Passover – even if their flour claimed to be “kasher lePesach” (kosher for

Passover). The declaration caused a stir – “hands off our ciambellette” was graffitied in

the former Ghetto10 – but the Chief Rabbi of Rome, Riccardo Di Segni, accepted the

ruling. He reasoned that “Jewish Rome remained an exception, but it has to come to

terms with globalization. Rome is not an extraterrestrial island or a crazy splinter of the

Jewish world.”11 Accordingly, the only ciambellette now considered kosher for Passover

are those sold by kosher-certified establishments, or baked under religious supervision in

the communal kitchen of a community center (Somekh 2014).

Eight years later, in 2018, the Jewish-Roman dish par excellence came under similar

scrutiny. Rabbi Yitzhak Arazi, then head of imports at the chief rabbinate in Israel,

declared that carciofi alla giudìa could not be kosher. The rationale involves the Biblical

542 S. WYER

prohibition on consuming insects. Frying artichokes whole makes it impossible to ensure

that their tough, inflexible inner leaves are insect-free. Carciofi alla giudìa, according to

that reasoning, cannot therefore be kosher, since it is impossible to guarantee that any

individual artichoke cooked this way is free of forbidden insects. Until 2018, the dish did

not appear to have been seriously questioned from a religious perspective. A 2010 book of

Jewish-Roman recipes contained a thorough guide to dietary laws by the Chief Rabbi of

Rome. He saw fit to mention a number of controversial cases, covering insects thor-

oughly, but made no special mention of artichokes (Marino 2010).

For Romans who place an importance on keeping kosher, and who believe

kashrut to be a guiding principle of Jewish-Roman cuisine, the declaration came

as a shock. Newspaper coverage tended to treat this as an isolated “local curiosity”

(e.g., Horowitz 2018; Traverso 2018), but I would argue that it is important to

consider it in its international context. David Kraemer

has identified a series of

“bugs in the system” (2007, 147): new concerns about the kosher status of

previously uncontroversial preparations. Carciofi alla giudìa could now be

included alongside his examples, which include New York tap water, found to

contain microscopic zooplankton, and lettuce, which like the artichoke has small

“folds” in which tiny bugs could be hidden. Although partly informed by techno-

logical developments – the improved ability to check for small insects – Kraemer

argues that these cases also indicate an increased vigilance. Since the mid-1980s,

he notes that some began to eschew certain vegetables altogether, or to alter the

way they prepared them: dissecting them, agitating them in water, and/or exam-

ining them under a bright light.

Kraemer notes that:

The argument supporting these new stringencies – that is, that eating certain kinds of

vegetables inevitably involves transgression and must therefore be avoided – is problematic

not only because it ignores precedent, but also because it casts aspersions on the piety of the

ancestors. Is it possible that the pious and noble Jewish mothers and fathers of old, who

committed their lives to Torah and mitzvot, regularly transgressed the law in this way?

(2007, 155)

I would argue that it is partly for this reason, as well as because of the artichoke’s

close association with Jewish-Roman identity, that this intervention caused so much

controversy in Rome. The local consensus remains that carciofi alla giudìa are

kosher, following the usual precautions adopted in kosher kitchens. Shortly after

the declaration, the Chief Rabbi of Rome was filmed preparing an artichoke to be

fried. A number of my interviewees reasoned that romanesco artichokes, compared

to the kinds common in Israel, have much tighter leaves, so it would be impossible

for insects to hide between them.

As of spring 2023, all the kosher restaurants in the former Ghetto serving Roman

dishes continued to sell carciofi alla giudìa. If anything, the association between

Jewish-Roman culture and carciofi alla giudìa has been reasserted following the

intervention, with the former Ghetto starting an annual “festival of the romanesco

artichoke” in 2022. Nonetheless, this episode illustrates that the relationship between

kashrut and local Jewish culinary practices is complex and can be contested. This

FOOD, CULTURE & SOCIETY 543

may be especially true in a city like Rome, where the Jewish community has had

over two millennia to develop a unique set of food traditions.

