I have to get this off my chest before I say a word about “My Kitchen in Rome,” by former Londoner and actress Rachel Roddy. I want her life. I also want access to what she can get in her markets. I want bowls of handmade pasta with luxurious ragu in exactly the right proportions. I want to be able to serve wine in stubby Duralex water glasses (which I often do) without having guests wonder where the real glasses are.
Roddy, who is a teacher, blogger (www.racheleats.wordpress.com), food columnist for The Guardian in London, mother to toddler Luca, and partner to Vincenzo, wrote the British edition of this book in 2015, originally published as the award-winning “Five Quarters: Recipes and Notes From a Kitchen in Rome.” She explains the title in the introduction. “The quarter of Rome that I call home, Testaccio, is shaped like a quarter, or a large wedge of cheese.” The words “quinto quarto” translate as fifth quarter, she writes, which is the offal in an animal, and part of the style of cooking created by the 19th-century neighborhood slaughterhouse workers, who were paid in organ meats like kidneys and liver. Roddy thinks of quinto quarto cuisine as “made up of things that are usually discarded,” including stale bread, ricotta (left after making pecorino), pasta cooking water, and bean water.
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Another fifth comes into play with the number of dishes in a typical meal. Romans start with antipasti, then comes primo (pasta, soup), secondo (meat or seafood), contorno (vegetable), and dolce (dessert).
She starts with dishes like fava beans with pecorino or deep-fried squash blossoms (she admits that afterward her flat smells like a fish-and-chips shop). In the pasta section, she offers lentils with small pasta, which she describes as something between a soup and a stew. It begins with a soffritto — onion, garlic, celery, parsley — to which you add pulverized tomatoes, a chile, cooked lentils and their liquid, then the pasta. The delicious dish simmers briefly but tightens dramatically right after cooking and needs a good deal more liquid.
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Chicken hunter-style (alla cacciatora) is nothing like the cacciatora we know, in that it is not made with tomatoes, onions, or peppers. Here, chicken, or rabbit, cut into 12 pieces and browned, cooks with white wine, rosemary, chile, and garlic, then is brought to life with a splash of vinegar and olives. The tastes are bright and appealing in the most rustic way. You’re supposed to simmer the dish for 45 to 75 minutes; that timing is way off for an American chicken, even a free-range one. The pieces of my organic bird cooked in 35 minutes (and I prefer it falling off the bone in a dish like this).
A tray of roasted potatoes with plenty of olive oil, rosemary, and garlic has a surprise ingredient. Lemon juice adds a faint pucker and makes them reminiscent of Greek potatoes. In this dish and some others, Roddy’s recipe testers on this side of the pond have not taken size or texture into consideration. Golden potatoes in our markets, even cut into eighths as instructed, are far larger than what she is buying. It’s a situation where bigger not only isn’t better, but also throws off recipe times.
This charming book does not have endless photos of the author (in fact, hardly any), and offers only glimpses into what looks like a functional European kitchen. We see tiny oblong red radishes, freshly scrubbed, sitting on a towel with their scrubbing brush, street scenes, vendors, food in its pots.
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Biscotti with almonds and pine nuts are made without additional fat, the way they were meant to be, so they come out exceptionally crisp. The dough forms easily, though you need an additional egg, slices nicely, and bakes the second time into cookies that will make you swoon. More shaping instructions would help a novice baker, and the yield is way off, to your advantage. You get almost twice what you’re expecting.
The conversational writing makes you want to head to the kitchen. “Just the thought of making ragu makes me happy, not the least because if you’re adding a glass of wine to the pan, it would be careless not to have one yourself,” writes Roddy. That ragu, she explains, was part of her repertoire before she got to Rome, inspired by an old Elizabeth David recipe (brava! David’s 1954 “Italian Food” is a classic). This version has only a spoonful of tomato paste. After you cook a soffritto, then brown beef and pork, reduce wine with the meat, and start simmering for an hour, you stir in whole milk, a little at a time. You get a very rich sauce with tender crumbles of meat that are sweet with just enough acidity.
This ragu will go into my own repertoire. So will the chicken alla cacciatora and other dishes. I can’t have her life, but I can have her recipes. No small consolation.
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My Kitchen in Rome : Recipes and Notes on Italian Cooking
By Rachel Roddy
Grand Central Publishing, 384 pp., $28
Sheryl Julian can be reached at sheryl.julian@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @sheryljulian.