Rebecca May Johnson

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I did not cook much and did not want to cook much when we were in Rome. In the second week there, I could not cook much because I experienced a period of fatigue and had to lie down for several days. I became aware of the ways that the city enabled me not to cook. I observed that not-cooking was integrated into the everyday lives of residents in the Marconi neighbourhood where I was staying. Specific forms of food and of labour had been developed, it seemed, to minimise the work of cooking for all concerned, while giving plenty of opportunity for enjoyment. As I write about food, people often expect me to cook all the time, or to regard home cooking as an unalloyed virtue. This is not so. One of my favourite things that early readers of my book Small Fires have told me is that they feel it gives them permission not to cook.
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I spent a lot of time in a canteen-like Tavola Calda (Hot Table) near my flat watching residents conduct various forms of not-cooking, from feasts to casual meals and snacks.
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Late one morning my partner and I were eating squares of pizza rossa and drinking coffee when a white-haired woman came in and listed the dishes she wanted to order for Easter weekend. When the person behind the counter said several dishes were not available, she became argumentative. She was throwing her energy into getting her expectations met, and not entirely succeeding. On the wall high above the counter was a photographic portrait of a woman the same age as the white-haired customer. The portrait was positioned to receive worship or to supervise; she surveyed the scene. The restaurant-canteen-takeaway-pizzeria-cafe appeared to be run by siblings and their partners. They were tactile and casual with each other and several looked alike: perhaps the portrait was of their mother. Perhaps she used to run the business and would have known how to meet the demands of the white-haired woman. The practice of not-cooking at Easter seemed to be long established.  Walking around in the week before, lots of places offered whole menus for collection, including vegetables, baked pastas, and tarts. When I relayed the story of the frustrated customer to a friend who lives there, she told me her grandmother-in-law also never made the lasagne for the Easter feast.
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When the white-haired woman left, the person behind the counter complained in good spirits about her last-minute orders to the man sitting behind me. He was also roughly the same age as the woman in the portrait. He read a newspaper and drank a coffee and seemed at home. While we sat and ate a second tray of pizza (this time with zucchini) a great number of dishes were carried out from the kitchen and set onto a serving counter behind a glass pane in readiness for lunch. A square tray of grey-green braised artichokes standing face down and stalks the air, flecked with mint. Roasted potatoes with rosemary. A ceramic dish of lasagna. Pieces of cooked chicken with golden skin. Cannelloni stuffed with greens and ricotta. Plates of roasted vegetables. Cicoria ripassata, a dish made with bitter greens that were in season. We could see all of the delicious ways our appetites could be sated without cooking if we stayed here for lunch. It was not expensive or out of the ordinary in the neighbourhood, and could be bought either to take away or at one of the tables inside.
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From my seat I could see into the kitchen from where food was emerging. A man stood at a stainless-steel table grating a peeled potato and spreading it on top of dough. He retrieved trays of pizza from the oven and carried them to a counter displaying pizza in the Roman style. Baked in long rectangular sheets rather than the circular shape that has been adopted by most UK restaurants, pizza in the Roman style is an ideal canteen food. When I order at any of the vendors in Marconi, the server asks me how much I would like and adjusts the position of their knife and cuts a piece to fit my appetite. If I am still hungry, I can go and ask for more. It is easy to buy a few squares with different flavours for a couple of euros and there is no area of crust left without topping. To eat pizza Romana, I do not need lay out the comparatively higher amount of money required to buy the circular pizza familiar to UK diners. When I order a whole circular pizza that I dislike, I experience it as a disaster on the scale of tragedy. My poor judgement or lack of self-knowledge is on show for all to see, and I cannot justify the expense of another. Round pizzas require on-demand, pressurised performances from both customer and pizzaiolo. Pizza Romana is not a spectacle produced out of the oven, burnished and bubbling when the customer summons it forth. In contrast, like the canteen dishes on the other counter, the pizza Romana in the Tavola Calda pre-exists the arrival of any particular customer. It is briefly re-heated in a hot oven when I order it, but it is not made to my order. It is not a just-in-time product, it is a product that in Marconi neighbourhood, is universally available for as little as a euro. I eat squares of pizza Romana at breakfast with coffee, as a snack with a coke while walking in the rain, and in the evening with a beer. It is never the wrong time of day to eat pizza Romana, which means I can not-cook at any time.
