Published: 1 August 2023
Last updated: 5 March 2024
Italian cook and author SILVIA NACAMULLI takes AVIVA LOWY on a tour of her country's Jewish history and explains how not to kill an artichoke.
What is the quintessential Jewish Italian food? Artichokes, according to cook and historian Silvia Nacamulli. The dish is called Carciofi alla Giudia - Jewish-style artichokes.
“The name kind of gives it away,” laughs Nacamulli. “A la Giudia is really the way of knowing how to peel the artichokes. You use the beautiful purplish local artichokes from the Lazio region around Rome. The Jews really did know how to peel it in a way that you are left with a close rose. When you deep fry it, it becomes like an open sunflower and it’s crispy and delicious. If you go to the markets, some people would just cut the artichokes flat. This is what I call to kill an artichoke.”
No surprise then, that it is artichokes which grace the cover of Nacamulli’s new book, Jewish Flavours of Italy: A Family Cookbook, which is a tasty mix of history and the recipes which bring this tradition to life.
“Rome, where I’m from, is the oldest continuous Jewish community in the Western world,” says Nacamulli, who now lives in London. “It was already registered in 200 BC. The numbers grew after the destruction of the second temple in 70 AD when the Romans brought back the Jews as slaves. They came straight from Jerusalem to Rome and have been present since.”
Even though Italy’s capital may boast the earliest record of Jewish habitation, there have been Jews living throughout the country, as we know it today, for almost as long. Nacamulli thinks the Jews of Sicily were more likely free settlers; merchants who came to the busy Mediterranean trade hub which became an ethnic melting pot. It was here that the eggplant, which also has a special place in Italian Jewish cooking, took root.
Originally from India, the eggplant was widely used in North Africa, from where the Moors took it to Sicily. While the eggplant became a “much-loved staple food” for the Sicilians, says Nacamulli, it was regarded with suspicion and looked down upon by central and northern Italians.
Pellegrino Artusi, considered the father of Italian cuisine, refers to the eggplant's ignominy in his famous book, Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well. Published in 1891, it says that just 40 years earlier - in the 1850s - "one could hardly see aubergines (eggplants) and fennel in the Florentine markets; they were considered vile foods of the Jews”. He adds that this is evidence of Jews “having a better flair than Christians for discovering good things.”
While the eggplant became a 'much-loved staple food' for the Sicilians, it was regarded with suspicion and looked down upon by central and northern Italians.
That eggplant did eventually become a staple in the kitchens of central and northern Italy can be largely attributed to Sicilian Jews who were forced to leave or convert during the Spanish Inquisition. While many went across to Greece, Turkey and North Africa, the rest moved further north into Italy, taking with them eggplant and a few other ingredients from the New World, such as pumpkin and tomato. The combination of pine nuts and raisins, used in savoury dishes such as spinach, carrots and fish, also travelled with them.
The eggplant recipes in Nacamulli’s book include two versions of eggplant parmigiana, the dish which her clients request the most. One is served hot and the other cold. While the ingredients for both are very similar, she insists the experience of eating them is quite different. “When people taste them, they say, ‘I see what you mean.’ Aubergines are my favourite things.”
Until the Inquisition, Jews had lived in Sicily for about 1500 years in quite peaceful conditions. “Sicily had the largest Jewish community in Italy at the time, about 40,000 in that small island. That’s more than all the Jews in Italy today,” says Nacamulli.
Her book includes maps showing the Jewish presence in Italy throughout history. It provides a stark picture of how the Jewish population changed from one spread all across the country, most densely in the south, to one sparsely dotted across the top half of Italy. There is now zero presence in the south.
This demographic shift can be “attributed uniquely to the persecution of the Jews. No other reason,” says Nacamulli. “If there had not been a Spanish Inquisition, the Jews would have continued to live in the south of Italy as a main point, especially the Sephardi Jews.”
Jewish persecution in Central Europe and France also accounted for an earlier wave of migration to the north of Italy. As the Black Death spread across Europe between 1348 and 1351, thousands of Jews fled not the plague itself, but the antisemitism it engendered. The Jews were falsely accused of poisoning the wells of the Christians, and a series of massacres annihilated 210 Jewish communities across Europe, writes Nacamulli.
