Carciofi alla Romana

Braised Roman-style artichokes are cooked gently in a mixture of white wine, olive oil, garlic, and herbs.

click the picture for the recipe

Carciofi alla romana is one of Italy's most famous artichoke recipes. It's made with little more than olive oil, wine, garlic, and herbs, but the result is gently cooked, supremely tender artichoke hearts in a fragrant bath of their own cooking juices.

When the Chief Rabbinate of Israel declared Jewish-style artichokes non-kosher, hundreds of Romans inundated social media with solidarity messages for the centuries-old dish.

Why It Works?

• Combining oregano and mint approximates the flavor and aroma of nepitella, an herb Romans use for this dish, better than mint alone.

• Gently cooking the artichoke hearts in olive oil with white wine both steams and poaches them until they're supremely tender and flavorful.

Artichokes play an important role in Italian cooking. Artichokes find their way to the table in many forms: raw, fried, braised, or roasted. And, while you can find artichoke recipes all over Italy, Rome is home to two of the most famous: carciofi alla guida (Jewish-style fried artichokes) and the carciofi alla romana I'm focusing on here.

In Rome, they often use a special variety of globe artichoke that's free of spines and the inedible, hairy choke, but it can be hard to find that kind here. Our artichokes work, too, but we have to trim away all the spiky and tough woody parts, along with the choke. The Roman artichokes often have much larger stems attached, which allows for a more dramatic presentation of the dish, the thick, long stems rising like gently bowed spires. I tried to keep my stems attached for these photos, too, but they were much shorter, thinner, and more prone to accidentally breaking off during trimming. It's fine if that happens; you can just cook the broken-off stems alongside the cleaned artichoke hearts.

The ingredients for carciofi alla romana are few. You need olive oil, white wine, garlic, and herbs. The herbs present a small challenge. In Rome, they use an herb that's sometimes called mentuccia and sometimes called nepitella, a type of calamint. It's not easy to find.

The most challenging thing about making carciofi alla romana is cleaning the artichokes.

Most recipes just shrug it off by calling for fresh mint instead, but nepitella doesn't quite taste like mint. It has a woodsier, oregano-like quality that mint alone fails to deliver. The best solution, I think, is to combine fresh oregano and mint to better approximate the flavor and aroma of nepitella. Parsley is often included along with the nepitella, helping to buffer the latter herb's intensity, so I mix some parsley into the herbs in my recipe as well.

Add olive oil and wine to a pot just large enough to hold all the artichokes closely side by side, so that they can sit flat with their stem sides up. Arrange artichokes in pot and season with salt and pepper.

After that, I rub the concave side of the artichoke hearts with the minced herbs and garlic, trying to pack some of it into the leafy crevices, then set them upside down in a pot that's just large enough to accommodate them all side by side. I add olive oil and white wine, bring the pot to a simmer, and cover.

To serve, just transfer them to a platter and drizzle the cooking juices all over, plus maybe an extra drizzle of fresh olive oil just to punch up the flavor a little. They get even better as they cool down to room temp, so no rush eating them right away.