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Roman Fry
II.
This can be made when you happen to have some breast of roast chicken left over. Some chicken breast, two or three slices of tongue and ham, one tablespoonful of grated cheese, a taste of nutmeg, are the ingredients used. Remove the skin of the chicken and cut it as well as the tongue and the ham, into little cubes. Make a Balsamella (see No. 54) in sufficient quantity and when it is cooked add the above ingredients and let it cool well to fry using the wafer as in the preceding. 70
A leftovers fry: cooked chicken breast, tongue and ham bound in a stiff béchamel, chilled, then coated and fried. The whole thing hinges on how firm the sauce is.
- Balsamella means béchamelRecipe No. 54 in this book is a plain white sauce of butter, flour and milk. For a mixture that can be cut and handled, make it much stiffer than a pouring sauce — roughly 3 tablespoons butter and 3 of flour to 1 cup of milk, cooked until it pulls away from the pan in a mass.
- "Let it cool well" is the instruction that mattersSpread the mixture no more than half an inch thick on an oiled plate or tray and refrigerate until cold and solid, at least two hours. Warm mixture slumps in the fat and bursts its coating.
- The "wafer"The recipe directs the cook to use "the wafer as in the preceding," so the coating came from the previous numbered recipe; the translation is awkward and what was meant is not clear from this page. Beaten egg and fine breadcrumbs, or a thin batter, would give the crisp shell that is the point.
- QuantitiesNo amount is given for the chicken; the tongue and ham are specified only as "two or three slices" and the cheese as one tablespoonful. A cup of diced chicken bound with about a cup of the thick sauce gives enough for four as a first course.
- TongueCooked beef or veal tongue was a routine cold cut in 1919 and is now a butcher's order. Good mortadella or a firm cooked veal sausage stands in for its texture, though not its flavour.
- Cheese and nutmegThe recipe says only "grated cheese"; in an Italian book of this date that most likely means Parmesan. Nutmeg in a bechamel is meant to be barely detectable -- a few scrapes for the whole batch.
- FryingDeep fry in oil or lard at 350–360F, a few pieces at a time so the temperature holds. They are done as soon as the crust colours; the filling only needs to be heated through.
- Cut sizesDice the meats small, about a quarter inch. Large pieces tear the set sauce when you slice it into portions.
This is from Maria Gentile's The Italian Cook Book (1919), a slim English-language collection often said to be drawn largely from Pellegrino Artusi's La scienza in cucina e l'arte di mangiar bene, the book that did more than any other to give a bourgeois Italian kitchen a written canon. Fritto alla romana belongs to a whole family of Italian fried dishes built on a stiff béchamel — the same principle as crocchette and as Piedmontese fried custard — in which a thick white sauce serves as a bland, sliceable matrix for whatever good scraps the cook has. The frank opening, "when you happen to have some breast of roast chicken left over," places it in the tradition of the fritto misto course, where cooked meat, sweetbreads, brains and vegetables were all reduced to bite-sized fried morsels, tongue and ham among them.