From Caserta, with memory

I grew up in Caserta, near Naples, in Campania, where my mother cooked every day and my father had opinions about pasta. These are the recipes from that kitchen — written down so my daughters Anna and Carolina can have them.

I've lived in the United States for over twenty years, across the Midwest, the West Coast, and now New England. The distance makes you pay attention differently. You notice what you miss, which is mostly specific things: the smell of a ragù that has been going since morning, the way a frittata comes out when you have the right eggs, the particular sweetness of San Marzano tomatoes grown in volcanic soil south of Naples.

For most of those years I've worked as a scientist — a biochemist, specifically, studying how lipids and small molecules shape human health. Some of that work has touched food directly: the Mediterranean diet has been one of the most studied dietary patterns in the world, and Campania is where much of that research was done, starting with Ancel Keys in the 1950s. But the recipes here are not about science. They are about memory, and about the specific flavors of Campania — the one region most people haven't heard of that gave the world pizza, ragù napoletano, and pastiera.

Most of what is here I learned by watching. My mother did not measure. My grandmother did not measure. I have tried to reconstruct quantities honestly, but the real instruction in a lot of these dishes is: use your judgment, taste as you go, and do not be afraid of salt.

The blog started as a way to preserve what I could still reconstruct from memory, and to fill in the gaps with research — historical, culinary, occasionally scientific. It has grown into something larger: a record of a specific place and a specific way of eating, organized by the women and men who taught it to me without knowing they were teaching anything at all.