In a Roman Kitchen: Timeless Recipes from the Eternal City

Rating:
Summary: Do As This Roman Does
Review: By Bill Marsano. Jo Bettoja (pronounced bet-TOY-a) went to Italy from
Georgia in the early 1970s as a model; she stayed to marry and become one
of the great ambassadors of Italian cooking. By now she's a kind of
culinary-cultural monument.

This is her latest and most delightful book--it fails to get a fifth star
through no fault of her own--because it focuses on Roman cooking (the fad
for the rather overrated Tuscan is abating at last) and because it is so
personal. You can feel it from her opening sentence: "My home is in Rome,
not far from the Trevi Fountain, just a short walk to the marketplace."
Isak Dinesen's "I had a farm in Africa" is another memorable opener, but
with Jo you know you're going to eat. And she takes you right to her
marketplace, and through Roman traditions and foibles and lore, while
piling on the recipes.

Which are not all Roman, by the way. Romans have, over the years,
grudgingly admitted that some other Italians can cook, at least a little,
and so what we have here are real Roman recipes and adopted Roman recipes.
Pastas are especially abundant because no Italians are so crazy about pasta
as Romans. There's also a nice selection of egg dishes (legacy of Ancient
Rome) and fritti misti or mixed fries, a more modern Roman passion.

In the tradition of cookbrook writers of her era, Jo doesn't discuss wine,
so allow me to recommend Rome's white, light and beguiling Frascati, which
entranced Americans during the postwar "sunny Italy" tourist boom. Back
then (the 1960s), Frascati was merely popular; today it's a quality wine.
Look for Fontana Candida's Santa Teresa and Terre dei Griffi; Villa
Simone's Vigneto Filonardi and Vigna dei Preti; Falesco's Vitiana; Colle
Picchioni; and Conte Zandotti's San Paolo.

So--why no fifth star? Poor design, deserving of a sound smack or two with
a wooden spoon. No, make that a rolling pin. Thinking to introduce color to
the pages, the designer chose a light mustard-yellow for many of the recipe
headings. Sorry, but it tends to blend in and so is hard to read. The
ingredients lists use a smallish italic that also fades. The body type is a
fuss-budget's dream, distracting with its silly, swishy little details.
Forty years in publishing have taught me that type's job is to convey
information legibly and easily, not to call attention to itself.

By the way: Some travelers may recognize the name. That's because Jo is the
wife of Angelo Bettoja, owner of one of Rome's finest hotel groups. Their
five family-run hotels, centrally located and well priced, are, like this
book, full of Roman warmth.
--Bill Marsano is an award-winning writer on wine and spirits, travel and
other subjects.

Rating:
Summary: Delicious recipes!
Review: I just returned home from a week in Rome with my husband. It was our first trip there and we just fell in love with the city, its people and of course, the food! I decided I would surprise my husband with some authentic recipes and bought Jo Bettoja's book. So far, I've made the Saltimbocca and the Artichoke Pie that were both fantastic! We topped the meal off with a delicious tea cake. The photos she uses throughout the book and her personal anecdotets on Rome are charming. I recommend this book to everyone!

Rating:
Summary: Re-creating Roma
Review: I visit Rome once a year, and in between times I dream of it. Of course, sitting in a Roman trattoria enjoying a fritto misto Romano , perhaps with artichokes, zucchini, or salt cod, tasting the wintery greens such as puntarelle, and hazlenut desserts, makes up part of that dream. Now Jo Bettoja has made the dream a savory reality, allowing me to create some of those joys here in New York, while imagining the sun set over St Peter's of course. Even a non-meat eater like myself can find dozens of pleasures in this treasure of a book.

Rating:
Summary: At Home in Rome
Review: Last spring, I passed a pleasant hour conversing with Jo Bettoja in her gracious Roman apartment near the Trevi Fountain.

This spring, I've passed many pleasant hours visiting again with Jo Bettoja - this time in the pages of her inviting new book "In a Roman Kitchen: Timeless Recipes from the Eternal City."

Bettoja is an American from Millen, Georgia, a small town near Savannah. As a young woman, she traveled to Rome on a modeling assignment. She fell in love with the city and also with Angelo Bettoja, to whom she has been married for nearly 50 years. The couple have three grown children. Having lived the better part of her long and colorful life in Rome, I believe it's safe to say that Jo Bettoja is Italian. Just as a religious convert is sometimes more zealous than someone born to the faith, Bettoja spreads the gospel of genuine cucina alla Romana with unparalleled passion.

It seems wherever she has tread for the past half century on the ancient stones of the city, recipes and food lore present themselves to her. Bettoja credits her initial training in Italian cooking to her husband. Then, in the 1970s, with Anna Maria Cornetto, she launched the fashionable cooking school Lo Scaldavivande. She has also written several cookbooks and published magazine articles.

"In a Roman Kitchen" is touchingly personal - like a collection of recipes and memories a mother would pass on to a daughter. These days, Bettoja still scours the street markets for the finest seasonal produce and other ingredients. She tells us of puntarelle, sliced chickory stems only available for a short time in spring, and the renowned carciofi alla Giudia, Fried Artichokes The Jewish Way. She culls dishes of noble pedigree, such as Chicken Breasts for the Princess from her friend Signor Ettore Nibbi who started his culinary career as a kitchen boy in a Roman palace. At the other end of the social scale, she transcribes recipes from a taxi driver including one for delightful Baked Stuffed Chicken Breasts (recipe follows). She cajoles her friends into sharing tempting home-style recipes such as Mina's Meat Loaf and Ginetta's Party Pasta.