The omnipresent carciofo alla giudìa only tells part of the story of food in

Jewish Rome. It is just one dish among many, which has come to stand for

a complex and varied cuisine. Accordingly, in the following section I shift my

focus onto other dishes from the Jewish-Roman tradition, asking how they too are

used to represent facets of Jewish-Roman history, culture, and identity.

On the origins of Jewish-Roman recipes

The image of Jewish-Roman cuisine as a perfectly-preserved culinary repertoire, insu-

lated from the visitors that have influenced the rest of the city’s food culture, is pervasive.

Jewish-Roman food is sometimes described as the most ancient of the city’s cuisines,

a repository of pre-modern and even classical Roman traditions. Michael Herzfeld

encapsulates such a view as follows:

Many Roman dishes also recall the cultural significance of the Jewish community, itself

a monument to past poverty and deprivation and today credited with having conserved

ancient recipes that would otherwise have been lost centuries ago. (2009, 13)

Jewish Roman culture, in this conception, is a living time capsule, preserved by

a community often “believed to be an unusually endogamous group” (Abu El-Haj

2012, 5). According to this “timeless” image of Jewish-Roman cuisine – of Jews as

the “preservers of the ancient traditions of the Roman table” (Herzfeld 2014, 37) –

the gated walls of the Ghetto sheltered Jewish Romans from external influences for

over three centuries. The claim to ancient roots is a source of pride for many cooks

raised in the Jewish-Roman culinary tradition.

Numerous dishes commonly acknowledged to be Jewish-Roman have multiple

potential backstories. It is not my intention to prove or disprove any competing

accounts, nor indeed to debunk them as mere “invented traditions” (cf. Hobsbawm

and Ranger 1983). To do so, I argue, would be to miss the point. I contend that it

does not particularly matter whether these “origin myths” (Montanari 2019) are true

in an historically verifiable sense.12 These stories, instead, are interesting as dis-

cursive phenomena, persisting despite, or perhaps because of, the impossibility of

proving or disproving them. It may precisely be the doubt surrounding their

veracity that keeps these stories at the forefront of local culinary discussions.

The stories we tell about food are not mere stories; no story ever is. In Massimo

Montanari’s words, the origin in an origin story can become a “beginning that

explains” (2019).13 It can even be used, in the hands of certain storytellers, to

account for a group’s supposed characteristics. In the subsections that follow,

I will therefore detail some popular origin stories that circulate about Jewish-

Roman recipes. I discuss only a fraction of the dishes thought to have Jewish-

Roman origins, recounting a selection of stories I repeatedly encountered in my

research. My aim in choosing this sample is to analyze the roles such stories play in

articulating ideas about Jewish-Roman identity.

544 S. WYER

Ancient roots

A recipe collection entitled “Apicius” is one of the most important sources we have on the

food of Ancient Rome (Groco*ck and Grainger, 2006). Donatella Limentani Pavoncello

notes apparent affinities between Jewish-Roman cuisine today, and some recipes docu-

mented in Apicius: “among those recipes, imagine, there’s the concia di zucchine.

[Apicius] even took recipes from the Jewish people who were in [Ancient] Rome. [. . .]

Apicius had copied recipes from the Jews of the time!”14 It is indeed remarkable to note

certain similarities between recipes separated by almost two millennia. Given the scarcity

of clear written records, however – there is no known collection of Jewish recipes from

Ancient Rome, for example – the “philology” is difficult to determine. A competing

origin story insists that the concia did not develop out of an Ancient Roman dish, but

instead came to the city via Sephardi refugees over a millennium later. Nonetheless,

origin stories that interpret Ancient Rome as the foundation of Jewish-Roman dishes tell

us something about how Jewish Romans see themselves, and about how they are

perceived by others. They corroborate a commonly-held idea that Rome’s Jewish com-

munity has a direct and uninterrupted link to the “last true Romans” (Herzfeld 2014, 38).

