Splendours and mysteries of ancient Naples

Margherita lives in Naples, a superb city on the Mediterranean sea, on the Tirrenic coast of Italy. For her  rich and good cuisine is synonymous with joy, pleasure, party, family, friends and guests. We still find here the ancestral meaning of Neapolitan gastronomy consisting principally of "exteriors",  an experience to be shared mainly in the streets. Hospitality still has the same charm as it had in ancient Greece, where the presence of a new guest made everything magic and sublime. Naples shows its ancient and legendary imagination: we can distinguish between different culinary cultures because of the several peoples that settled here. From the Greeks from Partenope of Eschio, to the Romans of NeaPolis (from which the name of the street in which our Cesarina lives comes), from the French to the Spaniards, from the Normans to the Arabs. Margherita tells us that the spectacular Neapolitan cuisine has also been mentioned in literature: writers such as Matilde Serao, Giuseppe Marotta and Eduardo De Filippo and poets like Salvatore Di Giacomo have immortalized meals and inventions, protagonists and personalities.

Our Cesarina's gastronomic interest began in her childhood when she watched her grandmother Margherita who, even with the leftovers, was able to create very special meals. Also her grandmother Clorinda who cleverly used the Artusi recipe book, and grandfather Roberto who jealously kept the secret of the jam recipes and the art of embellishing and laying the table. Her passion, authentic and veracious, is however derived from the street, from the vasciaiole, those wonderful luxuriant ladies that live in the lower part of the streets and who, with their tasty food, perfumed the neighbourhood.  Margherita has inherited from them the very old recipe for pane cotto cu ll'uoglio, a soup of stale bread in a stock which has few but very tasty ingredients. It was even painted by Caravaggio in his "Seven works of Mercy".  This was the meal that, during the Second World War, fed the children that are seventy years old today and who at the time left their streets for the big cities.

The recipe has been handed down to her by Donna Amalia, a seventy year oldl lady who has been living for 55 years in the same "basso".  She is considered to be the "Director" of the street; she knows everything about her neighbours but she is always discrete. The meal is served with 'nzalata e rinforzo, a salad of cabbage and vegetables with anchovies and olives, a typical Christmas dish that is also prepared throughout the year.

The zuppa ‘e fasule, a soup of beans with crostini of "cafone" bread, typical "loaf" cooked in a firewood oven that it is very different from the other southern Italian types of bread, as it is unmarked on its surface.  Margherita serves us ‘A pizza do’ monaco, stale bread in milk, with beaten eggs and cheese cut into small pieces, that in Naples have always been excellent, and ‘A pizza do’ puvuriello,  stale breadcrumbs with salted anchovies, tomatoes and grated cheese. These pizza breads, that differ from the famous pizza known all over the world, that with tomato, are served with ‘A cianfotta, a mix of peppers, aubergines, potatoes and tomatoes.

In  Naples, it is said, tha the tomato is "a half religion"; certainly the quality is excellent and they are used in almost every recipe. Margherita tells us that the use of this vivid fruit which is full of vitamins is relatively recent. It was brought to Europe, and afterwards to Italy, from Peru or Mexico after the discovery of America. But then it was largely ignored for two centuries.  It was mentioned for the first time in 1743, in a Carnival song, but only at the end of the XVIII century and beginning of the XIX did it become a common ingredient in a lot of recipes and its cultivation was so widespread that it became one of the most important products of Campania.   

On the table we then have different kinds of local salumi, provole and mozzarella, the queen of cheeses,  the sweet tender product of buffalo milk will be served with a local Vesuvius wine.  Finally, Grandmother Maria's sponge cake with cream and fruit together with Aunt Margherita's limoncello (a lemon liqueur) which is made from Grandmother Maria's lemons.