Vegetable

...in the Manner of Saint Mary of the Bath.

Made from handmade whole wheat or egg pasta cut into wide ribbons—half of which are sautéed until golden in garlic and chile-scented oil then, along with the poached pasta, tossed with roasted almonds and chickpeas softened in a rosemary, garlic, and bay-scented bath. It is a beauty, the crisp, garlic-scented pasta against the soft, delicate ribbons of it with the mealy, nutty little chickpeas and the bitter almonds stitching them together into a plateful of fantasy conjured from homey stuffs.

A smoky char permeates the potatoes and the onions and this, fusing with the brininess of the capers and olives and anchovies, gives up luscious flavors.

Orecchiette—little ears—are a pasta made from grano duro, or semolina, and served often with a rough sauce of cima di rape, the bitter leaves of a variety of Italian turnip not always available in America. Do not mistake them for young broccoli, as some do. Should the real thing not be at hand, it is a better business to substitute dandelion or beet or turnip greens or red chard or even to make the sauce only with cauliflower, especially the grassy-green, purply-edged Roman variety.

A gastronomic heirloom of the coast, this is a humble recipe made from the bits and pieces of what was at hand, sometimes eaten as a principal dish or a contorno, a side dish, other times as a sweet. It is still presented— though in dramatically different versions—in cherished places such as Da Gemma in Amalfi. This take, however, is lighter, less vegetal than most of those with which we’ve been presented, the trick being the absolute thinness of the eggplant slices. This enables them to blend better with the other components, all of them then settling down together into a nicely married sort of flavor and texture. More eccentric than it is bizarre, this version of the ancestral dish turns out to be quite luscious.

Six hundred years before Christ, the Greeks raised up a grand colony on the verges of the Mar Tirreno, dedicating it to Poseidon. Now known as Paestum, the whole cadence of life, as it was then and there, sits in high relief, a phenomenal diorama, traceable, floating, gleaming. The great temples, barely wounded and without a haunting, invite one inside to stay among the rests of old dreams, to race among the open pathways between them. A cordial parish, a fair Camelot, it seems, while one sits awhile on the thick tufts of grass inside the Temple of Neptune, having slipped under the easy gate to watch the sunrise, to collect armfuls of the tall, thin spears of asparagus that grow wild, treasures to take back to Alfonso to cook for lunch. He, having spent the morning gathering clams, combined the collected booty with fusilli di Felitto—beautiful pasta, hand-rolled then wound, one string at a time, around the traditional, corkscrew-shaped wires, used and prized like jewels, by the women of the nearby village of Felitto. Dishes that marry wild vegetables with sea or shellfish are typical of the Cilentini, they thinking it a thing natural to prepare their suppers with stuffs foraged from woods that fall down to the sea.

In the autumn, as schools of swordfish swam south into the Bay of Policastro, the fishermen of the Cilento were often their conquerors, luring the great fish with oil-soaked bread and hauling them up from the sea—porting them like vanquished kings, high atop their heads up the steep paths from the water—to their camps to roast them or smoke them over smoldering fires of pine and olive and citrus woods. Sometimes, the Cilentini cured the fish under salt and foraged grasses and spiceberries, dousing the flesh with their own rough-made spirits. Served a dish such as this, one could think it the offering of some cultivated chef, yet, then and there, it was nothing more than the improvised handiwork of hungry men.

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.

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.

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.

This is the poorest of dishes for the days when the seas are as empty as one’s belly, when even the clams have forsaken one. Fashioned from seawater—sometimes bits of seaweed—a tomato or two, some fat, firm garlic, a dried red chile, and a thread of good oil or a spoonful of sweet, rendered pork fat, hoarded from an easier day.

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.

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.

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.