Naples at Table: Cooking in Campania

Arthur Schwartz, popular radio host, cookbook author, and veteran restaurant critic, invites you to join him as he celebrates the food and people of Naples and Campania. Encompassing the provinces of Avellino, Benevento, Caserta, and Salerno, the internationally famous resorts of the Amalfi Coast, Capri, and Ischia — and, of course, Naples itself, Italy's third largest and most exuberant city — Campania is the cradle of Italian-American cuisine.

In Naples at Table, Arthur Schwartz takes a fresh look at the region's major culinary contributions to the world — its pizza, dried pasta, seafood, and vegetable dishes, its sustaining soups and voluptuous desserts — and offers the recipes for some of Campania's lesser-known specialties as well. Always, he provides all the techniques and details you need to make them with authenticity and ease.

Naples at Tableis the first cookbook in English to survey and document the cooking of this culturally important and gastronomically rich area. Schwartz spent years traveling to Naples and throughout the region, making friends, eating at their tables, working with home cooks and restaurant chefs, researching the origins of each recipe. Here, then, are recipes that reveal the truly subtle, elegant Neapolitan hand with such familiar dishes as baked ziti, eggplant parmigiana, linguine with clam sauce, and tomato sauces of all kinds.

This is the Italian food the world knows best, at its best — bold and vibrant flavors made from few ingredients, using the simplest techniques. Think Sophia Loren — and check out her recipe for Chicken Caccistora! Discover the joys of preparing a timballolike the pasta-filled pastry in the popular film Big Night.Or simply rediscover how truly delicious, satisfying, and healthful Campanian favorites can be — from vegetable dished such as stuffed peppers and garlicky greens to pasta sauces you can make while the spaghetti boils or the Neapolitans' famous long-simmered ragu, redolent with the flavors of meat and red wine. Then there's the succulent baked lamb Neapolitans love to serve to company, the lentils and pasta they make for family meals, baked pastas that go well beyond the red-sauce stereotype, their repertoire of deep-fried morsels, the pan of pork and pickled peppers so dear to Italian-American hearts, and the most delicate meatballs on earth. All are wonderfully old-fashioned and familiar, yet in hands of a Neapolitan, strikingly contemporary and ideal for today's busy cooks and nutrition-minded sybarites.

Finally, what better way to feed a sweet tooth than with a Neapolitan dessert? Ice cream and other frozen fantasies were brought to their height in Baroque Naples. Baba, the rum-soaked cake, still reigns in every pastry shop. Campamnians invented ricotta cheesecake, and Arthur Schwartz predicts that the region's easily assembled refrigerator cakes — delizieor delights — are soon going to replace tiramisu on America's tables. In any case, one bite of zuppa inglese, a Neapolitan take on English trifle, and you'll be singing "That's Amore."

A trip with Arthur Schwartz to Naples and its surrounding regions is the next best thing to being there. Join him as he presents the finest traditional and contemporary foods of the region, and shares myth, legend, history, recipes, and reminiscences with American fans, followers, and fellow lovers of all things Italian.

I acclimated quickly to Naples. The palm trees in the park along the sea seduced me. The decrpiet Baroque splendor of the city stunned me...And, of course, there was the food. The catering shops carried all kinds of macaroni-filled pastries, individual size and huge ones to cut a wedge from; cakes of fried pasta, fried balls of rice, stacks of vegetable frittatas, baked lasagne, and ziti. There were fry shops with fritters and croquettes, trendy pizzerias with long pies sold by the meter, and traditional pizzerias, every surface white marble, where I first learned to eat pizza with a knife and fork. I indulged in pastries and baba every morning and afternoon, drank short, powerful coffeess all day, and finished each evening with a stroll and a gelato. I ate linguine with clams oin Posillpo (then took a nap on a jetty on the sea); drank Gredo di Tufo (whoite winer) and stuffed myself and buffalo mozzarella at every opportunity. I could see right away it was a tough place to eat through, so I kept going back for more.

There were still warm almond-studded taralli, rings of crisp lard dough, from a street vendor by the sea, pasta and beans on a nineteenth-century trattoria, lamb ragu and cavatelli in the hills of Benevento, goat ragu and fusilli in the Monti Alburni, squid and potatoes on Capri, rabbit braised in tomatoes on Ischia, fish stew at the beach near Gaeta, the lemon chicken in Ravello.

from the introduction

A popular radio host brings readers the food and culture of Naples, with more than 200 authentic recipes that reveal the hearty, earthy Neopolitan taste.

Arthur Schwartz hosts "Food Talk," a popular New York City-based, nationally syndicated radio show, and was the longtime restaurant critic and food editor of the New York Daily News.He is the author of Cooking in a Small Kitchen, What to Cook When You Think There's Nothing in the House to Eat,and Soup Suppers.