{"id":145973,"date":"2020-07-07T11:37:27","date_gmt":"2020-07-07T15:37:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=145973"},"modified":"2020-07-07T13:21:31","modified_gmt":"2020-07-07T17:21:31","slug":"how-neapolitan-cuisine-took-over-the-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/07\/07\/how-neapolitan-cuisine-took-over-the-world\/","title":{"rendered":"How Neapolitan Cuisine Took Over the World"},"content":{"rendered":"

Edward White\u2019s monthly column, \u201cOff Menu<\/a>,\u201d serves up lesser-told stories of chefs cooking in interesting times.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

When a devastating cholera pandemic reached Italy in 1884, the disease took its heaviest toll on the sharp-edged, unpolished jewel of Naples. The authorities\u2019 response was disastrous, and as panic and anger rose, a conspiracy theory circulated that the suffering was an orchestrated attack on the city\u2019s poor. Physicians and public health officials were attacked in the street; a popular rumor had it that doctors received twenty lire for each person they bumped off, and that some were greedily chucking patients who were still alive onto funeral wagons. One man was arrested for inciting rebellion when he spread the notion that tomatoes, a symbol of Neapolitan peasant identity and a staple nourishment, were being laced with poison.<\/p>\n

The discord caused alarm in the government. The Risorgimento\u2014the movement behind the creation of a single, unified Italian nation in 1861\u2014had promised a new era of prosperity and progress for all. Events in Naples made a mockery of that. Italy\u2019s King Umberto I became a passionate advocate of a radical transformation of Naples that would improve the health of the city, and tie Naples closer than ever to the Italian nation. Corruption and chaotic administration kiboshed the plans, but the royal desire to celebrate the Italian-ness of Naples remained. When Umberto and his wife, Queen Margherita, visited the city in 1899, the queen, bored of overly complex French food, supposedly asked for some real <\/em>food, a true taste of Naples. A local chef served her a pizza in the colors of the Italian flag\u2014the red of tomato sauce, the white of mozzarella cheese, the green of fresh basil\u2014which Margherita loved so much that it\u2019s been named after her ever since. Whatever the precise truth behind the yarn, its intended message is unmistakable: the experience of being Italian is baked into the food of the ordinary Neapolitan.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a story that would have intrigued Vincenzo Corrado, a man born and bred in the south a century and a half before Queen Margherita\u2019s supposed conversion to the delights of Neapolitan cuisine. Corrado explored that cuisine in the pages of his series of cookbooks, which are a vivid testimony to the cultural life of eighteenth-century Naples, a city of dizzying social disparities and abundant artistic expression. Unwittingly, Corrado did more than almost anybody to define what we think of as Italian food, in which\u2014especially as the food exists in its international incarnations\u2014the flavors of Naples are so prevalent. Yet, one wonders what Corrado would have made of the ways in which food has been used as an important binding agent in the creation of an Italian national identity. Sincere as he was in his passion for the food of his homeland, he recognized that a plate of food is layered, like a Neapolitan timbale, with meanings and associations. As his recipes testify, much of what we consider to be authentically local, regional, or national, rests on small acts of self-deception and selective memory, the endless making and remaking of myths.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Vincenzo Corrado was born in 1738 in the town of Oria, in the region of Apulia, part of the Kingdom of Naples, which essentially covered the southern half of what we now know as mainland Italy. We know little more about his youth than that his family origins were unspectacular, and that after the death of his parents he may have gone into service at the court of a Neapolitan aristocrat.<\/p>\n

The years of Corrado\u2019s childhood were an exciting time for the city of Naples, which was then the heliocentric force within the Kingdom. Since antiquity Naples had occupied a special place in Mediterranean life. In the days of the Roman Empire, it had been a paradisiacal southern retreat for the wealthy and powerful. But by the era of the Renaissance it was one of the most heavily and densely populated cities in the world. As a site of tremendous strategic importance in their wars against Muslims to the east and Protestants to the north, Naples\u2019s Spanish rulers turned the place into a fortress, forbidding any building outside the city walls. The growing population piled up on top of itself. At a time when it was unusual for European cities to have buildings of more than two or three stories, Naples had the early modern equivalent of skyscrapers, reaching five, six, or seven stories tall. When Caravaggio turned up in 1606, he was struck by the intensity of Naples, all the extremes of city life in such close proximity. Within a month of his arrival, he had painted The Seven Works of Mercy<\/em>, perhaps the most vivid record of the unique energy that so many felt in Naples, a combustible exuberance, simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying.<\/p>\n