In the words of a recent book on religious pluralism in Rome: “they say if you are

looking for a real Roman in Rome, one who has been there for seven generations, perhaps

the best place to go looking is right in the current Jewish quarter, where the Ghetto used

to be.”15 Although Jews from across the world have made Rome their home, “tracing

back” to Jewish Rome’s ancient roots stresses the contemporary community’s romanità:

a strong sense of belonging to and in the city. At a festival of Jewish culture in Rome’s

former Ghetto, Giovanni Terracina, the co-owner of a kosher catering company, asserted

that “the Jews are ninetieth-generation Romans” (Terracina et al. 2020). Emphasizing the

potential commonalities between Ancient Roman cuisine and contemporary Jewish-

Roman cuisine is an affectively powerful way of insisting on this connection.

Overcoming adversity

Another Jewish-Roman dish with contested historical origins is aliciotti con l’indivia.

This pairs baby anchovies with endives, a bitter leaf vegetable, layered on top of one

another and baked. It is not

uncommon to encounter claims that this dish is ancient. The

menu of Nonna Betta, for instance, a restaurant in the former Ghetto, asserts that its two

main ingredients have been “together since [Ancient] Roman times.” Some of my

interviewees supported this thesis, pointing out that anchovies were an important

ingredient in Ancient Rome.

Nonetheless, another origin story has it that aliciotti con l’indivia were “invented”

much later, to circumvent discriminatory laws (Moyer-Nocchi and Rolandi 2019). The

1661 “sumptuary laws” (leggi suntiarie) forbade Jews from consuming “fish of any kind,

except for anchovies and [other] blue [fish].”16 According to Toaff, therefore: “the

pontiffs thereby forced the Jews of Rome to invent that splendid dish that is aliciotti

con l’indivia for themselves [. . .].”17 Toaff does note, however, that aliciotti con l’indivia

“may already have been rooted on the dining tables of the Jews of the Ghetto, and would

over time become a characteristic dish of Roman cuisine.”18

FOOD, CULTURE & SOCIETY 545

Origin stories emphasizing the poverty of the Ghetto, compounded by the antisemitic

legal restrictions placed on its inhabitants, convey different messages when compared to

stories celebrating Jewish Rome’s ancient pedigree. They stress the ingenuity of the

ancestors of today’s Jewish Romans, and their resilience in the face of discrimination

and adversity. We might compare such stories to many explanations behind Roman

cucina povera in general, which celebrates “l’arte di arrangiarsi,” or “the art of getting by.”

Traditional Roman cuisine makes do with cheap but nutritious ingredients, devising

ways to make unwanted discards or byproducts palatable. The main difference is that the

historic adversaries of Jewish-Roman cooks were twofold: both poverty and persecution.

As Pavoncello puts it:

Pope Alexander VII wanted to make the Jewish population closed up in the Ghetto die of

hunger, he wanted them to be malnourished [. . .] and so, what did these poor women do?

They tried to find [flavor] combinations, to see how best to prepare [the remaining

ingredients they were permitted to eat]. And so, from that period onwards, anchovies

were cooked in that way.19

This narrative characterizes Jewish-Roman women as steadfast and ingenious. It tells

a David and Goliath story: a story of resistance through cooking, or of survival against the

odds. With satisfaction, Pavoncello jumps nearly four centuries ahead to the happy

ending:

Then in 1995 the Ministry of Agriculture commissioned a study on fish. And it revealed that

pesce azzurro [“blue fish,” which includes anchovies] is the most nutritious fish. So [the

papacy] didn’t understand a thing, and we’re still here, flourishing!20

According to this narrative, Jewish Romans, whom the papacy intended to punish,

had inadvertently been constrained to develop as healthy a diet as one could possibly

follow. This is an origin story about persecution, then, but one in which the perse-

cuted prevail.

Resourcefulness and refuge

The crostata di ricotta e visciole is a sweet tart completely encased in pasta frolla,

shortcrust pastry, containing a layer of sour cherry and a layer of ricotta. The former

Ghetto’s bakery, Boccione, is the most famous “destination” for this Jewish-Roman dish,

though it is also sold elsewhere. For those familiar with Sicilian cuisine, it immediately

recalls a cassata al forno. Indeed, a predilection for ricotta-based desserts is widely

ascribed to the Sicilian Jews who migrated to Rome in the late fifteenth century.

