The KitchenThe complex historical events to justify this region on one side the French and Spanish influences of the preparations of the dishes that were eaten at tables of the rich, very showy, very scenic and often substantial, but also justify the poor kitchen, the one reserved to the people where excel vegetables and dairy products, which is almost absent from the meat and fish is reserved for parties.A region in which the poor were really poor and the rich lived a life of pleasure palaces and castles of the nobles and of course, the court of the Kingdom, has had over the centuries a kitchen divided by wealth without the possibility of reciprocal influences entrusted to the imagination of the poor People first, the second to the great cooks.
One character in common is the variety of dishes that in this land were developed through the centuries, making the cuisine of the Campania Region is particularly rich in inventive dishes of fruit for the poor and the rich abundance for that.The latter is housed in the historical texts written in Italy in 1400 and especially during the Renaissance. So Christopher Messisbugo that although probably born in Flanders in the early decades of the sixteenth century has been active as a steward at the court of Este, and he had a great reputation that it deserves to be created Earl Palatine by Charles V (January 1533).In the part of his work devoted to recipes are foods of various origins among whom there are those of Neapolitan cuisine, first of all macaroni. In fact, he writes: "To make ten dishes of macaroni to the Neapolitan." "Take eight pounds of grain flour, and mollena (= bread) in a large bread Boffetto, mogliato (= made springs bath) in rose water, and four fresh eggs, and four ounces of zuccaio; and well knead everything together, and good for your pasta, menandola for a while. Then it'll spoil more quickly grossette that thin and narrow strips in tagliarai longhette; and do that are fairly made. Then cook them in boiling fat broth, and imbandirai them in dishes or on top of capons or anadre or otherwise, with sugar and cinnamon inside and upstairs. And for them days of fish, cook them in water with no butter, or fresh butter, if you want. "As for the historical information on the wines of this area is valuable letter of Sante Lancerio (who lived in the sixteenth century), written to Cardinal Guido Ascanio Sforza about the nature and quality of wines.Among those cited many come from the Naples region. So the "Sum of Greek," the "Greek of Posilico (= Posillipo)," the "Ischia Greek," the "Tower of Greek," etc.. Interesting how he writes the "Wine Sucano": "It's back to Rome and some mules. These wines are for the most part red, and t is perfect wine yes for the winter and for the state. Sucano is a castle two miles away from Orvieto, and after the wine has no equal Monterano drink red wine. These wines are fragrant, beautiful and polputi (= hale, a lot of substance) rather than the Monterano, but do not have much odor. To want to know their perfection, wants to be fragrant, beautiful and not sour. There are very white models are perfect for the winter, with a hint of sweetness, but want to be biting, not fat nor matrosi. Wanting the red for the summer, you want to seize raw, and both old vines, because the old vineyard has this property, that if the wine is sweet and keeps it if he does keep it dry, the young woman does the opposite. This wine S. S. drank it willingly, especially when he was in Orvieto. Captain Jeronimo Benincasa (= historical character undetectable; is probably an official of the Curia, the time of Paul III) was good stock, and had it brought to Rome and on the go. "This is followed by "The Mangiaguerra" so called because very strong, "Wine of Salerno," the "Holy Wine of San Severino" and the "Aglianico wine." A rich production that demonstrates the fertility of this land and the winemaking skills of its people.The Lancerio in describing these wines also provides us with news about the reality of the Kingdom of Naples: Wine Fistigno speaking thus writes: "It is red and the Kingdom of Naples, from a place above the mountain of Somma. This question Fistignano wine than the grape vine or fate. In this place are very red grape vines et erborate and sweet, and the wine is ripe and sweet and full of color. There are still very dry and are of excellent wines. To want to know their wants to be perfect drain of color has et wrist (= force), that is strong, or soft (= weak, watery) or matroso, and above all to have scent. Of these wines, S. S. drank gladly and gave him honor. The best wine that you face is the possession of Archbishop Domenico Terracina, but is rare in Rome, because the Viceroy want it for