This iconic Roman dish called la vignarola is a ‘medley’ of spring vegetables made from spring onions, fava beans, artichokes, peas and tender lettuce, flavored in typically Roman style with a bit of guanciale. If there’s one Roman dish that says “spring on a plate”, this is it.

Admittedly, prepping the vegetables, especially the artichokes and fava beans, requires some patience. But from there the recipe is a simple one. You start with sautéing the guanciale, then the onion, then the other vegetables in order according to the time it takes to cook them: first the artichokes, then the fava beans, then the peas and finally, just at the last moment, the lettuce. They braise until tender in a quick vegetarian broth made the vegetable trimmings.

La vignarola has a very short ‘season’ of only a few weeks while all the requisite vegetables are simultaneously in season. In Italy this typically falls in April and May, when le primizie—those incredibly tender early spring vegetables—appear in the markets. Where I live at the moment, however, fava beans are only starting to appear now, in mid-June. Well, better late than never. The anticipation can be painful, but when those favas finally do appear, I jump!

On this side of the Pond, fresh tender young spring vegetables can be challenging to source. But your vignarola will still be good even if you’re missing one of the ingredients, or if you resort to frozen vegetables, in which case you can make vignarola more or less any time of year you fancy.

Vignarola is typically served as an antipasto, but it would make a perfectly delightful light second course or, even, especially if you omit the guanciale, as a side dish. It also makes a delicious dressing for pasta.

Ingredients

Serves 4-6

• 2 large or 4 baby artichokes, (about 250g or 1/2 lb after trimming)
• 250g (1/2 lb) fava beans
• 250g (1/2 lb) peas, fresh or frozen
• 1/2 small head of lettuce
• 3-4 spring onions
• 100g (3-1/2 oz) guanciale or pancetta, cut into cubes or strips
• Olive oil
• Salt and pepper
• A sprig or two of fresh mint (optional)

Directions

Prep the vegetables

Begin by prepping all your vegetables. Trim and cut the artichoke into thin wedges, following the instructions in this post. Immerse the wedges in acidulated water until needed. If using fresh fava beans in their pods, remove them from their pods and peel off their skins (see Notes for details). If using fresh peas, remove them from their pods as well. Cut and shred your lettuce. Trim the green tops off the spring onions and slice the white bulbs thinly.

Prepare a vegetable broth

Now make a quick vegetable broth by taking a few handfuls of the scraps from your vegetable prep and adding them to a pot. Cover with water by at least 3cm/1 inch and season generously with salt. Simmer gently for at least 15 minutes.

Sauté the vegetables

Meanwhile, in a large braiser or sauté pan, lightly sauté the guanciale or pancetta in olive oil, until translucent and just beginning to brown around the edges. 

Add the sliced spring onions and sauté for a minute or two, until they are soft and translucent.

Add the artichoke wedges to the pot, mix them with the onion and sauté gently for a minute. Then add a small ladleful of the vegetable broth and let them simmer for 5 minutes or so, until the broth is entirely evaporated and the artichoke is semi-tender.

Now add fava beans and peas, season with salt and pepper, mix, and sauté for another minute.

Braise the vegetables

Add ladleful or two of vegetable broth, enough to almost cover the vegetables. Cover and simmer gently until all your vegetables are nearly tender, usually around 10 minutes.

Now uncover the pot and add the shredded lettuce and (if using) the mint, mix, and continue cooking uncovered until the lettuce has wilted and the vegetables are perfectly tender but not mushy. As you prefer, you can cook off the liquid entirely or leave the dish rather ‘brothy’.

Serve

Serve either warm or, even better, at room temperature. 

Notes

Vignarola isn’t hard to make, but as mentioned at the top, prepping the artichokes and fava beans requires some patience. Once the prep is done, it’s just a matter of making care to add the vegetable in order so they all come out more or less tender but not overcooked by the end.

As in so many of these popular dishes, exact measurements are hardly that important, so take those given here just as rough guides. But do try to balance the ratio of the main vegetable ingredients—artichokes, peas and fava beans—so they balance each other, so roughly equal amounts by weight of each usually works well.