She escorts us to her bakery Riposati that faces the Trevi Fountain. "They sell a little bit of everything, but they have kept their ovens and still make their bread, only once a day now, but still of fine quality," Bettoja writes. "During Carnival they make the traditional sweets, frappe and castagnole, which are particularly good, and small simple pastries all year long. They have small and large rolls of all kinds, Terni loaves, bread with and without salt, squares of 'white' pizza painted with olive oil and sprinkled with kosher salt, 'red' pizza with tomato sauce on top, rough white country bread, Arab bread, brown coarse loaves, and so on."

Bettoja is a sorceress of succulence. Leafing through the recipes for Bucatini all'Amatriciana (long hollow pasta in tomato sauce with bacon and hot pepper), Calamari alla Romana (squid in spicy wine sauce), Coda alla Vaccinara (braised oxtails with celery), Abbacchio al Forno con Papate (roast baby lamb with potatoes), Piselli al Prosciutto (sweet peas with prosciutto), Crostata alla Romana (Roman cherry jam tart), and Semifreddo con Fragole (frozen cream with strawberries and almond praline) makes one ravenous. Candid halftone photographs, by Paolo Destefanis, of street scenes and food markets season the work with a sense of place.

All Bettoja's recipes are written with simplicity very much attuned to the time and talents of home cooks whether or not they have the grand fortune to live in Rome.

Rating:
Summary: Shootout in the Forum. Two excellent Books at the Same Time
Review: Two books on Roman cooking have appeared within the last eighteen (18) months, which gives us a golden opportunity to proof one against the other to find the better book. The first published last year is , 'Cooking the Roman Way' by David Downie. The second, more recently published book is the current subject 'In a Roman Kitchen: Timeless Recipes from the Eternal City' by Jo Bettoja.

In general, Downie's book appears to be based more on restaurante, trattoria, and osteria recipes while Bettoja seems to rely more on home cooking recipes. Still, there is a significant overlap of recipe names. I had no trouble at all finding five recipes with the same traditional Italian name, although the English translation of the name may have been a little different. I give high marks to both authors for giving the Italian names of all dishes in both the text and the index.

I compared the recipes for five dishes:

Gnocchi di Semolino alla Romana
Spaghetti alla Carbonara
Cipolline in Agrodolce alla Romana
Carciofi alla Giudia
Frittata con Zucchini

Although no pair of recipes was the same, I can find virtually nothing in these five recipes which would suggest that one author was presenting consistently superior recipes. I was slightly annoyed with Downie for specifying white coctail onions in the Cipolline recipe, especially since I have no trouble finding cipolline in my local Pennsylvania megamart. My conclusion that Downie relies on the Trattoria and Bettoja relies on the home is in the sources they cite for their recipes. Both appear to give equal time to the influence of the Jewish quarter on Roman cooking.

In Bettoja's case, the focus seems to be on a large number of recipes for each major type of Roman dish. She has, for example, more pasta, artichoke, and fava bean recipes than Downie, and also more dessert recipes. This is ironic since Downie controverts one of my hero Mario Batali's claims that Italians do not go in for sweets.

In contrast, Downie includes many seminally Roman recipes which Bettoja simply ignores. He has excellent recipes for making both Pizza Bianco, a certifiable Roman speciality, and fresh fettucini, including sound recommendations on making the fettucini completely by hand and with the assistance of power mixers and power pasta rolling machines. Most surprising of all is that Downie includes the recipe for Gnocchi di Patate while Bettoja does not. My understanding from Mario is that this is a Roman speciality and every trattoria in Rome serves it on Thursday. Alternately, Claudia Roden identifies it as a northern (Friuli) Italian speciality. Since Downie specifically cites potato gnocchi as the Roman canonical dish for Thursday and thereby agrees with Mario, I have to assume that while the dish may be promenant outside Rome, it is certainly a distinctively Roman dish as well.

Bettoja is a teacher who runs her own culinary school in Rome while Downie is a culinary journalist, so it surprises me that it is Downie who has the superior sidebars on some basic techniques such as how to clean an artichoke (sidebars with step by step photographs) and how to roast and skin sweet peppers.

Even though Bettoja's book is later and even though the books have identical list prices and almost identical page counts, Downie's book is much richer in the quality and quantity of it's photographs, almost all with useful captions. I generally do not count good photography to a cookbook's credit, but in the case of a book dedicated to so photogenic a location as Rome, I must make an exception here. For the identical price, Downie and his photographer and editors have simply done a much better job. Downie's book is also richer in sidebars on general Roman and Italian culinary matters. His headnotes for individual dishes are also richer in explaining the history of many dishes such as Fettucini Alfredo and Fettucini alla Papalina.

In the battle of the blurbs, Downie has Mario and Carol Field while Bettoja has Lidia Bastianich and Frances Mayes on her back cover. I think that's a tie.

I would buy both of these books, even with the rather substantial overlap in named dishes. The overlap is actually a plus for amateur foodie scholars, as it gives one the sense of exactly how different two sources can be with exactly the same dish. Bettoja is a great source for pasta recipes and Roman desserts, while Downie has much greater success at evoking the Roman ambiance and in covering deeper techniques. Downie also wins the points on domestic sources for flour and other Italian specialities. Bettoja rather quixotically gives us the telephone numbers of companies in Rome. Not very useful unless you plan to visit Rome in the near future.

Both books are recommended. If you need to choose one, I would pick Downie's book.