them, and certainly it is a good drink. "In the same years that he lived Scappi well in his work refers to the Neapolitan cuisine for example when it provides the recipe "To make cake real pigeons from 'Neapolitan pizzas of this lady's mouth" or "To make cake with different subjects, from 'said the Neapolitan pizza "that has nothing to do with the famous pizza in the twentieth century has had so much luck in the world. He writes: "Abbisi six ounces of loving ambrosine monde, and married four ounces of pine nuts worlds and three ounces of fresh Dattoli devoid of souls, and three ounces of fresh figs, three ounces of raisins soulless, and every thing pestisi in the mortar, sometimes sbruffandole water rose, so that is like pasta; giungasi materials with them eight fresh raw egg yolks, six ounces of zuccaio, track an ounce of cinnamon, one ounce and a half Neapolitan Mostaccioli Musk made powder, four ounces of rose water, and that will be made of everything in a composition, despite the pan with a abbisi browse marzipan et peeled the twisted about not too big, and mettasi composition in the pan , mixed with four ounces of butter, making it not be more of a finger, and put it to cook without being covered in the oven and serve hot and cold water as desired. In it you can make pizza topped with all sorts. "At the close of the seventeenth century The steward of the modern Latin Marches Antonio seems to mark the end of the hegemony exercised by the Italian gastronomic literature and represent, for an obscure consciousness of the author, the "summa" of all the previous literature, from the beginnings of humanistic gastronomy treaties of Messisbugo of Panunto, Scappi of Cervio, and Stefani, to mention only the major Renaissance age. He says the large size of the Treaty and witness the best summary of the topics, which are counted as 'the art of good arrange banquets, "" the rules more choices scalcherai, "" the noble and easy way to chop' , making roasts, stews, casseroles, soups, morsels, soups, fried pies, tarts, pizzas, sauces, flavors, vinegars, preserves, "the way of triumph," "well imbandire of the boards," " to know the degrees of quality 'of individual foods together with the name of their "inventors" and a catalog of fruits and wines, followed, in the second part, a treaty to package meatless dishes.He also mentioned the Neapolitan cuisine for example, proposing the soup "leaf Neapolitan" for which he dwells in many details. "Although I did mention n'abbia flat composite panels, it seemed to me good to put in the number of soups to be this delicious and very popular. You take a chicken and starts to boil together with the cow, when it will be more than half cooked, so that by the hen does not destroy it, and you are put into salted pork tongues, but boiled, salted meat, which was first soaking , a soppressata (a type of sausage place in pressure between two plates), a piece of thread, a piece of pork belly, bones coamings, annoglio (anduglia = o, from the French andouille, sort of stuffed sausage meat into small pieces and of shredded intestines), a piece of lard with the salt, in proportion, and when will the aforesaid robbe cooked, put the broth in a saucepan that will collect, cut into slices and robbe the above said the hen or capon, taking every What part, put in the broth of third sudetta cut stuff, and then stuffed v'aggiungerai torzi, bucks (= pumpkin) and onions also stuffed with veal beaten egg yolks, a little crumb of bread soaked in broth, passarina, fussy, in his time, and the berries of verjuice pastume (= paste) that you have made will serve to fill all the above said Robbe, with the usual spices and fragrant herbs. You can also add lettuce or endive stuffed, the other meat that will be stayed, sitting comfortably with the anderai order inside the pot or another pot of fairing framezzata with fettarelle filled with zizza (= breast) before boiling, sausage, split half, remove them his skin, thin slices of Parmesan grated cheese and well, fonghi of Genoa, the first desalted and boiled with bones sills, warning that the stock is good, it will be a soup of good taste and can be done in any conversation (= friendly meeting) that will always succeed sudette tasty when you observe the rules, and many times I did bring this soup to the table with all the pot you can view and taste better and you can share the dishes. "He also teaches us "To walk half a barrel of water (= sweet beans), so called in Naples." "Wilt take steps to sixteen pounds of grapes doraca (= duracina), spaccherai them diligently, after the split you put them in a half barrel, having prepared a kettle of water on the fire and when it boils well put in at half barrel, closing it and rolling