The precise form of this dish also has an origin story rooted in adversity and

discrimination. The papacy was preoccupied with culinary “mixing,” concerned that

dining with Jews, or even buying their food, could lead Christians to convert. This was

particularly the case with foods associated with religious practices, such as pane azzimo

(or matza bread). As well as forbidding the sale of pane azzimo to Christians, a 1775 law

stated that:

Jews are forbidden from buying any more milk than they need, and from gifting, selling or

otherwise dispensing of it to Christians, even if it has been converted into cheese or other

sorts of dairy products, and finally, Christians are forbidden from receiving it.21

546 S. WYER

This threatened the bakeries of the Ghetto, whose ricotta-based desserts were also

popular among Christians. Today, most crostate in Italy have a “woven” top, allowing

prospective buyers a tantalizing glimpse of the sweet filling. With such a casing, the

authorities would have immediately spotted ricotta on sale. A common origin story of the

unusual present shape of the crostata di ricotta e visciole goes that, to circumnavigate this

prohibition, the bakers of the Ghetto decided to roll out the pastry topping of crostate

containing ricotta, disguising the prohibited ingredient (Giorgetti 2016). Another varia-

tion suggests that cherries were introduced specifically to “hide” the ricotta (Roma 2021).

The constant feature in both versions is the cunning ingenuity of the Jewish-Roman

cook, who uses quick-wittedness to outsmart a more powerful oppressor. Furbizia, or

cunning, is a praiseworthy characteristic in many folk tales (see e.g., Calvino 2014). The

hero overcomes adversity through a certain sneakiness, but not one that carries negative

connotations; quite the contrary. The origin stories behind recipes like the crostata di

ricotta e visciole should be thought of in such a light. Whether or not they are literally

true, they try to tell us something about Jewish-Roman resilience.

The origin story of the crostata di ricotta e visciole also communicates another

important facet of Jewish-Roman identity. By tracing the roots of a Jewish-Roman dish

to the arrival of Spanish and Sicilian Jews in Rome, it recognizes Rome as a node in an

international network of Jewish communities. It implies a Roman “tolerance,” before the

Ghetto period, in which the city was a safe haven for persecuted Jews from elsewhere. It

also implies a neighborly openness on the part of Rome’s italkim, or Italian-rite Jews, to

embracing elements of a “foreign” Jewish culture, including culinary practices. The

crostata di ricotta e visciole is not the only dish used to tell a similar story. As I have

already suggested, some credit the concia di zucchine not to the Jewish minority in

Ancient Rome, but to the arrival of Sephardi Jews after 1492 (see e.g., Roden 1996).

Some cite its similarity to the Spanish escabeche as evidence that the two may share

a common ancestor (Gill and Parla 2016).

On top of these pre-modern “refugee” origin stories, we might also add

a contemporary layer: the influence of the thousands of Libyan Jews who found refuge

in Rome in the 1960s.22 Jews with Libyan heritage run a number of Rome’s kosher food

businesses; the Jewish bookshop in the former Ghetto stocks numerous Libyan-Jewish

recipe books. A number of my interviewees cited more recent additions to Jewish-Roman

tables – from mafrum (potatoes stuffed with minced beef, in a tomato sauce) to chraime

(a spicy fish stew) – as evidence that this cuisine remained dynamic and open to new

influences. These “integration narratives” celebrate the generosity of Rome, and specifi-

cally its Jewish community, for welcoming coreligionists in their time of need.

Domesticity and discards

An interviewee who runs a restaurant in Rome’s former Ghetto explained to me that

“ricotta used to be the discard [scarto] when you made cheese. It was a byproduct,”

meaning it was more affordable for poor Jewish Romans. “Cassola in particular, which

probably arrived with the Sicilians [Sicilian Jews], has been a big part of Jewish-Roman

cuisine for a long time. It’s an easy recipe, a simple dish: just eggs, ricotta and sugar.”

