European

In the thirteenth century, when the Angevins reanchored their royal seat from Palermo to Napoli, the latter was illuminated, transformed, by the influx of a luxe new citizenry. Royals, nobles, and government bigwigs were followed by a cadre of the epoch’s great artists. Giotto and Petrarch and Boccaccio ensconced themselves in Napoli. And as they are wont to do, the masses, too, followed, hoping to stay warm, a little warmer even, inside the echoes of the city’s great, new noise. And as much as she did flourish then, also did the misery of her increase. In great part, Napoli starved under the reign of the French kings. While obscenely cinematic festivals were being staged inside the lustrous salons, the Napoletani waited outside each evening for the cooks to wallop out over the castle walls to them the viscera of the lords’ sheep and cows and pigs and goats. And from these mean stuffs did the women and men of Napoli invent their suppers. Among the dishes that became tradition during this time was zuppa di soffritto, a high-spiced potion made from the heart, spleen, and lungs of the pig and still prized by the Napoletani. Here follows a version of the good soup that asks for less exotic parts of the pig.

A simple-to-make and delectable little paste with which to dress just-cooked pasta, to spoon into vegetable soups, to thin with milk or vegetable stock into, itself, a fine soup, to stuff into fat, ripe tomatoes, to present alongside roasted meat or fish, to spread on great chunks of olive-oil-toasted bread, to eat with a spoon while waiting for bread to bake.

Prepare it with only mussels, with only clams, with various types of clams, make it for two of you or for all of you. Carry a great, steamy pot of it outdoors to a table set with candles and backlit by the moon on a cool, almost cold evening, everyone nuzzled in sweaters but still in shorts and sandals, hungry, tired, perhaps, happy. Serve it then, just the way it is offered in the tiny taverns and six-table houses that look to the sea between Amalfi and Positano.

When Napoleon lifted up his brother-in-law Joachim Murat to the throne of Napoli in the early nineteenth century, he wittingly rubbed the gastronomic culture of the city to a high French polish. As the governor of Paris, Murat fixed for himself a popular reputation as gourmand, having conducted the business of his offices more often than not midst the ever-sumptuous, sometimes not-meant-to-be-eaten bas-relief of his banqueting tables. And trailing Murat to Napoli marched legions of French chefs. The great toques were an outlandish platoon, striding about the city’s marketplaces and food shops like so many swells among the rabble and answering only to the title monsieur. The irreverent Napoletani soon punished the word into monzù. But even without the genuflection of the masses, the French masters left rich, culinary impress. In the embrace of their hyperbole, there was nothing too spangled, their dishes mostly unredeemed paroxysms of the baroque in both component and construction. And one of their glory dishes was the timballo—the drum—recalling the high-sided round or oval forms in which the chefs built great, towering pies, as much for table architecture as for their eventual service as dinner. One version of the timballo asked for a deep mold upholstered in sweet short pastry, layered with pasta stuffed with veal sweetbreads, layered with the livers of game and whole fat, musky truffles, all of it robed in a salsa besciamella—béchamel—spiced with cinnamon and nutmeg and cloves. The timballo was roofed then in more pastry, painted with egg wash and baked golden as amber. Here follows a version less awkward to make, less fantastic, perhaps, but no less sublime for its relative restraint. When preparing any one of the cinque brasati di carne con pomodori (page 67), increase the amount so that some might be saved, then used to flavor the timballo.

A while ago, I’d heard from a friend about a tart made with oranges from the groves on the island of Capri, it, once an idyll and now mostly a tourist ruin just seventeen kilometers across the bay from Napoli. Specifically, it was the island’s village of Anacapri that was the scene of my friend’s tart story. She told me that the confection was barely sugared, so perfect were the oranges of its making. She said it was all of a cool cream in the mouth, each little bite of it a sensual, sweet/pungent explosion. She said that even the crust was scented with oranges, perhaps with some locally distilled liqueur of the fruit, and that, too, the crust gave up some soft breath of herb, like wild mint or rosemary. But where in Anacapri, I begged, never having seen the sweet in any pasticceria nor read of it on any menu nor found it perched on any dessert cart. Worse, everyone I asked about the tart shook their heads. “Non c’è una cosa del genere qui, signora.” “There is nothing of that sort here, madam.” This bantering betwixt my friend and I has endured several years. She insists that the tart, indeed, exists. I think it some citrusy half-dream of hers, a tart that should have been, perhaps, but one that never yet was, at least not in Anacapri. And so I baked it, hearing her gurglings and swoonings in my mind at every step. Though I’ve yet to make it for her—she living in Oregon while I’m here in Tuscany—I offer it here and tell you, humbly, of its goodness, of its simple sort of persuasiveness. I think it is the pastry I would make and share and eat on the last day of the world.

