'O SARTÙ

Sartù di riso is a Neapolitan specialty that was invented by the chefs of the Bourbon king Ferdinand I of Naples at the beginning of the 1800s.

After the Greeks and Romans, Naples had been ruled by the Normans, French, Austrian Hapsburgs…you name the empire or dynasty, and it ruled Naples at some point. In 1735, Italy was still made up of city-states, and the Bourbon king Charles the Something of Spain (he was simultaneously Charles the First, Third, Fifth, and Seventh depending on which of his kingdoms you were talking about) conquered the Kingdom of Sicily and the Kingdom of Naples and joined them under his crown.

Naples under Bourbon rule was the place to be. In Paris, Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote, “Do you want to know if there is a spark within you? Run, no, fly to Naples” to hear the masterpieces of Neapolitan composers at the San Carlo opera house. Mozart’s dad brought him there on his Wolfgang Wows the World! tour of 1770 (on the trip, they also got some very swank silk outfits from Neapolitan tailors).

Insomma, if you could make it there, you could make it anywhere.

King Ferdinand I was the son of Charles. He was technically named Ferdinando Antonio Pasquale Giovanni Nepomuceno Serafino Gennaro Benedetto. Ferdy loved art, he loved music, and he also loved to eat.

Chefs were brought to his palace in the center of Naples directly from France, the seat of the Bourbon dynasty. They were supposedly the best chefs in the world. Pasta, fish, baked vegetables, elaborate cakes: they made sure that Ferdinand the First went to bed with a satisfied tummy. One day, the king asked his head chef, whom he called ’o monsù (derived from the French monsieur), what was for lunch. He was told that rice was the first course.

“Rice?” King Ferdinand was furious. Rice was for the sick! Even today in Naples, there is an expression, ’O rriso d’o mese int’a ’o lietto stesa: Eat rice and stay in bed for a month. Rice is considered insipid, insignificant, hospital food. It is even called a sciaquapanza, or tummy rinse.

“Please,” the monsù insisted. “Enough pasta. We’ll make the rice hearty! We’ll add butter and cheese and…”

“Very well. I challenge you to prepare rice that I like!”
And so the Neapolitan sartù di riso was born. It is made with dense tomato ragù, pieces of egg, cheese, sausage, peas, and tiny fried meatballs or salami. Then it is baked in a buttered casserole dish.
The king was thrilled. Who knew? Rice could actually taste good and make for a decent meal.

It was a Saturday afternoon and I was in the Avallones’ kitchen while Raffaella was cooking sartù di riso, one of Nino’s favorite dishes. Salvatore had picked me up at the boarding school—always late, always smiling—and had deposited me in the kitchen with his mother while he finished studying in his room. He was in his third year at the University of Naples, studying law. In Italy, a university law degree is a combination of undergraduate and graduate studies, so after five or six years (or longer for some) “repeating” his books, he could take the bar and begin practicing as a lawyer.

He studied in his room all day, every day, and went every few months to take an exam. No listening to lectures, no comparing notes with fellow students, no interaction with professors. Just memorizing law texts in his boyhood room, which was adorned with teddy bears and third-grade soccer trophies. (I remember describing to Salva later that at Princeton we had precepts, small groups of students who were encouraged to express their opinions on the subject matter to the professor. Salva’s reaction: Why would a professor care what a twenty-year-old thought?)

I had assumed that when Salvatore picked me up we would do something together. There had been chemistry, I thought, when he cut my pizza into little squares. On the phone the previous evening he had said not just Ci sentiamo, We’ll hear each other, but Ci vediamo—We’ll see each other!
And here I was in the tiny kitchen with Raffaella. Who was I for them? I certainly wasn’t Salvatore’s girlfriend, but I wasn’t the Avallones’ guest either. There was neither “have a seat in the salone, do you take milk or sugar?” nor “Salvatore, honey, why don’t you come and show this girl a good time?” Maybe this was how it felt for brides in arranged marriages. Your future husband is busy somewhere, so in the meantime let’s teach you how he likes his rice. Would an arranged marriage really be so bad, though, if my fiancé was someone who made me feel as happy and alive as Salva did? I wouldn’t have to cook for him, after all. Or would I?