Cassola is traditionally prepared for Shavuot (Guetta 2022, 260), at which it is customary

to consume dairy products, but it is not solely linked to that festival (Manodori

et al.

FOOD, CULTURE & SOCIETY 547

1995, 547–8). Its origin story relies on what we might now refer to as “zero-waste

cooking,” given that it was historically a way of using up a cheap discard, without calling

for many additional ingredients.

Ricotta is losing its association with cucina povera. “Now it’s become gourmet,” my

interviewee explained, “but that wasn’t always the case.” Certain dishes made with

ricotta, especially more elaborate ones, have indeed been elevated to gourmet status.

The aforementioned crostata di ricotta e visciole, for example, features on dessert menus

in Rome’s former Ghetto. Others, like cassola, have by and large remained domestic

preparations in Jewish-Roman households; cassola rarely makes it onto restaurant

menus, and my interviews indicated that was neither famous among tourists nor

especially sought after by diners. The fact that it has remained a domestic dish, while

other dishes using the same ingredient have been “gourmetized” (Hirsch 2011), is

revealing. It highlights that certain Jewish-Roman dishes are undergoing what some

Italian food scholars call tipicizzazione (“typicization”) – the “complex cultural negotia-

tions” through which a dish becomes regarded as “typical” of a place (Puca 2020, 146),

increasing its profile – while others have largely remained in the home.

As a local cuisine becomes better known among outsiders, a few of its dishes acquire

the role of representing or “typifying” that tradition: Jewish-Roman cuisine is not unique

in this regard. As I have already suggested, the carciofo alla giudìa may be the most

obvious symbol of Jewish-Roman cuisine, but it is not the only dish to acquire this status.

Meanwhile other dishes, like cassola, remain relatively unknown among outsiders,

despite their significance for many Jewish-Roman households.

Roman and Jewish-Roman cuisine: one and the same?

The relationship between Roman and Jewish-Roman cuisine is symbiotic: Rome’s

geography affects the cuisine of its Jewish community, and some Jewish-Roman

dishes are popular in the city as a whole. Occasionally, one encounters suggestions

that the two cuisines are so closely related as to be almost synonymous with one

another. This may be an exaggeration, as this section shows, but it nonetheless merits

exploration, because it shows how some Romans perceive their city. Roman and

Jewish-Roman cuisine are neither entirely separable nor one and the same, I argue,

meaning their connection must be more complicated and nuanced. On that basis,

this section concludes by examining how some Roman recipe collections present

Jewish-Roman dishes within the city’s cuisine.

In Chewing the Fat, a collection of oral food histories from women who experi-

enced Fascist rule in Italy (2015), Karima Moyer-Nocchi interviews Renata, a Roman

born in 1931. Renata says that:

[C]ucina romana, Roman cooking, is Jewish. [. . .] Everybody in the world knows about

pasta alla carbonara, in America and China and everywhere, and it comes from Italian-

Jewish cooking. Have you ever had pig’s liver alla romana? Pig’s liver is a dish that has been

passed down to us from the time of the Roman Empire! And it is Jewish. What about the

pajata? The intestines of lambs that have only ever had their mother’s milk? Jewish, all of it.

This takes the idea that Jewish-Roman cuisine is inseparable from Roman cuisine to

its extreme conclusion here, so that the two become indistinguishable. I occasionally

548 S. WYER

encountered less emphatic versions of this narrative in conversations, but none of my

interviewees implied that there was no difference whatsoever between the two

cuisines.

The intention behind overstating the nexus between Roman and Jewish-Roman

food is often well-meaning. Many of my Roman interviewees used the link to

express just how important Jewish heritage is to Rome’s sense of identity. It is

sometimes also used as an expression of interreligious solidarity, and even of shared

anti-authoritarian struggle: according to Herzfeld, “intermingling [between Roman

and Jewish-Roman cuisine] represents the habit of accommodation that Romans

stereotypically, and repeatedly, attribute to centuries of evading the cruelties of

papal power” (2009, 13). Demonstrations that Romans have willingly adopted

Jewish culinary traditions are often employed as signs of tolerance, and of the

city’s welcoming nature.

