Carciofi alla giudia: the dish the Roman ghetto invented

Carciofi alla giudia: the dish the Roman ghetto invented

A whole artichoke, trimmed, beaten open until it looks like a bronze flower, and fried twice in olive oil until the outer leaves shatter like crisps and the heart stays soft. That is carciofo alla giudia — the artichoke in the Jewish style. It is the most famous Jewish dish in Italy, it is genuinely only in season for about three months, and in 2018 it caused an argument between two rabbinates.

What it is, and what it is not

Do not confuse it with carciofi alla romana. Those are a different dish: braised whole, stem up, stuffed with garlic and mint, soft all the way through, and green. Alla giudia is fried, golden-brown, flattened, and eaten with your hands, outer leaves first.

The variety matters. It is made with the carciofo romanesco — the round, tender, almost choke-less bud the growers call cimarolo or mammola, the terminal bud at the top of the plant. A globe artichoke from elsewhere will not behave the same way in the oil.

Why the ghetto invented it

In 1555 the bull Cum nimis absurdum walled the Jews of Rome into a few damp acres beside the Tiber. They stayed there for 315 years, until 1870. Trades were restricted, movement was restricted, and money was short for most of that time.

The cooking that came out of it is what poverty cooking always is: cheap ingredients, treated with enormous technique. Vegetables from the nearby market, the cuts of fish and meat nobody else wanted, and frying — which makes very little go a long way and works without an oven.

That is the honest origin of Roman Jewish food, and it is why it is so good. Nothing on that table was designed to impress anyone.

The 2018 question: is the artichoke kosher?

In April 2018 the Chief Rabbinate of Israel ruled that artichokes could not be certified kosher, on the grounds that insects lodge between the leaves and cannot be reliably removed — and insects are forbidden.

Rome disagreed, publicly. The Chief Rabbi of Rome, Riccardo Di Segni, pointed out that the Roman variety is tightly closed and does not harbour insects the way an open artichoke does, that the dish is checked and prepared under supervision, and that the community has been eating it under rabbinical authority for centuries.

The kosher restaurants of the Roman ghetto went on serving it, under the supervision of the Rabbinate of Rome. If you keep kosher and you are travelling from elsewhere, that is the piece of context worth having before you order: this is a dish with a local hechsher and a live halachic discussion behind it, not a tourist novelty.

The rest of the table

The artichoke is the famous one. It is not the interesting one.

• Aliciotti con l’indivia — fresh anchovies layered with curly endive and baked. Two cheap ingredients, nothing else, and it is the dish I would order first.
• Concia di zucchine — courgettes sliced, fried, then left to marinate in vinegar, garlic and mint. Sharp, cold, made the day before. A Shabbat dish, because it needs no cooking on the day.
• Pizza ebraica, also called pizza de beridde — not pizza at all. A hard, dark, almost burnt bar of dried fruit, almonds and candied peel from the old bakery on the ghetto street. It looks like a mistake. It is not.
• Torta di ricotta e visciole — ricotta and sour cherry tart, with a pastry lid. The story told on the street is that the lid was there to hide the ricotta, in a period when papal edicts restricted the sale of dairy to Christians. Folklore or not, it is the best cake in Rome.

Where to eat it — and the thing nobody tells you

Almost all of it sits on one street, Via del Portico d’Ottavia, and its few side alleys. That is the whole map.

Three practical warnings:

1. Not every restaurant on that street is kosher-certified. Several are excellent Roman restaurants serving Roman Jewish dishes without supervision. If certification matters to you, it has to be checked restaurant by restaurant, not assumed from the address.
2. The kosher places close for Shabbat, from Friday afternoon to Saturday night. If your Friday night and Saturday lunch are in Rome, they need to be arranged in advance — a table booked with a pre-paid Shabbat meal, or a kosher chef cooking where you are staying.
3. After three nights you have eaten in all of them. This is the single most common complaint I hear from families staying a week. It is why accommodation with a kitchen and a chef for two of the evenings usually beats booking a restaurant every night.

When artichokes are actually in season

Roughly February to April, sometimes into May. That is when the Roman artichoke is harvested in the Lazio countryside and when the dish is worth crossing a city for.

Outside those months you will still be offered it. It will have come from a freezer or from a greenhouse somewhere else, and it will be a completely different thing. Nobody will tell you this, so: if you are in Rome in August and the artichoke arrives looking perfect, be suspicious.

Cook it yourself

The frying is harder than it looks — two temperatures, and the moment between crisp and burnt is short. If you want to learn it properly, the kosher cooking class in Rome goes through the ghetto repertoire with someone who grew up making it, and it is the one activity in my whole catalogue that families with teenagers ask to repeat.

Otherwise: walk the street with someone who can tell you which door is which. The food is inseparable from the place, and the place is best explained on the ghetto, Museum and Synagogues tour. The longer history is in the guide to Jewish Rome, and the whole country, city by city, is in Jewish Italy.