In the 1976 Italian film, “Down and Dirty,” Giacinto Mazzatella—played by actor Nino Manfredi—remarks, “Oxtail and celery are like man and woman: it’s all well when one sticks to the other.”
Oxtail, or as you’ll see it on menus in Rome, coda alla vaccinara, is in the culinary pantheon of Roman cuisine. And if you’re in Rome, you have to try it at least once, if not twice.
What is coda alla vaccinara?
The tail of the ox is a tender piece of beef. In Rome, they prepare it by simmering the tail with a large amount of celery, carrots, herbs, red wine, and tomatoes; sauteed with pancetta, garlic, and onions; and then slowly braised with more celery, cloves, and bay leaves. The last step is adding a pinch of cinnamon, black pepper, and nutmeg. Sometimes raisins are added to create a sweet and sour balance to the taste.
The result is a rich, flavor-popping meal with fall-off-the-bone tender meat. Sometimes, Roman chefs de-bone the tender oxtail meat and turn it into a pasta dish called rigatoni al sugo de coda.
Where does coda alla vaccinara originate?
The dish is deeply associated with Regola, a sliver of a neighborhood in Rome’s Centro Storico between the Tiber River and Campo de’ Fiore. It’s particularly connected to the butchers (or vaccinari in the local parlance) of Regola. The association is so deep that Romans would often refer to people from Regola as “magnacode,” a word in Roman dialect that means “tail eater.”
The other part of Rome that is tied to coda alla vaccinara is Testaccio. It is here where the dish solidified its status as one of the stars of Roman cuisine. Testaccio, located south of the city’s historical center and hugging up against the Tiber, is famed for a few reasons, all of which are related to animals and food in some way:
- One of those is for Monte Testaccio. This 120-foot urban mountain is made up of broken pottery, deposited here from Rome’s port. It exemplifies the city’s love of olive oil. It was there that clay amphorae containing olive oil would arrive from the port. Workers would deposit the oil on other containers and then smash the amphorae, tossing the shards on what would become Testaccio Hill. Today, Monte Testaccio is made up of 53 million clay amphorae.
- In the Middle Ages, Testaccio was home to the city’s carnival celebrations, part of which included rolling pigs and cows (and sometimes, the city’s Jewish residents) down the hill in a cart.
- The other legendary site in the neighborhood is the now-defunct slaughterhouse. Opened in the last decade of the 19th century, the mattatoio, or slaughterhouse, was the main meat producing center in Rome. Workers were paid a combination of money and meat. But not just any meat. They were given what is called the quinto quarto, or the 5th quarter—essentially the parts of the beast that consumers rarely eat and butchers rarely sell.
- These parts, also called offal, included the intestines, heart, brains, testicles, and—wait for it—the tail. Because refrigeration was not dependable in those days, restaurants sprang up across the street from the slaughterhouse, many of them anchored into the base of Monte Testaccio, to cook the quinto quarto meat for the slaughterhouse workers after they were finished with their shifts.
And with that, Roman cuisine and its obsession with offal, was born. Dishes like pajata (calves’ intestines with the mother’s milk still inside), coratella (an offal-laden lamb stew), trippa alla romana (tripe cooked in a tomato sauce), and, of course coda alla vaccinara became Roman classics.
Where to eat coda alla vaccinara in Rome?
The slaughterhouse permanently shuttered in 1975, but many of those restaurants that sprang up in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, are still around and still serving traditional Roman food, including coda alla Vaccinara.
Checchino dal 1887
This ancient eatery was one of the first restaurants to fire up its pasta-boiling burners next to the slaughterhouse in Testaccio. Quinto quarto dishes are their speciality, particularly coda alla vaccinara.
Here you can get rigatoni with a tomato-laden oxtail sauce and coda alla vaccinara: slow-cooked oxtail in a sauce of celery, pine nuts, raisins, and bitter dark chocolate.
Ristorange Jole
Located around the corner from Checchino in Testaccio is Jole, which does more modern takes on Roman classics.
Case in point: the fan-favorite dish ravioli de Jole is oxtail-stuffed ravioli. It’s a fantastic dish on the coda alla vaccinara trail.
Santo Palato
Chef Sarah Cicolini’s Santa Palato is not an easy restaurant to nab a table at. The menu changes regularly but if her oxtail meatballs are on the menu, order them immediately.
The polpette di coda alla vaccinara include lovage, cacao, and a peanut dipping sauce.
Want to learn more about the neighborhood that’s closely tied to coda alla vaccinara? Join us on our Tastes & Traditions of Rome: Testaccio Food and Market Tour. From sipping the perfect espresso to indulging in Rome’s most iconic dishes, you’ll taste your way through local markets, family-run trattorias, and historic landmarks that define Roman cuisine.