To entirely equate Jewish-Roman cuisine with Roman cuisine, however, and to

elide the differences between them, is false. As Moyer-Nocchi points out, with the

exception of pajata,23 the dishes mentioned by Renata involve pork, which is

prohibited under kashrut. Arguing that these two different but interlinked cuisines

are literally the same overlooks the fact that, whatever else impacts Jewish-Roman

cuisine, it also arises from a set of religious dietary rules that differ from those of

Rome’s Catholic majority. Minimizing this distinction means ignoring important

factors that make Jewish-Roman cuisine Jewish.

It is accurate, as a Roman chef put it to me, to say that there is an “embrace”

between Roman cuisine and Jewish-Roman cuisine. It is worthy of note that Jewish-

Roman cuisine is an important component of the city’s cucina povera tradition.

Given the scarcity of written historical records, and the primarily oral transmission

of both cuisines, it is “impossible to disconnect [slegare] one from the other,” as

another chef I spoke to put it. Some Roman dishes are universally acknowledged to

be Jewish. For others, it may be impossible to establish their origins definitively.

These blurred boundaries make false equivalencies a tempting and neat solution,

albeit an inaccurate one.

As I have already mentioned, some Roman cookbooks make scant mention of the

Jewish-Roman tradition. Others, in contrast, dedicate an entire sub-section to

Jewish-Roman food. Indeed, Giuliano Malizia’s book, La cucina romanesca

e ebraico-romanesca (Malizia 2021), combines two originally separate books: one

on Roman cuisine, and one on Jewish-Roman cuisine. Malizia makes his position-

ality clear: Roman cuisine is “ours” (“la nostra”), and Jewish-Roman is “theirs” (“la

loro”) (2021, 104). His main sources for the Jewish-Roman tradition are two books

by Jewish-Italian authors, Mira Sacerdoti (1994) and Giuliana Ascoli Vitali-Norsa

(1970). In spite of his attempt to divide the two cuisines, however, Malizia is

conscious that some recipes straddle the two traditions. Stuffed zucchine, for exam-

ple, though they appear in his section on Jewish-Roman cooking, are “easy to find

on Roman tables, without religious distinction.”24

In another essential reference work, Livio Jannattoni (2003) takes an alternative

approach,25 organizing his cookbook by type of food – meats, fish, etc. – rather than

by assumed community of origin. This allows him to convey uncertainty about the

provenance of dishes sometimes attributed to Jewish-Roman cuisine, and sometimes

FOOD, CULTURE & SOCIETY 549

to the city at large. His schema does not force him to allocate a dish to one tradition

at the expense of another. Thus baccalà in agrodolce, for example – bitter-sweet salt

cod – is “a Roman dish, in that it is always said to be so, even if it might well also

recall a certain local Jewish tradition.”26 Filetti di baccalà, too – deep-fried cod fillets

in batter – suffer a similar problem of origins: “it’s from the Jewish side, strangely

enough, that we are unable to reach consensus or confirmation” as to whether this

recipe is of Jewish-Roman provenance.27 Jannattoni’s schema does a better job,

I argue, of representing the blurred but nonetheless distinct relationship between

Roman and Jewish-Roman cuisine.

Although it also has limitations – Jannattoni’s major source is Vitali-Norsa’s book on

Jewish-Italian cuisine as a whole (1970), of which the Roman tradition forms only

a part – a more nuanced picture of this complex relationship emerges from

Jannattoni’s

approach. We can begin to imagine Roman cuisine as a “circle” on a Venn

diagram, overlapping considerably but not entirely with another circle, representing

Jewish-Roman cuisine. The lines on the Venn diagram are faint, and in parts they are

shaky. A number of recipes straddle their borders. Some are accompanied by arrows or

question-marks, attesting to the mutual but sometimes impossible-to-ascertain influ-

ences these two cuisines continue to exert upon one another.

