Beef, mutton and pork

“Eat your meat” is a phrase that my paternal grandmother constantly cited because it was believed that without the meat, we could not grow up and would not grow strong and intelligent! For all my childhood I do not remember a meal without a “little meat” to finish before I could go back to play.

Today, I eat little meat because 1) I no longer have a grandmother to push me lovingly to consume it, 2) I started to have ethical qualms about the ways in which many animals are bred, and 3) the cost, in my opinion, is excessively low considering it derives from a living being.

The meat, an expensive and noble food since ancient times, has always been religiously revered by the Romans; it was eaten little and on special occasions.

The use of beef is relatively recent because the ox was first used to pull the plow. When the breeding was extended, it was almost exclusively for the well-to-do, the populace mainly used the less valuable cuts of the “fifth quarter.” The use of offal and entrails was so common that the inhabitants of the districts were nicknamed with the types of innards they would consume; so we have, for example, the “Trasteverini who eat offals” or the inhabitants of the Regola district, “tail eaters.”

The most common practice was the breeding and the sale of lamb meat. There are hundreds of recipes with it. Abbots were selected according to the type of pasture, sex or season of birth, so that there was a Roman saying: “Each lamb has its ‘slaughterhouse.’” Consumption therefore of lamb was not confined to the Easter period alone.

The same goes for the pig: a domestic animal that appeared more frequently on the tables of the ancients and which remains common even after the fall of the Roman Empire to rise to a gastronomic myth with the recipe of “Porchetta.”

The recipes that I report are part of the tradition and partly of my own family. Of the Roman tradition, there are some of my grandmother Violetta and my grandmother Irene who, as all good housewives, knew how to make excellent dishes even with less noble cuts. Instead of my mother I have kept the recipes of classic Italian cuisine, such as roasts, suitable for Sunday lunches and formal dinners.