As I was walking through Rome’s Testaccio neighborhood last summer, following Kenny of Eating Italy Food Tours in Rome with a dozen other hungry travelers, he introduced me to a concept that I’ve never forgotten. As we stared up at the ancient remains of the largest butchery in Roma, he described the meals the laborer’s wives would make from the undesirable bits and pieces scrounged from the carcasses, one of which was beef cheek ragu. The concept that stayed with me from that tour is this: You don’t have to have a lot of money to eat well – you just need imagination, a big pot, and time.
On Monday I found a recipe for Beef Cheek Ragu Pappardelle in the San Francisco chronicle. On Tuesday, I searched three Carnicerias around my apartment for the elusive crappy cut of meat. Failing that, I gave up and went to my usual butcher to ask “if I can’t find beef cheek, what’s the next best thing?” My butcher replied “you want a really cheap, stringy, tough piece of meat.” So for the first time in my clearly over-privileged life, I grinned and said “Give me two pounds of the cheapest, crappiest cut of beef you have.”
What followed was a process Roman laborers’ wives would recognize well. Lots of onions, garlic, celery and carrots, mushrooms and wine, followed by browning then brazing beef and slow-cooking it all together for 3 hours. Then I removed the beef chunks and pulled them apart, adding them back into the pot with a cinnamon stick to simmer for another 30 minutes.
After I spooned the rich sauce liberally over the pappardelle (I love big, thick noodles), I sliced up olive bread so we could “Fare la scarpetta” – or, “do the little shoe” by using it to soak up the leftover sauce.
The best Italian food – the robust pastas, meat and vegetable dishes famous throughout the world – didn’t come from the upper classes. They came from the peasants. Garlic, for example, is still considered “peasant food” and shunned by the upper echelons of Italian society for being a “low class seasoning.” As recently as 2007, NPR did a story on trendy Roman restaurants disparaging the humble root:
“La Mantia says that garlic is a leftover from when Italians were poor and used it to flavor their meager victuals. He says the average standard of living is high enough today that people can do without it.”
Yes, many people can do without “peasant food.” But why ever would they want to?