Sourcing the ingredients

Where I’m living, the main trouble I encounter in making la vigarola is sourcing ingredients of acceptable freshness and quality. I won’t belabor the point, since I’ve already ranted ad nauseam in past post about the indifferent quality of fresh artichokes and fresh peas in these parts, if and when you can even manage to find them. That said, over the years I’ve developed workarounds and found substitutes. Here they are, along with tips for trimming those pesky artichokes and fava beans:

Spring onions

Spring onions are a rarity in most of our local supermarkets, but I can usually find them at my local Latino market and sometimes, in season, at the farmer’s market. If you can’t find true spring onions, then scallions (aka green onions) or shallots can substitute.

Artichokes

The most common type of artichoke called for in Roman recipes are the local mammole, roughly equivalent to our globe artichoke, though smaller and less fibrous. Feel free to use globe artichokes, noting that they may need longer cooking. But when I can find them, I prefer baby artichokes for their tenderness and shorter cooking time. In a pinch, frozen artichoke hearts will do, but try to find ones that are not treated with citric or absorb acid, which lend them an unpleasant sourness.

If you’re trimming a globe artichoke, see this post for instructions. And if you’re using baby artichokes, see this one.

Fava beans

Fava beans can be especially very hard to find. My local Whole Foods carries them for a very brief period, but if you have a Latino or Italian market close by, that’s usually a better bet. You can also find them frozen, especially in Latino supermarkets. Otherwise, edamame make for a surprisingly fine substitute. Lima beans can also work, though their taste isn’t quite the same.

Fresh fava beans, it has to be said, are rather fussy to deal with. They grow in pods much like peas, but larger, often much larger, ones. You crack open the pods, then pop out the fava beans. The beans have a peel that can be rather tough, so fava beans are usually peeled. This isn’t difficult but it is rather fussy work. I start from the dimple that you’ll find one the side of the bean, then pry the peel off a bit of the peel with my thumbnail. After that, it’s just a matter of nudging the peel off the rest of the bean with your nail. They say that a brief blanching makes the job easier, but I usually don’t bother.

You can find a useful visual guide to peeling fava beans here.

Now here’s my dirty little secret: I don’t always peel my fava beans unless they’re quite large. Fava beans can vary hugely in size. I sometimes find ones with pods not much larger than pea pods enclosing quite small favas. Those I often don’t bother peeling. Yes, the peels aren’t very tender, but they’re perfectly edible. To decide whether to peel or not, I look at that dimple on the side of the bean. In a more mature bean the inside seam begins to turn dark, creating a kind of line—at that point, it’s best to peel. The photo at left shows beans that need peeling on top and those that don’t (in my humble opinion) below.

Peas

To my mind, frozen peas are perfectly acceptable substitutes and, in my experience, actually preferable to all but the freshest of fresh peas. But be aware that they cook very quickly. You may want to hold them back until a few minutes before you add the lettuce.

Lettuce

The classic lettuce for making vignarola is lattuga romana, which is roughly corresponds to our Romaine lettuce. Lettuga romana, however, is rather younger or more tender than most Romaine lettuce you’re likely to find in supermarkets. Look for baby romaine if you can, or just use the tender green parts of the leaves. I also like to use other, more tender varietals like Boston or Bibb.

Variations

Although the recipe above is pretty much standard, as for so many traditional dishes, there are some variations of la vignarola.

For instance, you can veganize the dish simply by leaving out the cured pork. Even if you’re not a vegan, this is an especially nice variation if you want to serve your vigarola as a side dish.

Some modern recipes get fancy and add that other typical, but more ‘noble’, springtime vegetable, asparagus, to the mix.

Other variations include adding a bit of garlic in addition to the onion, a bit of peperoncino, a few drops of lemon juice and, as mentioned above, a bit of mint, typically the local Roman type called mentuccia. I like adding mint but don’t particularly care for these other variations terribly much. It seems to me that you don’t need the garlic. The hot pepper would utterly overwhelm the delicate, sweet flavors of the spring vegetables. And the vegetables don’t need the tartness lemon would lend to the dish, either.