Conclusion

As I argued at the beginning of this article, the near-ubiquitous carciofi alla giudìa are an

obvious starting point, but they only tell part of Jewish-Roman cuisine’s diverse and

complex story. That said, their dominance in contemporary understandings of Jewish-

Roman cuisine is itself revealing. By carefully peeling back the leaves of this symbolic

artichoke, we uncover important things about tourism, heritage, and the restaurant

industry; about how an individual dish can come to “typify” an entire cuisine; and

even about the complicated relationship between a hyper-local cuisine heavily influenced

by religious dietary rules, and arbiters of those rules themselves.

If artichokes can tell a number of stories about Jewish-Roman cuisine, then the stories

behind other dishes – some humble and largely domestic, and some prized by connois-

seurs – add further layers to our understanding of this repertoire, and what it means for

Roman and Jewish-Roman identity. By analyzing commonly-told origin stories behind

just a small sample of Jewish-Roman dishes, we can observe local pride in Ancient

Roman roots; narratives of resilience in the face of oppression; celebrations of the diverse

Jewish communities that have made Rome their home; and ingenious uses for leftovers,

of which some (but by no means all) have been “gourmetized.”

Educated guesswork is often involved in “tracing back” dishes. This does not make the

study of origin stories any less worthwhile, however. On the contrary, I argue that the

multiplicity of origin stories in circulation are powerful tools for crafting narratives about

local and religious identities. Is the dish in front of us Roman or Jewish-Roman, or

perhaps both, or neither? How so, since when, and what does it matter? Asking these

apparently simple questions at a Roman table can result in discussions, and sometimes

disagreements, which are as much about identity and self-perception as they are about

recipes themselves.

550 S. WYER

Notes

1. “[R]icca e aristocratica” (Toaff 2011, 35).

2. On just one day, 16 October 1943, at least 1,023 of Rome’s Jews were deported to Auschwitz

(Picciotto 2002).

3. “[E]ccellono i celeberrimi carciofi alla giudia; [. . .] piatto di origine israelita, [. . .]

sono preparati alla perfezione in non poche trattorie romane” (Touring Club Italiano

1931).

4. D’Achille and Andrea (2007). Some outside Rome use the archaic standard Italian, “alla

giudea,” but this is uncommon in Rome.

5. “‘[S]ta magnera de côce li carciofoli è la più conosciuta e, naturalmente, la più diffusa”

(Santolini 1976).

6. “Siamo il popolo dei carciofi non solo della Shoah”.

7. “La vita è troppo breve per sbagliare carciofo alla giudia.”

8. “[I] carciofi alla giudia perché si chiamano alla giudia? Perché solo gli ebrei li sapevano – le

donne ebree – li sapevano pulire, capare si dice, in un certo modo” (Pavoncello 2011a).

9. Rabbi Shlomo Moshe Amar, then the Rishon LeZion (and now the Sephardic Chief Rabbi).

10. “Giù le mani dalle ciambellette” (Brogi 2013).

11. “Roma ebraica è rimasta un’eccezione ma deve fare i conti con la globalizzazione. Roma non

è un’isola extraterritoriale o una scheggia impazzita del mondo ebraico” (Di Segni 2010).

12. To avoid the connotations that “myth” sometimes carries in English – an untruth, or

a misconception in need of debunking – I have chosen the more neutral “origin stories”

over Montanari’s “origin myths.”

13. “[U]n ‘inizio che spiega’” (Montanari 2019), citing the historian Marc Bloch.

14. “[U]n certo Caelio Apicio [. . .] aveva raccolto delle ricette. E nelle ricette, pensa, ci

sta la concia di zucchine. Le ricette, lui le ha prese anche del popolo ebraico che c’è

stato a Roma. La concia [. . .] Apicio aveva copiato le ricette dagli ebrei dell’epoca

(Pavoncello 2011b).

15. “Si dice anzi che se a Roma si è alla ricerca di un romano verace, uno ‘di sette generazioni,’

forse il posto migliore dove andare a cercare è proprio l’attuale quartiere ebraico, lì dove

c’era il ghetto” (Russo and Saggioro 2018, 131).

