Jeanne Carola Francesconi and La Cucina Napoletana

La Cucina Napoletana is the work of Jeanne Carola Francesconi, a writer on the food of Naples, and it takes the city and its gulf as the whole of its subject. It belongs to the line of regional Italian cookery books that record a local table as a body of practice rather than a list of recipes. Within this book it stands as the authority for the cooking of Naples and its province.

Francesconi's book gathers the cooking of Naples into a single volume, from the dishes of the street and the humble household to those of the great houses. Its worth lies in its attention to the city as a place with its own habits: the pasta eaten daily, the vegetables of the Campanian plain, the fish of the gulf and the preparations that belong to feast days. A cook who reads it learns what the Neapolitan table considered ordinary and what it set aside for occasions. The text treats the cooking of Naples as a tradition with its own logic, distinct from that of Rome or the north, and it does not apologise for the plainness of many of its dishes. The book is useful to a cook chiefly as a reference for the structure of Neapolitan cookery. Pasta in its dried form holds a central place, and the sauces that accompany it, whether of tomato, of vegetables or of the sea, are given in the proportions and methods that the city's kitchens knew. The same attention is given to the pizza, to the fried foods of the street, to the pastries of the feasts and to the preparations of meat and fish that fill the middle of the meal. The reader finds not a single canon but a range, from the austere to the lavish, held together by the same ingredients and the same hand. In this library the book is cited for Neapolitan and Campanian dishes, and it is read alongside other authorities rather than alone. Where Artusi and Boni write for the nation, Francesconi writes for one city, and her account is the closer to the local kitchen. Where her method differs from a national text, the difference is recorded as the Neapolitan practice, and the entries that rely on her say so. The book is therefore a primary witness for the cooking of Naples, and its place in the lineage of this book is that of the regional authority on which the Campanian entries rest.