But hey, that’s me. Don’t let me dissuade you if any of these variations appeal to you.

Broth or water?

If you want to bother preparing the vegetable broth, you can just use water. That’s perfectly fine—and that’s what I used to do myself—but the broth, made with trimming from the same vegetables as the vignarola itself—some artichoke leaves, the fava bean pods and peels, the green tops of the spring onions and perhaps a lettuce leaf or two—adds a subtle but really appealing extra depth of flavor to your vignarola. Although some recipes call for it, personally I’d avoid using a meat broth or even a standard vegetable broth, which to my mind upsets the balance of flavors.

The amount of liquid varies from recipe to recipe. Some call for just a bit to keep the vegetables moist, anything from a few drops to a ladleful, from time to time. Personally, as indicated in the recipe, I like to add a fair amount of water to the pan all at once and allow it to evaporate. I find that this melds the flavors more effectively and saves on the cooking time.

The name vignarola

There name vigarola comes from vigna, which means ‘vine’ in standard Italian. One story has it the dish got its name from the fact that the vegetables that go into it are typically grown in between rows of grapevines. Another story say simply that vigna in Roman dialect is used to mean vegetable garden (orto in standard Italian).

By the way, vignarola is also apparently the name of a kind of bruschetta topped with a lamb and cicoria mixture, an unusual antipasto that I found in a book called Le specialità della cucina romana: ricette tratte dalla tradizionale cucina casalinga. But by far the more common use of the word is for the recipe described above.

Print Recipe

Vignarola

Roman Spring Vegetable Medley

Prep Time30 minutes mins

Cook Time30 minutes mins

Total Time1 hour hr

Course: Antipasto

Cuisine: Lazio

Keyword: braised

Ingredients

• 2 large or 4 baby artichokes (about 250g or 1/2 lb after trimming)
• 250 g (1/2 lb) fava beans
• 250 g (1/2 lb) peas fresh or frozen
• 1/2 small head of lettuce
• 3-4 spring onions
• 100 g (3-1/2 oz) guanciale or pancetta cut into cubes or strips
• Olive oil
• Salt and pepper
• A sprig or two of fresh mint optional

Instructions

Prep the vegetables

• Begin by prepping all your vegetables. Trim and cut the artichoke into thin wedges, following the instructions in this post. Immerse the wedges in acidulated water until needed. If using fresh fava beans in their pods, remove them from their pods and peel off their skins (see Notes for details). If using fresh peas, remove them from their pods as well. Cut and shred your lettuce. Trim the green tops off the spring onions and slice the white bulbs thinly.

Prepare a vegetable broth

• Now make a quick vegetable broth by taking a few handfuls of the scraps from your vegetable prep and adding them to a pot. Cover with water by at least 3cm/1 inch and season generously with salt. Simmer gently for at least 15 minutes.

Sauté the vegetables

• Meanwhile, in a large braiser or sauté pan, lightly sauté the guanciale or pancetta in olive oil, until translucent and just beginning to brown around the edges.
• Add the sliced spring onions and sauté for a minute or two, until they are soft and translucent.
• Add the artichoke wedges to the pot, mix them with the onion and sauté gently for a minute. Then add a small ladleful of the vegetable broth and let them simmer for 5 minutes or so, until the broth is entirely evaporated and the artichoke is semi-tender.
• Now add fava beans and peas, season with salt and pepper, mix, and sauté for another minute.

Braise the vegetables

• Add ladleful or two of vegetable broth, enough to almost cover the vegetables. Cover and simmer gently until all your vegetables are nearly tender, usually around 10 minutes.
• Now uncover the pot and add the shredded lettuce and (if using) the mint, mix, and continue cooking uncovered until the lettuce has wilted and the vegetables are perfectly tender but not mushy. As you prefer, you can cook off the liquid entirely or leave the dish rather ‘brothy’.

Serve

• Serve either warm or, even better, at room temperature.

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