16. “[S]e prohibiscano [. . .] il pesce de qualunque sorte, eccettuato ch’alici et azzurro” (Toaff

2011, 82, citing Milano 1932).

17. “Era così che i pontefici costringevano gli ebrei di Roma ad inventarsi quel piatto splendido

che sono gli aliciotti con l’indivia [. . .]” (Toaff 2011, 83).

18. “Una ricetta [. . .] che forse era già radicata nella mensa degli ebrei del ghetto e sarebbe

diventata col tempo un piatto tipico della cucina romana” (Toaff 2011, 83.).

19. “Il Papa Alessandro VII voleva far morire di fame, non nutrire il popolo ebraico che era

chiuso nel ghetto. E allora aveva stabilito che si potessero solamente mangiare pesce azzurro,

accompagnato con verdure, non sontuose [. . .]. E allora queste povere donne che hanno

fatto? Hanno cercato di fare degli abbinamenti, di vedere com’era meglio preparare. Perciò

dall’epoca le alici sono state cucinate in quel modo” (Pavoncello 2011a).

20. “Poi nel 1995 il ministero dell’agricoltura e delle foreste ha fatto fare uno studio sul pesce.

E allora si è saputo che il pesce azzurro è il pesce più nutriente. Perciò non hanno capito

niente, e siamo ancora cosi! Floridi!” (Pavoncello 2011a).

21. “[S]i proibisce agli Ebrei di comprare latte più di quello che comporti il loro bisogno, e di

donarlo, venderlo o alienarlo in qualsiasi modo ai Cristiani, benché fosse convertito in cacio,

o in altra sorte di latticini, e finalmente a’ Cristiani di riceverlo” (cited in Toaff 2011, 142).

22. 2009 statistics counted 13,701 residents in Rome with at least one family member born in

Libya (Archivio Anagrafico 2009, cited in Casacchia and Natale 2012).

23. Pajata, a traditional Roman dish, refers to the intestines of an unweaned animal, tradition-

ally a calf, which still contain its mother’s curdled milk. Although it may appear to contra-

vene the prohibition against eating meat with milk, in some cases this does not apply to milk

found curdled in the stomach of a baby animal (see Shulchan Arukh YD 87:9). Indeed, it is

FOOD, CULTURE & SOCIETY 551

not uncommon to find pajata referred to in association with Jewish-Roman food (see e.g.,

Freda 1975, 188).

24. “[F]acilmente reperibile sulle tavole romane, senza distinzione religiosa” (Malizia 2021,

165).

25. Jannattoni died before he could complete this title, which was then finished by Malizia.

26. “Un piatto romano, a quanto si è sempre detto, anche se potrebbe risentire anch’esso di certa

tradizione ebraica locale” (Jannattoni 2003, 425).

27. “È proprio da parte ebraica, stranamente, che non ci arrivano, invece, consensi e conferme

in questo senso” (Jannattoni 2003, 429).

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank my interlocutors in Rome, who made this research possible, and the British

School at Rome for its support. Rachel Roddy kindly let me borrow from her extensive library of

Roman recipe books, and our conversations taught me a great deal about Rome and its food. Diya

Mukherjee and Mia Fuller generously read and commented on earlier drafts of this article. I am

grateful to the journal editors and two anonymous peer-reviewers for their helpful suggestions. All

remaining errors are my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Funding

This work was supported by a Ralegh Radford Rome Award from the British School at Rome.

ORCID

Sean Wyer http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5246-6684

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Abstract

Introduction

Background

“Life is too short to have the wrong Jewish style artichoke”

“Why are they called alla giudìa?”

Why artichokes?

An artichoke war?

On the origins of Jewish-Roman recipes

Ancient roots

Overcoming adversity

Resourcefulness and refuge

Domesticity and discards

Roman and Jewish-Roman cuisine: one and the same?

Conclusion

Notes

Acknowledgement

Disclosure statement

Funding

ORCID

References

01-Peeling back the artichoke leaves symbolism and origin stories in Jewish-Roman Cuisine - Artes (2024)

References