In the Latium region recently, I ended up in the remote village of Grisciano, 150km north of Rome. It consists of a bunch of old mountain houses, barely 200 inhabitants and utter silence. But it harbours a culinary secret. This is the region that gave the world an iconic Italian dish, Pasta Amatriciana, the essential ingredients of which are pork cheek, tomatoes and pecorino romano sheep’s-milk cheese, livened up with black pepper.
As I soaked up the sun on a bench in the main piazza, Anna, an 85-year-old who specialises in preserving old recipes, told me the story.
“The ancestor of Amatriciana is Pasta alla Gricia, named after our village, and it was and still is white, not red. There is no tomato sauce. Italy had to wait for Christopher Columbus to discover America and bring tomatoes, which were later used to make the Amatriciana sauce, back to Europe.” Which means, said Anna, that “Amatriciana is a usurper.”
The original white pasta version, the lesser known Gricia, is still made with guanciale (pork cheek) spiced up with pepper and melted pecorino romano cheese. Spaghetti is the most common type of pasta used, or short tube-like rigatoni. Locals in Grisciano are out to tell the world that their village deserves much greater credit. The problem they face is that, while the lesser-known Pasta alla Gricia was named after their village, the much better-known Pasta Amatriciana takes its name from the nearby village of Amatrice.
Villagers and restaurateurs in Grisciano are now on a “promotion mission” to fight back and claim what’s theirs, hoping their new “origin tale” might bring in the tourists.
Pasta alla Gricia remains pretty much an unknown dish to most people – but not me. My grandma made a delicious Gricia with crunchy guanciale, and passed it down to my mum.
I decided to have lunch at Grisciano’s main restaurant to savour the taste of the original recipe. It made me appreciate the dish even more. In my view, Amatriciana tends to be way too heavy to digest, due to the combination of the thick tomato sauce with the pork jowl. I’ve never been a great fan of it, as it literally sends me into a deep slumber. Gricia is lighter, more delicate and tastier.
At the table next to mine Paolo, a middle-aged gourmand food historian, was gulping down a plateful of Gricia. He had travelled all the way from Piedmont to discover the roots of the recipe, and while I ordered a second portion, we talked.
“What makes this pasta unique is the simplicity of its ingredients: born as a humble dish, it is made with the few foods available to shepherds in the old days when they set out for long months alone on the cold hills looking after sheep,” said Paolo.
All that shepherds had back then were pigs, dry pasta prepared by their wives, and cheese – all with a long expiry date. Tomato sauce would have rotted after a few days.
These poor ingredients were the shepherds’ sole source of nutrition during the long weeks spent out in the pastures. That’s how Pasta alla Gricia was born.
As for the arrival of tomatoes in Italian food, said Paolo, “Don’t forget that for centuries tomatoes were simply ornamental plants like roses. They weren’t eaten but gifted across royal courts. During the Renaissance, the French cardinal and statesman Richelieu was known to be a great fan of tomato plants.” Tomatoes only started being eaten after the 1600s.
I looked down at my empty plate of Gricia. The second serving had vanished. What wonders and untold tales can be found in a simple, largely forgotten recipe.
Silvia Marchetti is a journalist living in Rome