it several times well below and above them so that by the mixing steps; afterwards pull him leave to stay close to the fire for a day et night, but afterwards pull the wind to put in place where the sun does not give, and after eight or ten days, according to the cold, you start to drink because it will puole pigliato the razzente (= spicy flavor). This water is pectoral (= is good for diseases of the chest) and friendly, you can drink freely without suspicion of harm, you must do them for the winter cold weather. "By the seventeenth century French cuisine thus exerts its dominance over the Italian which also follows from the lexicon of great gourmet chefs like the Neapolitan Vincenzo Corrado (1734-1836) which, while revealing a great fidelity to the practice of traditional Italian cuisine, does not disdain to use in his work The chef gallant French terms italianizzandoli sometimes at the cost of compromising understanding.In this work we find a great number of recipes like those of the Neapolitan pies, vegetables, fish and hunt with the various proposals such as for cooking the thrushes: "The flesh of these birds is an excellent flavor, and indeed the estimate between birds the best. Their season begins in the month of October and lasts far down as January.Roasted thrushes. The tastiest dish that you can do will make them roasted thrushes models in various ways, that is wrapped in net decked with slices of pork or bacon or ham around and even with bay leaves or in fine decked with olive oil and lemon juice and then served with the taste of Capparini. Become even roasted parmesan, well greased with butter and served with Parmesan crust.Imboracciati (= breaded and fried). Bleached thrushes in broth, cut the wings and feet, after s'infarinano is golden brown in egg and roll in bread crumbs and Parmesan cheese, fry them to serve them with fried sage around.The peasant. They cook in the thrushes istufa with good gravy, a sense of garlic, bay leaves, sage and thyme, served with a sauce of ham and shallots trite.Florentine. Cooked the thrushes in beef broth with garlic, and bay leaves, you Servino coli with white beans, spinach, where models are in butter.For entremets. They cook in the thrushes wine with bay leaves, cinnamon and cloves and after Whole Servino is cold sauce with raisins and Malvasia. "But we can not forget the precious preparations offered by Francesco Leonardi in his The modern Apicius, a true culinary encyclopedia, neatly distributed in six volumes and preceded by an introduction in which for the first time it's a plotted history of Italian cuisine, reconstructed from 'the Roman era to the times of the author, through the moments of its greatest fortune - during the age of the Renaissance - and through the subsequent involution to determine the hegemony exercised by the French gastronomy. The author, "cook to Her Majesty Catherine II, Empress of all the Russias," shows a remarkable experience of foreign cuisines, not only of Russia but also of Poland, Turkey, Germany, England and France, widely documented in his recipe and in the large catalog of foreign wines, but at the same time he emphasizes his interest in recording the culinary uses of the various Italian regions and cities, so as to provide a rich repertoire on.Neapolitan cuisine reminiscent of the "soup of all kinds of herbs to the Neapolitan", but also the rissoles (= pancakes) and many other dishes well known to him.Only with the new work entitled The stove Vincenzo Agnoletti one begins to consider the kitchen the poorest of all the Italian regions and a version of Neapolitan pizza that reminds you all know: "When you have formed a paste like Easter (= kind of pastry), but with a pound of lard and a pound of sugar, you will mix slices of ham, cheese horse (= cheese), and the streaky provature (= fresh cheese made from buffalo milk) , then you will form the pizza and you will cook like any other. "As for the pizza rustica suggests: "When you put the yeast with two pounds of flour, after ten hours you will add another two pounds, four eggs, four ounces of sugar, a pinch of salt, ten ounces of lard, warm water discretion and slices of mozzarella, ham or bacon. Then make the pizza and when it is leavened cook and serve it as usual. This dough can also do without the egg. "Another recipe that appears in this work is that of "zeppole (= crostoli) of semolella (= made of oatmeal) to the Neapolitan," a kind of pancakes fried in lard and sprinkled with sugar.Today the differentiation between the kitchen and opulent popular cuisine is almost nonexistent because many dishes disappeared with the evolution of taste and having shortened the distances of taste and economic opportunities between the