Historically the Napoletani have been able and brilliant friggitori—fryers of food. Until only a few years past and sometimes, still, in the quarters of the poor, the very air was thick with the scents of food being crisped to a light gold in boiling oil. The humble kiosks of the friggitori, traditionally wagons fitted with cauldrons, were wheeled about the dank alleyways, the friggitori wailing out the worth of their salty wares, promising them to be “nuvole ricoperte d’un manto dorato”—“clouds mantled in gold.” Sometimes, the offering was a nugget of simple bread dough stretched out and fried, then dusted in sea salt and anointed with oil, other times there might be little croquettes of rice and cheese or fritters of broccoli or artichokes. Often, though, the friggitori brought forth lusciously crunchy half-moons of dough plumped with mozzarella and known as panzarotti. Our favorite kiosk sits, still, in front of the Pizzeria Bellini, just down the street from the Accademia delle Belli Arti in Via Costantinopoli, a tiny quiver of space where one can stand, at nine in the morning, even, to bite at hot, too hot, savories while listening to two violins, a viola, a violoncello, and a Baroque guitar working through Boccherini. Here follows a version of panzarotti made from course dough rolled thin, laid with mozzarella, pecorino, and bits of salty meat or tomato or anchovy, folded over and cast into whorls of bubbling oil.

Perhaps the essence of Campania is this, of the countryside, of the pastoral innocence of the good, pure foods one eats there. Search, beg, grow, procure these few ingredients, first eating them with your eyes, dashing all record of plastic mozzarella and dusty-fleshed fruit masquerading as a tomato. This is not a recipe as much as it is quiet illustration of one fine way to eat in Italian.

This illuminates the pervasive Napoletano mastery over vegetables, the charred, sweet flesh of the peppers invigorated by the brine of the capers and olives, excited by the potency of the garlic and the pecorino, all of it hushed, then, by the raisins and the bread.

An island off Napoli’s great bay is Ischia. Wild rabbits thrived there once and some still do for a while, before the clever Ischitani sack them, whipping them into old terra-cotta pots, flattering their dry, scant flesh into rosemaried silk.

This was and is still the dish every Napoletano wishes to come home to for Sunday lunch. There have been sonnets written to its lush sauce, to the perfumes of it curling down to the alleyways below, signaling that, at least for a day, all would be well for that family. The tomato, after its long, slow courting with the red wine, takes on a sort of rusted ebony tint, a beautiful rich color the Napoletani, with their keenness for flourish, are wont to call “black.”

Though the ancient origins of pasta are likely Egyptian, it was inside the eternal Saturnalia of fifteenth-century Napoli where the simple stuff began its story as an everyday comfort against the hungers of the southern Italian poor. Crafted and cooked and dispatched from painted wagons spirited through the city’s boisterous alleyways— they were exuberant vehicles of rescue enrobed in garlicky vapors, for nearly everyone could sport the price of a portion of il carrettiere’s belly-warming wares, hence thwarting the troll for yet a few more hours. Typically, il carrettiere prepared his long, thick cords of dried pasta by dragging them through a warmed coalescence of olive oil, ravishingly perfumed with garlic, oregano, and peperoncino. Should one have been so flush as to call for cacio, his dose would have been handsomely dusted with the piquant pecorino of Crotone in Calabria. The formula stayed safe through time, its solace radiating north and south, where still some one or another version of pasta all’ aglio, olio, e peperoncino prevails as cure for surfeit now as much as for want, but always, one hopes, with homage to il carrettiere. As rudimentary as this dish is, don’t mistake it for one whose elements might be collected without care. One needs crisp, sharp, juicy garlic and a fine extra-virgin oil. That little bottle in the cupboard with the blue or red top that is older than the Flood and smells only of dust is no longer oregano. And the pure, clean fire that comes from a small, whole dried chile pepper crushed between your thumb and fingers can rarely be had from flakes of them long-ago collected in jars.

