Cucina Napoletana: 100 Recipes from Italy's Most Vibrant City
American cooks’ interest in Italy’s regional culinary styles continues unabated. Although many Italian Americans’ roots lie in the Naples region, adaptation to American ingredients and foodways has obscured the real traditions of Neapolitan cooking. Iengo makes optimum use of typical Neapolitan staples: olive oil, mozzarella, pasta, and the ubiquitous tomato. Cheese, prosciutto, eggplant, ricotta, fava beans, and mushrooms all play parts in a wide variety of sauces for pasta. Meats include rabbit, sausage, veal, and beef. Naples’ salt cod shows up in several guises. Pizza and bread, central to the Neapolitan diet, put in an appearance. A few desserts appeal to sweets lovers, including rich cheese-stuffed sfogliatelle. Sharply focused, full-color photographs record recipes’ results, and other photographs scattered throughout the text show off Naples’ elegance in its majestic sprawl along the Mediterranean shore. Iengo also documents wine’s central role in everyday life in Naples. --Mark Knoblauch