In front of the sea, on the Caracciolo promenade, the Neapolitan cuisine to taste also with one’s eyes

Colleagues in a secondary school in the province of Naples, our Cesarine are two teachers bound by a great mutual esteem on the working plane, that has become a strong friendship made of support, common interests and confidences. Assunta and Rosanna, able of fruitful co-operation at school, have found the same understanding in the kitchen. Assunta, lover of the cuisine of Naples, is side by side with Rosanna and her good taste and courtesy. The first one recovers her grandmother’s and mother’s recipes, safeguarding tradition, the second cares the table setting and the warm welcome of their guests, as usually and typically happens in Naples.

To cook and have guests: more than a hobby, for these Cesarine it’s a way to be together, to relax, to keep up with the times as concerns both their dishes’ origins and the new trends in the table setting, traditional as well as always different. This event is a mixture of cooking and style: how to eat well, also with one’s eyes.

The start doesn’t betray your expectations. Delicious nests of tart pastry are served: influenced by the French tradition, they are nevertheless Neapolitan to all intents and purposes. The filling is made of aubergines, absolutely from Campania, long and dark, peas and eggs, all ingredients always present in the Neapolitan Easter lunch. The dish is accompanied by an aperitif with sparkling wine and fruit in season.

The Cesarina Assunta tells us that the vermicelli with courgettes and fresh ricotta cheese are her family’s version of the vermicielle che cucuzzielle, typical dish of the Neapolitan cuisine in the post-war period, made of simple and not expensive ingredients: “being impossible to buy Parmigiano cheese, my grandmother used ricotta cheese in its place; this dish is so tasty that at home, from then on, we use to prepare it this way”.

A meatloaf filled with friarielli and a potato pie follow: the friarielli, typical Neapolitan product, are little broccoli with newly developed inflorescences, and are so named from the Neapolitan verb frijere (to fry), because they are cooked directly in the pan with garlic, oil, salt and paprika, without boiling.

This second course will be also accompanied by tasty peppers, of the “papacella” variety. This last is characterized by little, slightly flattened and costate berries. The pulp is typically sweet and the fragrance is strong. You’ll taste the peppers filled with crumb, capers, black olives, anchovies and other delicious but “secret” ingredients.

The sweet, the babà, that arrived in Naples with the Monsù, is a symbol of this town. Its origin seems to be “royal”. The Poland king Stanislao Leszczinski, once deposed, and being father-in-law of Louis the 15th of France, received the dukedom of Lorraine as a palliative… It was a poor consolation, so he tried to find new consolation every day in the sweets. His pastry-cooks often offered him the “kughelup”, a sweet the king considered a little “dry”. Accustomed to the wines of Meuse and Moselle, pride of the Lorraine, and to something also stronger like rum, he decided that this strong liquor, extracted from the sugar cane and imported by the Antilles, might transform the yellow tasteless leavened pastry into something fragrant and stirring. Once tasted, it couldn’t be forgotten. And if tasted in front of the sea, on the Caracciolo promenade…