Macaroni, Naples Style I

History

Naples was the nineteenth century's great workshop of dried pasta, its backstreets hung with maccheroni drying in the sun before mechanical presses made it cheap and everywhere. It was famously street food: vendors pulled tangles of pasta from open cauldrons, and eaters lowered a fistful into the mouth in a single gulp.

The tomato dressing now inseparable from Neapolitan pasta was a later marriage, and Ippolito Cavalcanti's cookbook is the witness usually called on to date it. His book does pair the two, more than once. One menu gives *Vermicelli con purè di pomidoro, e vongole* — vermicelli with tomato purée and clams — and the method has the clams boiled, their water kept, and four rotoli of tomato pulp boiled in that water. Another dish, listed in his own index, is a *timpano* of vermicelli cooked with raw tomatoes.

His Neapolitan-dialect appendix, the part of the book usually credited with the first tomato pasta, dresses its vermicelli differently. One is *Vermicielli co la mollica de pane*, grated stale bread with salted anchovies, pepper and oil. The other is a *Timpano de Vermicielli* built in pastry, the pasta tossed in oil fried with salted anchovies and parsley. Tomato is in that appendix — the dialect spelling is *pommadore*, and it sauces the meatballs — but not on the vermicelli.

Artusi's 1891 pair — one elaborate braised-meat *sugo*, one plain tomato-and-basil — sets this southern idiom down for a national bourgeois kitchen far from the fistful.

An earlier version of this note quoted a specific recipe title and called it the documented first pairing of pasta with tomato. We could not find that title in the edition we were able to read, and whether any dish is the *first* is a claim needing its own evidence; the edition where it is usually placed we could not reach at all. The rest of this account — the nicknames and their dates, the traveller's observation of 1787, the gesture described in 1832 — we learned from popular reference and food-writing sources, and we were unable to locate the evidence they rest on.

Ingredients

• beef
• prosciutto
• zibibbo raisins
• pine nuts
• lardo (cured pork back fat)
• garlic
• parsley
• onion
• tomatoes
• long macaroni
• sharp cheese
• salt
• pepper

Instructions

1. Lard a piece of eye-of-round beef with strips of prosciutto, zibibbo raisins, pine nuts and a battutino of lardo, garlic, parsley, salt and pepper. Tie with string.
2. Brown the meat with a battuto of lardo and finely chopped onion, turning often and piercing with a larding needle.
3. Add peeled tomato pieces; once broken down, add passed tomato sauce gradually and reduce, then cover with water, season, and simmer over low heat.
4. Dress the macaroni (boiled in plenty of water, not overcooked) with the sauce and a sharp cheese; serve the meat as a companion dish.