The Neapolitan kitchen and the court of the Bourbons

The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, with Naples as its capital, was ruled by a Bourbon line from the 1730s until the unification of Italy, and the city's cooking in that period is the subject of Jeanne Carola Francesconi's La Cucina Napoletana. The essay concerns the relation between the royal household and the city beneath it, between the palace kitchen and the cooking of the streets, the markets and the Gulf.

Francesconi treats Neapolitan cooking as the product of two kitchens that stood close together and borrowed from each other. One was the cucina of the palace and of the great houses, run by trained cooks under the influence of French practice, which in the eighteenth century governed the grand table across much of Europe. The other was the cooking of the people of Naples, built on vegetables, pulses, bread, fish from the Gulf and, increasingly, dried pasta. The interest of the subject lies in the traffic between them rather than in either one taken alone. The French manner at court left a lasting mark on the vocabulary and the repertoire of the Neapolitan table. Francesconi records the monzù, the household cook of the noble families, whose name is a Neapolitan rendering of the French monsieur and who stands for the arrival of French technique in Neapolitan kitchens. Elaborate preparations of the kind served in great houses, such as the timballo and the sformato, belong to this tradition of display, in which pasta, meat, cheese and sauce were enclosed in a crust or moulded and brought whole to table. The cooking of the city did not simply yield to this influence. Pasta, dressed with cheese and later with tomato, became the food by which Naples was known, and it moved upward from the street to the palace table rather than the reverse. The tomato, a New World plant, entered Neapolitan cooking in the course of these centuries and took its place beside the vegetables, oil and cheeses of Campania. What the monzù contributed was method and order; what the city supplied was produce, appetite and a settled taste for simple things cooked well. The result, as Francesconi presents it, is a cuisine of two registers that share one set of ingredients. The same tomatoes, pasta, vegetables and fish appear in the humble dish and in the dressed and moulded one, and the difference lies in labour, enclosure and presentation. This explains why Neapolitan cooking can seem at once frugal and ornate, and why a single city holds both the plain plate of pasta and the baroque timballo within one tradition. The court's importance for the history of Italian cooking is therefore twofold. It gave Naples a professional kitchen and a body of written and spoken technique, and it placed the foods of the poor within sight of the powerful, so that they were not despised as provincial. Francesconi's book remains the principal Neapolitan authority for reading this relation, and it should be read with the regional and national works of the same library, which set the Neapolitan case against the cooking of the rest of the peninsula.