Melanzane di Roma

During a recent trip to Europe I stopped in Rome for a weekend to eat eggplants  visit a friend. Shout out to one Jess Peritz for the delectable food tour, and all the various restaurant tips that follow.

Italy is still untapped eggplant territory for me. Three years ago I spent a few days wandering around Florence and Venice with my mother, and naturally we were stunned by the architecture—especially Venice, which feels like the CGI set of a high-budget fantasy film. But alas, we were both disappointed with the food. I recall her saying at the time, "my wish in Italy is to try the most delicious marinara I've ever tasted." What a reasonable request! As usual in touristy cities, if don't know someone to show you around, you get caught in the tourist flytrap—you can try to fight it, but you'll end up eating a plate of mediocre, overpriced pasta you could make at home. And sure enough, our most successful food experience was buying ripe tomatoes from a farmstand and munching them like (golden) apples. The marinara remained elusive.

That's why I was excited to visit a friend in Rome who escorted me to the best nightshades. I found a stark contrast between food culture here vs. major cities Germany and Austria where I spend more of my time. In Vienna, Berlin, even mid-sized cities like Leipzig, there's been an explosion of ethnic restaurants for decades, and it's even more pronounced since the influx of migrants. You can find ten different world cuisines in a single city block, not unlike NYC. But in Italy, food = Italian food. One could view that as pride, justly deserved, in the local cuisine. One could also view it as conservatism and a lack of adventurous tastes. I wasn't in Italy long enough to make that judgment—just long enough to eat delicious things and enjoy every moment of it.

My visit was inaugurated with a Neapolitan-style pizza at a place called La Gatta Mangiona, widely considered to serve some of the best pizza in Rome and also cat-themed. Yes, friends, the decor is made up entirely of pictures of cats.

Roasted eggplant, zucchini, roasted and marinated green peppers, and mozzarella. 

I learned that the typical Neapolitan pizza is lighter and fluffier than other kinds, baked at an extremely hot temp so that it burns on the outside while remaining soft on the inside. Eating a whole one of these is not difficult because it's mostly air in there. (And because it's, um, delectable.)

In-between eggplant meals, we enjoyed eating suppli, a Roman street food. Balls of tomato risotto (or... more like tomatoey arborio rice that's not fully risottified) are stuffed with a cube of cheese, breaded in a cornmeal coating, and deep fried. They are dense and unhealthy and amazing—and the best place to get them in Rome, along with an incredible assortment of baked goods, is Roscioli. They sell out fast, so get there early and grab them while supplies last. (Pun absolutely intended.)

The highlight was my first time finally trying a true pasta alla norma. I've been wanting to cook this famous Sicilian dish and post a recipe to Aubergenius for ages, but I'd never tried a good version in a restaurant and I didn't know what to aim for. This rendition was served at Meridionale, an unassuming, homestyle place with hip decor in the neighborhood of Trastevere.

Before.

After.

It's true what everyone says about Italian food. It's simple, understated, and the star of every dish is the ingredients. My pasta alla norma was so straightforward. It was long pasta (fatter than spaghetti, rounder than linguine, so I guess it was a Pinottini?) with intensely tomatoey tomato sauce. Interestingly, many Italians dislike garlic, so the sauce had scarcely perceptible garlic flavor; Americans think that's what Italian cooking is all about, but they're wrong. Mixed in were chunks of roasted or sautéed eggplant, velvety soft and flavored with strong olive oil, topped with ricotta salata, a mild, fresh, salty cheese. Most of the salt came from the cheese on top; in fact, most Italian food is way less sugary and salty than the American version. It just tastes like tomatoey freshness and olive oil.

On my last day in Italy, I indulged in this sandwich from Trapizzino, a portmanteau of the triangular sandwich "tramezzino" and a pizza. (Plus: they deliver!)

Exactly what it looks like: eggplant, tomato sauce, mozzarella in a crusty bread. Exactly what it tastes like: HOW CAN SUCH SIMPLE THINGS BE SO GOOD?? Italian cuisine in a nutshell.

