Daily MenuNeapolitan cuisine has ancient historical roots: It comes, in fact, from the Greek Roman period.Its dishes are based on rural ingredients (pasta, cheese, vegetables) and seafood dishes (fish and mollusks).

Chefs: Nicolò Innocenti, Jacopo Comedini

pasta

pizza

tomatoes

cheese

vegetables

cakes

Cakes

Nicolas Stohrer followed Stanislas' daughter Maria Leszczyn� ska to Versailles as her pâtissier in 1725 when she married King Louis XV, and founded his Pâtisserie in Paris in 1730. One of his descendants allegedly had the idea of using rum in 1835. While he is believed to have done so on the fresh cakes , it is a common practice today to let the baba dry a little so that it soaks up better.

Later, the recipe was refined by mixing the rum with aromatized sugar syrup.In 1844, the Julien Brothers, Parisian pâtissiers, invented the "Savarin" which is strongly inspired by the "Baba au Rhum" but is soaked with a different alcoholic mixture and uses a circular cake mold instead of the simple round form.

The ring form is nowadays often associated with the Baba au Rhum as well, and the name "Savarin" is also sometimes given to the rum-soaked circular cake.Neapolitan BabàThe baba was later brought to Naples by French cooksand became a popular Neapolitan specialty under the name babà or babbà.The pastry has appeared on US restaurant menus since 1899, if not earlier.Alain Ducasse, one of the world's top chefs, uses Rhum Baba as his signature dessert in his Michelin starred restaurants

Pasta

There is a great variety of Neapolitan pastas. Pasta was not invented in Naples, but one of the best types available is found quite close by, in Gragnano, a few kilometers from Naples. It was here also that the industrial production of pasta started, with the techniques to dry and preserve it.

Traditionally in Naples pasta must be cooked "al dente", while soft pasta is not tolerated. The most popular variety of pasta, besides the classic spaghetti and linguine, are the paccheri and the ziti, long pipe-shaped pasta, broken by hand before cooking and usually topped with Neapolitan ragù. Pasta with vegetables is usually also prepared with pasta mista, which is now produced industrially as a distinct variety of pasta, but which was once sold cheaply, made up of broken pieces of different kinds of pasta.

Hand-made gnocchi, prepared with flour and potatoes, have become a popular method of overcoming the Neapolitan disdain for potatoes.

Pizza

Pizza is Greek in origin. The Ancient Greeks covered their bread with oils, herbs and cheese. In Byzantine Greek, the word was spelled π or pita, meaning pie. The word has now spread to Turkish as pide,and Bulgarian, Croatian and Serbian as pita, ιταAlbanian as pite and Modern Hebrew pitta� h. The Romans developed placenta, a sheet of dough topped with cheese and honey and flavored with bay leaves. Modern pizza originated in Italy as the Neapolitan pie with tomato. In 1889, cheese was added.

In 1889, during a visit to Naples, Queen Margherita of Italy was served a pizza resembling the colors of the Italian flag, red (tomato), white (mozzarella) and green (basil). This kind of pizza has been named after the Queen as Pizza Margherita.

Tomatoes

Tomatoes entered the Neapolitan cuisine during the 18th century. The industry of preserving tomatoes originated in 19th-century Naples. There are traditionally several ways of preparing home-made tomato preserves: either bottled tomato juice or chopped into pieces.

Cheese

Cheeses, both soft and aged, are a very important part of the Italian diet and also have their place in Neapolitan cooking: some recipes descend from very old Roman traditions. Starting from the freshest ones, the most used are: the ricotta di fuscella, the ricotta salata, salty, the caciottella fresca the mozzarella di bufala, the fiordilatte, similar to mozzarella, the provola affumicata, the scamorze, white or smoked, the burrini di Sorrento.

Vegetables

Some of Campanian dishes using vegetables, like the parmigiana di melanzane or peperoni ripieni are a typical dish. Some of the most typical products are friarielli, scarola, smooth or curly , several types of broccoli, la verza. Lettuce is mixed with carrots, fennel, rucola, radishes. Black olives used in Neapolitan cooking are always the ones from Gaeta. During the Second World War, poor families used less appealing ingredients. Recipes have been reported of pasta cooked with empty pods of fava beans or peas.