By the early 16th century, the large influx of Jews had become an issue for the Republic and a decree was passed to organise their presence. To this end, the first Italian ghetto was created in Venice in 1516. A second (1541) and third (1633) Venetian ghetto followed. Other ghettos were created throughout Italy by successive popes, and unique cuisines developed.
The ghettos constrained freedom of movement for those forced to live inside but Nacamulli concedes that the one positive outcome was the preservation of cultural and culinary traditions, and the prevention of assimilation. “They stretched out a few extra hundred years there. But once the gates were open, as with Jews all over Europe, they just wanted to blend in and assimilate.”
Italy was only unified in 1870, and the Jews felt very Italian and proud of it, says Nacamulli. When Mussolini’s fascist movement arose in Italy some 50 years later, “a lot of Jews belonged to the fascist party. It took them some time to understand that it was not in their best interests”.
Both of Nacamulli’s parents were living in Rome when Italy entered WWII. While many family members perished, both her mother and father survived because they were hidden by non-Jews.
“On my mother’s side they had this housekeeper who was only 18 when she started working for my great grandmother. She didn’t have any other family so they treated her as a daughter. When she had to leave because of the racial laws, she kept on coming to see them regularly as if you would go and see your parents.”
One day she went to visit but couldn’t find them. When the concierge told her they had gone into hiding, she went looking for them and insisted they come and live with her. She was married and pregnant at the time but undaunted. “The housekeeper who took my mother’s family in had a daughter and now the daughter makes a Christmas cake which I’ve included in the book. It’s the only non-Jewish recipe,” laughs Nacamulli.
“On my father’s side it’s a bit more complicated. The church had a very contradictory role during the Second World War.” Although Pope Pius XII allowed the Jews of Rome to be deported, the convents and churches opened their doors to Jews who wanted to hide. “My father and grandmother were saved by the Catholic church because they managed to hide in a boarding school and a little convent in Rome.”
You can tell good restaurants in Rome when they have just specific food on one day. Friday is fish and on Sunday you would do a fresh pasta.
It was her paternal grandmother, Nonna Bianca, who gave Nacamulli one of her earliest lessons in cooking and around whose table the extended family would meet for the weekly Thursday lunch, “the adults having shut their shops for lunch and the children joining after school.” And because it was Thursday in Rome, the meal was gnocchi.
“There’s a food for every day of the week. So you can tell good restaurants in Rome when they have just specific food on one day. Friday is fish and on Sunday you would do a fresh pasta.”
Though Nacamulli confides that “my mum’s never made fresh pasta”, there is one Jewish dish for which her mother is well known: pizzarelle, or matzo fritters with honey. “We still have friends who come for Pesach and we make the pizzarelle. Mum makes it one night and all the friends come, Jews and non-Jews, and they wait for us really for one year. They ask, ‘When is the night of the pizzarelle?’”
Interestingly, Nacamulli notes that even back in the time of the ghettos, matzo was very popular with Christians and she suggests that part of that fascination may have been because the church forbade them from eating it.
Now that the book is completed, she plans to resume giving cooking classes in June next year, starting in the place she knows best - Rome. “It’s got such an interesting history and I have a wonderful guide to do a tour of the Jewish ghetto and to go to Ostia Antica (the ancient Roman port). It’s literally an archaeological site where there is one of the oldest synagogues found. I’ve spoken to the Jewish community there because they have a kitchen and I would do it kosher-friendly.”
Growing up, Nacamulli says “I was the only Jewish friend that my friends had.” At the age of 20, she went to Israel to try and understand her identity as a Jew. Having intended to learn a little Hebrew and stay for one year, she remained for six and got a degree in political science from the Hebrew University. “Israel made me realise how important being Jewish was for me.”
And Jewish food? Well, says Nacamulli, “the food travels with you.”
Jewish Flavours of Italy: A Family Cookbook, is published by Green Bean Books