The town of Scanno is bedded quaintly on a valley floor near the tortuous Gole del Sagittario—a mountain road called the “Throat of Sagittarius,” on the fringes of the Parco Nazionale degli Abruzzi, a national park and nature reserve. Bespeaking eloquently its Late Renaissance and Baroque past, its little streets and alleyways are warmed by artisans working in gold and silver and lacemakers with their small wooden hoops. The women—many of them, rather than only an archaic few—toddle through the enchanted tableau of the old village on Sundays garbed in long black skirts that rustle their arrival, their hair swept up in gorgeous and ornate headdresses of lace and velvet, their arms comforted in black woolen capes. Theirs is no quaint, historic burlesque. They are wearing the clothes that please them, that are faithful to their images of themselves, that honor their heritage. They are at their ease. A poetically costumed nonna (grandmother) admonishes her young grandson—in jeans and a T-shirt, his hair falling in soft brown curls below his shoulders—to be neither late nor in a hurry for Sunday dinner before she disappears through the small, humble portal of her home. Scanno, if one watches her carefully, will give view to a life inviolate. And these are her traditional biscuits, all chewy and full of spiced Renaissance perfumes and savors, lovely with good red wine, especially when it’s warmed and spiced with pepper and cloves, or, in summer, a little goblet of sweet, iced moscato.

Traditionally, the gatekeep of an apartment building in Napoli is a widow or a widower of a certain age, one of whose missions, as spiritual guardian of the palazzo, is to slot the mail—after fastidious palpating of its contents, lifting it to the light of the sun, trawling it for heretical intelligence, and generally shadowing the recipient’s movements by it, to diligently rouse, invent, and unbosom internal gossip. The good gatekeep only breaks from these industries to stir at or baste some one of his legendary little potions, all of which signal to the tenants as they cross the threshold what will be the old watchdog’s supper.

It was not often,that one was plump enough in the purse to buy a kilo or so of meat from the butcher, carry it home, and cook it up into some luscious, soulful dish. When fortune placed in one’s purse a few centesimi more than were necessary for subsistence, one sought out the carnacottaro (an itinerant seller of cooked meat).

It seems unclear why a dish characteristic of Napoli should be called after a Ligurian port. Some say it’s because a Genovese sailor cooked it for some locals and the goodness of it was hailed throughout the hungry city. Others will tell you that Genovese is nothing more than a torturing of Ginevrina—of Geneva—hence giving a Swiss chef, one from the tribe of the Bourbons’ monzù, no doubt, credit for the sauce (page 84). The truth of its origins, adrift forever, holds less fascination, I think, than the patently simple recipe and the lovely, lush sort of texture the meat takes on from its long, slow dance in the pot.

Beautiful breakfast biscuits with hot anisette-sparkled milk, caffè, or cioccolata calda.

An ancient practice to conserve some windfall of fish or vegetables is to fry them in good olive oil and tuck them under coverlets of bread crumbs into a vinegary bath. The addition of saffron is a fillip only half a century old, when the golden pistils began to be prized beyond their value as a pharmaceutical (page 58). A dish made traditionally also in Puglia, I think the Abruzzesi hands fashion the most luscious versions. Zucchini or eggplant may be treated in the same way as the fish.

Insalata di Pesce Dove il Mare Non C’è (A Salad of Fish in a Place where there is no Sea). Though the Teramani, in truth, live not so far from the sea, their cuisine is one of the interior, of the highlands, with sea fish playing an insignificant part. And so when we were served this divine little salad in a backstreet osteria in Teramo, it proved a light, breezy surprise for an early spring lunch. When we asked the old chef why he had made such an unexpected dish, he answered that sometimes, even in a place where there is no sea, one can have a desire to eat some good, bracing, and briny-tasting fish.