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What is the time of pizza in the Roman style? What reality does it produce? The person making pizza Romana appears to work steadily and in a regular way, and then to rest. When I visit the Tavola Calda mid-afternoon on different day to eat more pizza and drink a beer, there is no man standing grating potato. His work is finite and when it’s done it’s done. He has made the pizza, the pizza is there, and when it’s gone it’s gone. But at the end of the day there is still enough for us to have two flavours and more leftover. It is just after nurseries and schools have been let out. Behind me a child sits with her mother, playfully stuffing bread into her water glass and watching a cartoon. Her father works behind the counter and chats over my head to his daughter’s mother, occasionally making cute speak with their child. On another table is a young child and her father, also chatting to the girls’ mother and the man behind the counter. A woman walks in with a toddler in a push chair, buys a square of plain pizza bianca, and gives the kid a piece to eat on her way out, calling good wishes to all in her wake.
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With pizza in the Roman style there is not the frenzied inconsistent pace of fast-fast-fast-fast-slow-slow-slow fast again, slow again, of a pizza made to order. When customers control the pace of production, every desire uttered makes the pizzaiolo move. Pizzaioli making round pizzas are often on display in open kitchens. In the branch of UK chain Pizza Express I visited as a child, the pizza cooks wore a costume of striped t-shirts and their work was part of the show. I would crane my neck to try and watch what they were doing, willing them to work for me, becoming grumpy if I thought they were too slow, my stomach rumbling. The pizzaiolo who makes pizza-to-order hovers in the subjunctive state of an almost-worker, like a machine permanently on standby, waiting for orders to come in. They are always poised in anticipation of the customer; it is always hour zero.
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The flavours of pizza made in the Roman style had been chosen in advance of my arrival at the Tavola Calda, too. I could choose from zucchini flower, anchovy and mozzarella, or zucchini and ricotta, or sausage and broccoletti, or aubergine and tomato, or potato and rosemary, or tomato, known as ‘pizza rossa’. I cannot pay to add extras or ask them to take off ingredients that I don’t like. I cannot create a lot of noise and buzz and work through a heightened sense of myself as king customer. Servers are not required to perform an interest in my choice and the cook need not follow my whims. When I eat pizza in the Roman style, I find I do not want to be king customer. I do not want to agonise over my choice. Pizza served in the Roman style decentres me as a customer, while also giving me everything I need. I assign less importance to my choice and become less fraught. I am a hungry person crossing the threshold of a place that sells food and I can get on with my day.
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The aesthetic of this Tavola Calda is neither old fashioned, nor highly contemporary. There are Coke and mineral water branded refrigerators, electronic payment machines, and bright red plastic canteen trays. There is an assortment of old photographs on the walls and chequered tablecloths in the slightly more formal room. It is not particularly stylish, nor overly drab: it is ordinary in its looks and its function. It is not part of a chain and the people working there can look after their children in the dining space and talk to each other across the counter. They have the authority to push back against customers who ask too much, and yet are able to serve most people what they need.
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In Marconi there are narrow pizza shops, cafes, bakeries, and Tavola Calda every ten or so meters, all of which sell Pizza Romana. Many places look almost the same and serve almost the same food but as I walk past over three weeks, places become distinct because a specific group of people drink and eat there, sometimes together. I see no one carrying a takeaway cup of coffee but pass hundreds of people standing for a few minutes at the bar drinking an espresso and chatting. There is easy access to good enough food in good enough surroundings for a low price. ‘Good enough’ does not mean ‘bad’, ‘disappointing’, or even ‘average’: it means sustaining and pleasure giving, both of which are basic requirements.
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I ate pizza rossa every day, appreciating the marginal differences between each iteration of bread and tomato from different pizza shops. The food infrastructure in Marconi felt like a recognition of cooking as work that not everyone has the time or inclination to do – while also providing common spaces in which to eat, as well as takeaway services. The streets in Marconi form an extended canteen, serving the whole neighbourhood and anyone passing through.
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While I was writing my Small Fires, I realised that not-cooking was as complex and storied as cooking. There were many days where I was paralysed by anxiety or indecision or fatigue on the sofa: hungry. If only there were a Tavola Calda on my street! I began to think more deeply about moments when the thought of my own cooking felt unbearable, and what they could tell me. My appreciation for the infrastructures that supported my not-cooking grew and I wrote about takeaways and plastic-wrapped snacks and fish and chips and frozen pizza. I realised I could not write an epic in the kitchen without giving an account of not-cooking.
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Rebecca May Johnson is a writer whose writing brings critical practices into everyday life. She has published essays, reviews and nonfiction with Granta, Times Literary Supplement, Daunt Books Publishing and Vittles, among others. She was a creative writing fellow at the British School at Rome in 2021. She earned a PhD in Contemporary German Literature from UCL in 2016. Her anonymous waitressing series was voted in the Observer Food Monthly ‘Top 50’ of 2018. She was finalist in the ‘Young British Foodies’ writing prize judged by Marina O’Loughlin and Yotam Ottolenghi. She publishes a newsletter called dinner document where she shares recipes and thoughts about food every week. Small Fires is her first book.

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