Portico: Cooking and Feasting in Rome’s Jewish Kitchen

"My colleague Olga Massov recommended this book. It focuses on Jewish cooking in Rome. Jews in Rome have a very long history, dating back something like two thousand years. For about three hundred of those, they were limited to a ghetto, a very small area of Rome. This gets at what I was talking about in terms of home cooking, and being smart with what you have, because they were limited to certain ingredients. There were a lot of things they couldn’t buy, they couldn’t get, they had to have the small types of fish, so these were ingenious recipes through which they made do with what they had. The cover of the book has an artichoke on it, and fried artichokes are an iconic Roman Jewish dish. People go and get them and eat them on the streets now, but back then, it was because artichokes were one of the things they could actually acquire, in addition to lots of olive oil. What Olga really liked about this book and what I also appreciated was that, in general, the recipes are short. They don’t require a lot of ingredients. They’re approachable, again, because these are homestyle recipes. It’s also part travelogue. Koenig mentions in the introduction that she wrote a lot of it when she was in Covid-19 lockdown, and we weren’t traveling anywhere. You get that feeling of love and appreciation and yearning for a place that makes you want to hop on the next plane to Rome. When she finally was able to visit, she and her photographer went, and the photos are just stunning. They give you such a sense of place. You feel like you’re there, it’s about real people, and it definitely feels like a coffee table book that’s about travel and cooking. One of my pet peeves is when there aren’t that many photos of recipes in cookbooks, because I want to know what the dishes look like. There are a lot of recipe photos in this book. Not every dish has one, but I don’t mind because there are so many great atmospheric photos of Rome that really make you feel like you’ve gone there or that you want to go. Olga said she already has given this book to people as a gift for Hanukkah and they loved it. It’s a great merging of place and food, and you can tell that this is a place Koenig is passionate about. It wasn’t just that she thought, ‘I need to write another cookbook.’ She cares deeply about these recipes and history and people."