When the eighteen-year-old Charles of Bourbon acceded the throne in 1734, he embarked upon a reign of so-called enlightened absolutism, turning Naples into what one historian has described as \u201can intellectual laboratory where intellectuals and government collaborated.\u201d Under his guidance, there were reforms of the judiciary, the civil service, and taxation laws, and Jewish people were officially allowed to settle in the Kingdom for the first time in centuries. Before abdicating the throne to his son Ferdinand in 1759, Charles also invested heavily in Neapolitan arts and culture, patronizing artists, funding theaters, and recruiting the architects Ferdinando Fuga and Luigi Vanvitelli to design many of the landmarks of modern Naples. Taking Charles\u2019s lead, wealthy Neapolitans used their money to beautify the city. One such person was Raimondo di Sangro, who paid for the reconstruction of the Chapel of Sansevero, complete with Giuseppe Sanmartino\u2019s statue Veiled Christ<\/em>. It was a work of such astonishing quality that locals suspected it had been made with alchemical wizardry rather than a sculptor\u2019s chisel. At the same time as crafting the Neapolitan future, Charles also rediscovered its past: it was he who commissioned excavations of nearby Pompeii, one of the great cultural moments of the eighteenth century.<\/p>\n

It was against this backdrop that Vincenzo Corrado entered a Celestine monastery in Naples at the age of seventeen, where he received a thorough education in astronomy, mathematics, philosophy, and history. He also began a culinary education, traveling the Kingdom of Naples and other parts of the Italian peninsula, collecting recipes as he went. We don\u2019t know much about how he refined his skills, but he evidently paid close attention at the tables, kitchens, and marketplaces of the various places he visited; the knowledge he would later display of food from Italy and beyond was immense.<\/p>\n

Though it was the contemplative life of the monastery that brought him to Naples, it was the worldly pleasures of cooking and eating that made Corrado\u2019s name. At the court of Michele Imperiali, Prince of Francavilla, he was given the magnificent title of Capo dei Servizi di Bocca<\/em>, literally translated as \u201cHead of Mouth Services,\u201d and given responsibility for planning banquets that were not only lavish in the quality and quantity of the food served, but distinctly theatrical, of a piece with the social world of Naples that focused so much on display and performance. As well as dozens of individual dishes, Corrado designed table settings and elaborate ornamentations, often complex sugar sculptures or small models made from marzipan. He left few details of exactly who he cooked for, but the Prince attracted the glitterati from across Europe, and Casanova was a guest of his in the 1770s.<\/p>\n

The guiding spirit of these elite occasions was certainly Parisian, the default setting of fashionable society across Europe. In Naples, high-status cooks were referred to as monzu<\/em>, a Neapolitan corruption of monsieur<\/em>, an indication of the style and atmosphere that Corrado\u2019s food would have been expected to project. It\u2019s for this reason that Corrado\u2019s first book, Il cuoco galante<\/em>, was a landmark in the development of Italian food\u2014and therefore in the development of Italian national identity\u2014when it was published in 1773. The last cookbook in a native language of Italy was published in the 1690s by Antonio Latini, another Neapolitan, and even that comprised mainly French- or Spanish-style dishes; it was the gastronomic testament of a thoroughbred monzu<\/em>. In Il cuoco galante<\/em>, Corrado pointed toward the Italian future, interweaving the dominant fashion for French cuisine with distinctively Italian flavors and textures. Though most of the peninsula is represented in one way or another, it is the Kingdom of Naples to which Corrado returns over and again. Throughout the text, he extols fish from the Bay, as well as the cheese, meat, fruits, and vegetables from Campania, and other southern regions. He has prototypical recipes for things that remain classics of Neapolitan cooking: Genovese sauce, timbales of various kinds, and parmigiana\u2014though as he wasn\u2019t keen on eggplant, his version uses fried slices of squash, layered between Parmesan and butter. For a wealthy, well-to-do audience, Il cuoco galante<\/em> was the most articulate statement of colloquial Italian food to have been written for more than a century.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a parallel between Corrado\u2019s take on food and other trends in eighteenth-century Neapolitan culture, most notably opera buffa<\/em>, a form of comic opera that told stories of ordinary Neapolitans, using the language and settings that everyone in the city would recognize. By 1730, Naples had three theaters dedicated to opera buffa<\/em>, and the form spread to the rest of Italy. Some say the assertion of Neapolitan identity, sometimes at the expense of the political, social, and cultural establishment, can be detected in Corrado\u2019s food writing. In a recipe for pheasant\u2014stuffed with veal, wrapped in bacon, roasted on a spit\u2014he remarks that the birds are in season from winter to spring when they are \u201cpersecuted and murdered by hunters,\u201d a strange turn of phrase which the food historian Gillian Riley asserts is a dig at \u201cthe sport of kings, enjoyed by the idle and illiterate Bourbons,\u201d the foreign dynasty that ruled the Kingdom.<\/p>\n

