Lazio Food & traditional cuisine

Lazio's cuisine is largely represented by that of Rome, with contributions from the neighbouring areas, and it has one defining characteristic: popular extraction. In Rome the cooking is the cooking of osterie — recipes made from poor foods.

That is not a modest disclaimer but the organising principle. The dishes the region is known for were built from what was cheap or left over: offal, tough cuts, pork cheek, artichokes, chicory. The technique went into making them good, not into the ingredients.

The region's own larder runs well beyond the capital, and it is unusually place-specific: the lentil of Onano, the potato of the Alto Viterbese, the potato of Leonessa, the cured guanciale of Amatrice.

Roman cooking is the best-known part, and several of its recipes come directly from those so-called poor dishes of the people — including one, carciofi alla giudia, invented by the Jews of the ghetto.

Spaghetti alla carbonara and pasta all'amatriciana are the two Roman pastas that travelled furthest, the second taking its name from Amatrice and built on the region's own cured pork cheek, guanciale amatriciano.

Carciofi alla giudia — artichokes in the Jewish style — were invented by the Jews of the Roman ghetto, and sit beside carciofi alla romana as the region's two defining vegetable dishes.

Saltimbocca is the best-known Roman meat dish; coda alla vaccinara, oxtail, and coratella d'abbacchio, lamb pluck, are the osteria tradition in its purest form, along with trippa.

Other first courses include the ravioli called di San Pancrazio, maccheroni, sagne, and chicory and asparagus dishes; among the regional staples are porchetta, the cured coppa, and the Easter bread pizza di Pasqua.

For sweets the list is long and strongly local: the maritozzo, pangiallo and pampepato, castagnole, ferratella, zeppola, brutti e buoni, castagnaccio, ciambellette al vino, torta mimosa, zuppa inglese, the pupazza frascatana and the serpentone.

And grattachecca — shaved ice with syrup — is the Roman street answer to summer heat.

Lazio's food culture is an osteria culture, and that word carries the whole argument. In Rome the cooking is the cooking of osterie: recipes made from poor foods, in a cuisine whose defining characteristic is its popular extraction.

What follows from that is a food culture organised around the cheap cut and the seasonal vegetable rather than around luxury produce. Offal dishes — oxtail, lamb pluck, tripe — are not a curiosity here but the centre of the repertoire, and the artichoke is treated with the seriousness other regions reserve for truffles.

The ghetto is a living part of that history: carciofi alla giudia were invented by the Jews of the Roman ghetto, and Roman-Jewish cooking remains a distinct strand of the city's food.

Outside Rome the culture is one of named local products rather than restaurants — the lentil of Onano, the potatoes of the Alto Viterbese and of Leonessa, the guanciale of Amatrice — and the festival calendar reflects it, with sagre through the region devoted to single ingredients.

The sweets are the most local layer of all, with specific towns attached to specific things: the pupazza frascatana belongs to Frascati.

Lazio's wine is grown mostly on volcanic soil, and the map of its appellations follows the map of its craters and hills.

The Castelli Romani, the volcanic hill towns south-east of Rome, are the historic heart: their DOC wines have supplied the capital for centuries, and the hills around the Albano and Nemi crater lakes are where Rome has always gone to drink.

In the Viterbese, to the north, the distinctive wine is the Aleatico di Gradoli, with the Colli Etruschi Viterbesi red and the wines of Vignanello from the same volcanic country around the Monti Volsini and Cimini.

The coast and the south contribute the Moscato di Terracina and the Circeo wines, grown on the Tyrrhenian side near the Circeo promontory.

Elsewhere the typical wines include the Cerveteri, the Colli della Sabina red from the Sabine hills, and the Colli Lanuvini.

The through-line is proximity: nearly all of it is drunk young and close to where it is made, which is why Lazio's wine is better known inside the region than outside it.