La Cucina Povera: Should We Be Paying A Fortune For Downhome Cooking?

La cucina povera has become the new cliche of Italian cooking in New York City. All of the famous star chefs are making recipes that began as peasant meals. While delicious, one can question paying $20 for panzanella, a Tuscan specialty made from stale bread or pasta with aglio, olio and pepperoncino. These are dishes to make and eat at home. Many do not agree with this viewpoint and restaurants that serve “la cucina povera” in Manhattan or in the Hamptons are packed to the gills. Why does this occcur? Perhaps it is because New Yorkers have forgotten how to cook or that they never learned to cook these types of meals or they remember how delicious one of these meals was in a little out of the way Osteria in Florence or in Rome. Perhaps they have forgotten the cost of that pasta, 8 to 10 euros at the most. Before the euro came into the picture, it might have cost 10,000 lire. That seems like such a quaint number now. Whatever the reason, Americans are forking over huge sums to eat meals that many Italians would consider ridiculous to eat in a restaurant. That said, it doesn’t seem that this trend will abate any time soon.

Another new trend is the menu macabre. I love this term which I got from the son of a famous Roman chef, Sora Anna from Osteria di San Cesareo.

Sora Anna is a true personaggio and anyone traveling to Rome should check out her cuisine. The menu macabre is based on the internal parts of animals, such as intestines, sweetbreads and the like. Sora Anna calls this type of cooking the cuisine of the ?quinto quarto? (the fifth quarter). According to her website, these traditional dishes all come from the butcher’s at Rome?s Testaccio slaughterhouse who invented such dishes as stewed oxtail (coda alla vaccinara), veal intestines in tomato (pagliata di vitella), tripe alla Romana and sweetbreads (animelle) at the end of the 19th century.

These delicacies are also being cheered at restaurants in the big apple. Wonder’s never cease.