Corrado was tapping into a widespread feeling of pride in Neapolitan food, but one that was tempered by social and cultural resentments, exacerbated by a deadly famine in 1764. At the cuccagna <\/em>festival of that year\u2014a kind of early modern Black Friday, in which the poor were encouraged to fight each other as they devoured giant structures made of food\u2014the nobles were disgruntled that the chaos had begun before the King gave his signal. At the carnival four years later, pasta makers, seen by some as guardians of the true Neapolitan identity, handed out pamphlets denouncing the social elite for filling their tables with foreign foods. Pasta had become a symbol of everyday Naples only relatively recently. During the Renaissance, Neapolitans had been referred to, derisively, as \u201ccabbage eaters\u201d by those outside the region. From the late seventeenth century, images of lazzari<\/em> (the poorest of all Naples\u2019s inhabitants) eating long strands of pasta with their fingers began to appear in depictions of the city, and Neapolitans were now called mangiamaccheroni<\/em>\u2014\u201cmacaroni eaters.\u201d Yet, Il cuoco galante <\/em>shows us that pasta, and many other types of Neapolitan cucina povera<\/em>, were also eaten by the wealthy and powerful. Corrado wrote down recipes for gnocchi, lasagna, ravioli, vermicelli, and a startlingly rich macaroni timbale, filled with cheese, sausage mince, mushroom, truffles, and ham, all cooked in a mold of flaky pastry. Though some of Corrado\u2019s recipes were well beyond the means of ordinary people, in this city of extremes the consumption of pasta provided a common experience. Some sources suggest that even King Ferdinand IV ate pasta with his fingers just as the poorest of his subjects did.<\/p>\n

What Corrado does not give us, either in Il cuoco galante<\/em> or any of his subsequent works, is a recipe that fuses pasta with tomato sauce, the combination that, rightly or wrongly, has come to define Neapolitan\u2014and Italian\u2014food for millions around the world. The food historian John Dickie has described tomato sauce in Italy as \u201ca national religion: its Holy Trinity is Fresh, Tinned and Concentrate; and its Jerusalem is Naples.\u201d But, when Corrado was writing, the default accompaniments of pasta were butter and cheese; tomatoes\u2014apples of love, as they were called in English\u2014were still considered poisonous by many Europeans, and even Corrado, who encourages their use, advises removing the seeds and skin before cooking with them, such as in a recipe he called pomodori alla<\/em> Napolitana<\/em>,<\/span> in which tomato halves are stuffed and fried. Elsewhere, he gives us tomato soup, tomato fritters, tomato croquettes, tomatoes stuffed with rice and truffles or anchovies. He also describes a precursor of passata<\/em>, a broth of tomatoes fried in oil with garlic, parsley, radish, bay leaf, and celery, bulked out with bread crusts and pushed through a sieve. Though he may not have hit upon the killer combination of pasta and tomato sauce, the success of Corrado\u2019s cookbooks (Il cuoco galante <\/em>was reprinted several times in the decades after its publication) helped ensure that tomatoes became a key ingredient in Neapolitan cooking.<\/p>\n

Beyond tomatoes, Corrado adored fruit and vegetables. In 1781, eight years after Il cuoco galante<\/em>, he published Del <\/em>cibo pitagorico<\/em>, expounding the virtues of vegetarian food, and the bounty of the Kingdom\u2019s harvests. His passion for local produce was evident, yet he was also keenly aware that much of what he was dispersing as Neapolitan cuisine was an invention of tradition, rather than its continuation. Tomatoes were products of the Americas, brought to Naples by its Spanish rulers, as were coffee and chocolate, novel ingredients that he included in his recipes. The same was true of potatoes, about which he published a book of recipes in 1798. A number of those recipes, the first in Italian history, have become Neapolitan favorites, such as potato cake, which Corrado suggested making with sweetbreads and pig\u2019s liver.<\/p>\n

