My Love for Naples

by Anna Teresa Callen

The reputation of Neapolitan cooking has suffered unduly in America both from ignorance and the violence done to its integrity when immigrants adapted recipes haphazardly to American ingredients and inaugurated Italian American cookery. This cookbook provides a needed and welcome correction, celebrating the unique delights of Naples multidimensional gastronomy. In simple recipes, Callen demonstrates how Neapolitan kitchens employ Italys finest, volcanically enriched tomatoes to produce superior pasta sauces fragrant with basil and other herbs. In addition to pastas, other grains, such as rice and polenta, grace the Neapolitan table. Callen displays Neapolitan cookings great range, from simplest spaghetti topped with tomato sauce to elaborate layered cakes of rice bursting with meat sauce and cheeses. Food historians will find intriguing a recipe for spicy Vesuvius Chicken, which proposes a possible progenitor for the Chicken Vesuvio found ubiquitously on Italian restaurant menus in Ame