various layers of the population, although it is often difficult to reconstruct the derivation of various preparations.Neapolitan cuisine, so sunny, imaginative, dramatic, has not escaped the rule of entering in the literature: writers such as Matilde Serao, Giuseppe Marotta, Eduardo De Filippo, Salvatore Di Giacomo as poets have immortalized dishes and inventions, and character actors. Thus, to speak of Neapolitan cuisine (which summarizes the whole region) without mentioning these illustrious names is almost impossible to say what the "sauce" after Marotta has dedicated one of the most memorable chapters of Gold of Naples? Traditional preparation, or at least Sunday festive, this sauce that, together with the pizza, the peak of gastronomy, cooking requires first ending. "From the earliest hours of the morning a steam tender bids farewell to terracotta pots in which the onion becomes blonde and exhales its noble essences just picked a sprig of basil on the windowsill." So begins the poem in prose that dedicates the incomparable Don Peppino sauce that will season what is the true heart of Naples at any meal: pasta. Because the result is what should be and not the common meat with tomato sauce, the sauce should never be left alone at any stage of cooking, because "a ragout sauce ceases to be a neglected and in fact loses any chance of becoming" . Carefully chosen piece of meat - neither fat nor thin - that is the basis of the recipe, you put it in the pan first browning watching and then spreading the first layer of preserves. Others follow "a scientific intervals", then come into play and the spoon on fire: the first very slow, the second expert, responsive to understand when to intervene. And finally here's the steaming bowl on the table ready and the meat sauce, red and aromatic, that "throbs in the macaroni as blood in his veins."At the base of it, as we have seen, there is an ingredient that deserves a speech to himself, the tomato. Vivid, vitamins, available to join thousands of other flavors, it is natural to ask how it was possible to do without it for so many centuries. The use of tomato is relatively recent: and then came to Europe from Peru in Italy or Mexico after the discovery of America and was ignored for two centuries in terms of food. It is mentioned for the first time in 1743 in a song of carnival, but only in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth became common to many recipes and cultivation spread to become one of the most important in Campania.In Naples - it was said - the tomato is "half a religion", of course, the quality is excellent and very frequent use. In Naples, the canning industry has arisen that has taken him around the world famous "peeled" and "concentrate" of tomatoes. Many methods are also the home to keep it from bottled tomatoes, cut to pieces or ready to be passed to many different uses, the famous "preserved" in which the tomatoes are stewed until it becomes a creamy dark and velvety.Fresh and juicy tomatoes recline on the pizza because their flavor is joining in wonderful agreement with that of mozzarella and anchovies. The pizza, the most famous creation of the whole Neapolitan cuisine, is an invention far more remote epoch of the tomato, in fact it is among the oldest ever. A first type of pizza made in Roman times, and was a kind of flat bread wheat. But pizza par excellence, that bright tomato, sizzling and playful as any other food, has little more than two hundred years. It soon became popular with the populace, but also among the barons and principles dominated the receptions of the Bourbons, who were greedy, and Ferdinand IV came to cook it in the ovens of Capodimonte, the same ones from which came the precious artistic ceramics.Even the rulers of Piedmont let themselves be conquered by this humble southern food: it was for Margaret of Savoy in 1889 that the pizza maker Raffaele Esposito created a pizza patriotic "flag" in which white, red and green were made of mozzarella, tomato and basil, and that then it is called just "pizza Margherita". There are many varieties of pizza: the four cheeses, seafood, olives, marinara, but the presence of tomato, at least in Naples, is almost fixed.Today, pizza and pizza are everywhere magical names: abroad are often signs of places to try to reconstruct the idea or illusion, picturesque and stereotyped, Italy away.Because everyone likes the pizza, it's cheap, it fills the stomach and "fixes" in short, a lot of occasions, is often done at home with ease. It is a good and happy, of course, but will never be like that of the large wood-burning oven, the pizza maker who created, with skilful hand, flatten the dough disc, thinner at the center than at the edges, and