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. Neapolitans, mocked as mangiafoglia ("leaf-eaters") in the 1500s, became mangiamaccheroni ("macaroni-eaters") from the 1700s onward, once the price of meat and vegetables rose and wheat fell, leaving pasta as the filling, caloric staple of the working poor. 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, a gesture Andrea de Jorio described in 1832 as nearly an art. When Goethe passed through in 1787, that maccheroni was still dressed simply with grated cheese, not tomato. The now-inseparable tomato dressing was a later marriage: Ippolito Cavalcanti's "vermicelli con lo pommodoro" (1839) is the documented first pairing, with further Neapolitan tomato recipes recorded through the 1840s. Artusi's 1891 pair — one elaborate braised-meat sugo, one plain tomato-and-basil — set this southern idiom down, sharp cheese "as the Neapolitans do," for a national bourgeois kitchen far from the fistful.

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.