As Corrado busied himself with a quiet revolution in Italian food, the violence of political and social revolution swept across Italy, leaving the Kingdom of Naples prone. In 1798, alarmed by Napoleon\u2019s conquest of northern Italy, King Ferdinand decided to send an army of seventy thousand soldiers into Rome and halt the French advances. It was a calamitous error. Back in Naples, revolutionaries declared the end of the monarchy, though the nascent republic was violently torn down with the help of thousands of rural peasants and the lazzari<\/em> of Naples, the \u201cmacaroni eaters,\u201d a minority of whom were alleged to have acquired a taste for human flesh. Whether or not reports that counterrevolutionaries \u201cate their neighbors roasted\u201d are true, they underline the astonishing brutality that enveloped Naples in the final year of the century. For the first sixty years of Corrado\u2019s life, Naples had been a place that spoke of progress, of high ideals of civilization, beauty, and a celebration of Neapolitan culture, all of which shone through in Corrado\u2019s work. As the city spasmed its way to the end of the century, it\u2019s tempting to wonder which of his recipes the old chef turned to for comfort, redolent of the land he loved.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Naples was in a tug of war for the next several years, until Napoleon\u2019s demise allowed the Bourbon dynasty to reassert a firm grip on power. Corrado\u2019s writing career wound down; the small amount he published lacked the exuberance of earlier work, perhaps reflecting his mindset in these more subdued, uncertain times. But he lived long enough to see stability return to Naples; he died aged ninety-eight in 1836, by which point a great deal of his take on Neapolitan cuisine had become standard.<\/p>\n

Bourbon rule of Naples continued for another twenty-five years, until it was overwhelmed by the forces of national unification. When Garibaldi\u2019s men closed in on Naples, a leader of the nationalist movement had rejoiced that \u201cthe macaroni are cooked and we will eat them.\u201d The outside world, it seems, still tended to view Neapolitans through the holes of a colander, and in subsequent decades the old images of the lazzari<\/em> eating pasta with their fingers were updated, in photographs staged for tourists who wanted a souvenir that summed up the city in one arresting clich\u00e9.<\/p>\n

By the close of World War Two the Neapolitan diaspora had exported its cuisine to the rest of the planet. Elaborations on the traditional recipes from the old country were now viewed as quintessentially Italian, especially in the United States. When Paulie Gualtieri goes \u201chome\u201d to Naples in The<\/em> Sopranos<\/em>, he\u2019s shocked to discover pasta served in ways he can barely stomach. Native Neapolitans mock him for requesting \u201cgravy\u201d with his macaroni: \u201cand you thought the Germans were classless pieces of shit,\u201d they say, in a language Paulie understands no better than the food on his plate.<\/p>\n

As the international fame of Neapolitan food grew, so Italy itself became more attached to it. By the sixties, pizza of the variety made for Queen Margherita was essentially a national dish\u2014a national symbol, even\u2014along with many of the recipes sketched by Vincenzo Corrado nearly two centuries earlier. His books are still reprinted and read across the peninsula, and caf\u00e9s, pizzerias, and trattorias across southern Italy bear the name \u201cCorrado,\u201d a word now synonymous with the glories of Italian gastronomy.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Read earlier installments of \u201cOff Menu.\u201d<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Edward White is the author of\u00a0<\/em>The Tastemaker: Carl Van Vechten and the Birth of Modern America. He is currently working on a book about Alfred Hitchcock. His former column for\u00a0<\/em>The Paris Review Daily\u00a0was \u201cThe Lives of Others<\/a>.\u201d\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Two centuries after his death, Vincenzo Corrado\u2019s books are still reprinted and read across the peninsula. Caf\u00e9s, pizzerias, and trattorias across southern Italy bear the name \u201cCorrado,\u201d a word now synonymous with the glories of Italian gastronomy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":695,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[63685],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-145973","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-off-menu"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nHow Neapolitan Cuisine Took Over the World by Edward White<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Two centuries after his death, Vincenzo Corrado\u2019s books are still reprinted and read across the peninsula. 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