with rapid movements will spread the ingredients already prepared, and he pours the oil, then with a big bang and puts it on the blade slides into the oven at the right heat, stirring as you cook until evenly throughout, with another shot, again with the shovel and the finally put the pot of luck which, even before eating, can savor with eyes all the warm, exuberant beauty. The Neapolitan, if it is a real expert, the four-fold "booklet" and eats with his hands.Other glories of Neapolitan cuisine which is half of the kitchen floor (pasta, vegetables, dairy products) and half of the sea (fish, crustaceans, molluscs), are the dishes of magnificent vegetables of Campania, such as peppers or eggplant parmigiana fillings. Substantial, real "dishes" are numerous and always good. Among the fish recipes, excel the "octopus at Luciana", so called from the popular neighborhood of whom were born in Saint Lucia, cooked with chili peppers and the ubiquitous tomato. Among the merchandise of the sumptuous, a typical character of the street and the "theater" of Naples, are the "clams" to deserve the prize: fleshy and aromatic give rise to a delicious soup and seasoned "macaroni" and "noodles".The variety of Neapolitan pasta is such that would justify a separate chapter. The pasta was not invented in Naples, but certainly there has been increased to the highest degree of perfection and here, to be precise in Gragnano, only a few kilometers from the capital, has found a way to dry them and store it, thus giving rise to industrial production with Italian food there is. As the raw material is durum wheat, very difficult to mix and work, the Neapolitans rely with confidence to their industrial pastes and do not feel at all - as in other regions - the dough should be good to be home made. In fact the pasta in Naples is extraordinary both for its quality and for the perfection of cooking, which must be correctly "al dente", and seasoning. From the classic "pummarola" to simple "garlic and uoglio" until the whole exhibition of sauces accompanied with vegetables or seafood and the apotheosis of the sauce, the creativity of the South gives a brilliant account of itself.Important presence of Neapolitan cuisine and bell are dairy products. Provolone, scamorza, caciocavallo, ricotta often appear on the table and enter in the preparation of many dishes, but the queen of cheese is the "mozzarella", the cool, sweet, tender product spun paste made from buffalo milk. The production is mainly concentrated in the area of ??Aversa, Battipaglia, Capua, Eboli, Sessa Aurunca: anyone who comes around here will find something that will stay etched in her memory of taste! A variety of mozzarella are the "burrielli" nuggets like sweeter stored in earthenware jars and dipped in milk. Unfortunately the real buffalo mozzarella is now very rare, so he often uses cow's milk: the result is called "mozzarella", less rich in flavor.There is also a series of Neapolitan cuisine in dishes that date back to the tradition of the court or the actual "school", inspired by the French, which was followed by a group of noble families, especially in the nineteenth century. It created so recipes in which they met and refined French ingredients and customs typically Neapolitan. It came out very elaborate and spectacular inventions: the hosts relied on the direction and pack their lunches expert cooks who became famous. Among their preparations, the most famous is the "sartù," a timbale of rice stuffed with chicken livers, sausages, meatballs, mozzarella, peas and topped with meat sauce, or, in the "white" with white sauce. Another triumph is the timbale of macaroni with meat sauce.Sure, these elaborate and precious creations were far from simple cuisine of the people, who nevertheless continued to reap success in the alleys and trattoriole sea as in restaurants and hotels. The Neapolitan street urchin or baron, likes the same macaroni with "pummarola 'n cup" or clams, maybe eaten outdoors with the sun filtering through a pergola and a view of the famous bay in the eye.The most classic desserts of Naples are those who once ate: ice cream, "baba", spumoni, "puffs", "bagels" and the magnificent "pastiera", the cake is the manifestation of the time at Easter, with the fresh ricotta and orange blossom, cinnamon and candied fruit.The food in Naples is made primarily of "external", the show is an experience to share with someone face to the public. From "fry and eat", the many products of the local deli, the various "hobbies" that are offered at the kiosks or stands and which are eaten at any time during the day (seafood, pizzas, sandwiches, pancakes). Naples shows as always to those who wants to see its ancient, legendary fantasy.