Meanwhile, since I was visiting a friend and fellow eggplant-lover at the American Academy, I enjoyed strolling through their backyard gardens, abundant with eggplants of all kinds. The gardens supply the Academy kitchen with a good portion of its ingredients. Lucky fellows at the academy spend their year eating gourmet meals made with local produce, part of the Rome Sustainable Food Project spearheaded by Alice Waters. Keeping those fellows jolly and good.

Big fat globe eggplants.

Easter egg eggplants (almost as redundant as an ATM machine).

Gardens, grounds, and some guy in blue who's pretty stoked.

And why wouldn't he be? One of many scenic corners of the academy in morning light. Not pictured: two live hedgehogs I saw right there in that very spot (at night though).

In the Rome airport, I said my Abschied to Italian eggplants with a little tiny panino filled with roasted eggplant and artichoke-lemon spread. I forgot how well eggplants and artichokes go together.

Airport food in Rome. Yep.

The tiniest sammy.

My only regret is that I couldn't bring my mother—blog's most loyal reader and home cook extraordinaire—along to taste a real Italian marinara.


IMPORTANT ADDENDUM: Nary a Marinara

A friend, musicologist, and self-professed saucerer (badum-tsch) from Italy has chimed in with some interesting and important sauce-related info. The concept of marinara, as it turns out, is more American than Italian—well, I'll let Claudio tell you in his words:

• Claudio: Marinara sauce is an Italian-American invention, based on the very same kinds of culinary fantasies/misunderstandings you mention in your post (lots of garlic to cover the poor taste of mediocre tomatoes).
• Yours truly: Here I also have a point of ignorance where I thought marinara was a broad umbrella term for tomato sauce. What do you usually call tomato sauce to differentiate it from marinara? (Like what would you call the sauce on a pasta alla norma?)
• Claudio: There are different ways of using tomato sauce according to the recipes you are making. In Tuscany we use the term "salsa di pomodoro" to indicate a basic tomato sauce made with a base of sautéd carrots, celery, onion, strained tomatoes and (optional) basil. If you make pasta all'arrabbiata (transl. as "angry pasta") then we'd use finely chopped garlic, hot chili, and parsley, in addition to the strained tomatoes. When I make amatriciana (which would not be suitable for non-carnivores), then I revert to onion (without carrots and celery this time) and chili. Different regions have different ways of using their tomato sauce. In northern Italy, the sauce is often sautéd in butter, which is blasphemy in the central and southern regions, whose cuisine is much more olive-oil based. There is no consensus among Italians on how to call what Tuscans label "salsa di pomodoro." In Milan they call the same thing "sugo," which in Tuscany is a meat-based sauce (very similar to ragù alla bolognese, with some variants).

Yours truly again: I'm glad to have Italian friends who can set me straight. The main points I took away are:

1) There is so much local variation in food in Italy that maybe there's no such thing as "Italian" food to begin with. I remember the story an Italian literature PhD student told me once: when she was in Italy, she noticed that teenagers would take jars of their mom's sauce in their suitcases even when they were visiting a neighboring town. Because, presumably, the town next door wouldn't make things quite the same. So when Americans mix up suppli with arancini, to us a rice-ball is a rice-ball; but to the Italian sensibility it's a significant error because so much local variation gets whitewashed/marinara-washed by American tastes.

2) Without a truly stellar quality of ingredients, perhaps there's no point in making or eating Italian cuisine in America. You can make Italian-American food, though. Load up the garlic and cook that marinara to death! Because if your tomatoes aren't superb, if your pasta's not perfectly cooked, if your dough's the wrong consistency, if your olive oil tastes like BPAs, if your cheese tastes like cornstarch, if your risotto's a glue and your pesto's pale—then go to Eataly I guess?

3) O, the humble aubergine! Nomatter how plasticky the tomatoes are, the aubergine remains delicious most everywhere. With some good olive oil, a lovely roasted surface, a sprinkling of salt and a leaf of basil on top, ecco!