What I didn’t realize was that I wasn’t being judged, and I wasn’t being primed. Raffaella’s focus was on the sartù, and she was making it to satisfy my hunger as much as anyone else’s.

Her dance was perfectly choreographed: she simultaneously stirred the ragù, fried the meatballs, sautéed the peas. I ducked and dodged. I was at times behind her, at times beside her. She had been to the gym, and wore New Balance sneakers and light green, fitted sweats. How was her makeup perfect after a workout? “Non sudo,” I don’t sweat, she explained. Ah, that’s convenient. The kitchen window was open and sea air was coming in. Look at the volcano! Raffaella pointed. When it’s windy like this, you can see the towns surrounding the base of Vesuvius. Even the outlines of the houses. The wind sweeps away the mist and fog.
“Vieni, assaggia.” Come, taste. Her wooden spoon was suddenly coming at me, full to overflowing with ragù, her hand cupped underneath to catch any spills. She stuck the whole huge spoon into my mouth, and I almost gagged on the wood. “Com’ è?” How is it? I answered that it was buonissimo, and she dipped the same spoon back into the pot and tasted it herself.

“Hm.”

I was told to cut the hard-boiled eggs into quarters. Raffaella laid the fried meatballs, spitting and sizzling, on freshly ironed dishrags. My Italian had improved enough to be able to ask, “How much egg? How many cheese? How many much peas?” Okay, my quantifying adjectives weren’t perfect, but I got my point across. In response, she put her arm around my waist and whispered conspiratorially, “Più ci metti più ci trovi!”—the more you put in the more you get out. In other words: That analytical, precise, quantifying brain has no place in my kitchen, girl.
(Many years later, in my mother’s kitchen in Bethesda, Maryland, I would find Raffaella staring at a ring of measuring spoons as if they were an archaeological find. “They’re for measuring quantities,” I explained. “In cooking?” she asked, bewildered. She then shook her head and laughed. “Americani! Americani!” Yes, we’re a wild and crazy people.)
“Lella!” Nino was standing in the door of the kitchen calling his wife’s nickname. He was pissed off. What had she done? I wondered. “C’è una puzza terrificante!” It stinks in here! Nino, I later learned, has an extremely sensitive sense of smell. He insists that his wife turn on the ventilation when she is cooking so that the smell of food doesn’t waft into the rest of the apartment. “Scusa, scusa!” Sorry! she cheerfully replied, and turned on the hair dryer–sounding machine. Nino disappeared, still indignant.

Nino was fourteen years Raffaella’s senior, and had spent most of their marriage managing the hotel that he and his brothers owned. He left early in the morning and came back late at night, Raffaella told me; it was the least she could do to care for him with a smile when he was at home. He was forced into early retirement because of an ugly family battle that nobody talked about, and now he was at home all the time. She made sure the ventilation was on when she was cooking, served him at the table, and accepted his negative comments about how the pasta was cooked with a smile or a wink and “I think you’re right, Nino.”

It bugged the hell out of me—she was cooking his favorite dish, for God’s sake! But soon I realized that my irritation at Nino’s outburst had no place in Raffaella’s kitchen, either. “Ketrin!” she was yelling over the fan (the flat a and th of Katherine were too much of a challenge for most Italians), “make sure you add a little ragù first so the rice doesn’t stick….” I was forced to move on, to concentrate on the preparation of that rice.

The preparation became aerobic. Raffaella’s biceps bulged as she stirred the dense ragù in with the rice. I was asked to lay out fresh dishrags (impossibly white) on the table, ousting the baby meatballs (they’d had themselves enough of a nap). I held the tiny balls in my fists until Raffaella offered me the pot with the rice and ragù. I plopped them in and she smeared the casserole dish with butter.

Salvatore emerged from his room smiling just as I was helping his mother pour the heavy mass into the pan. He came over and pinched my cheek. “Pagnottella! Did you learn how to make the sartù? There’s going to be a test later. Esame, esame! Princeton!” He found himself delightful. I wasn’t laughing. I was hot and hungry. And I really wanted to taste that sartù.

My mother first put me on a diet when I was in kindergarten. I was never called fat: the words that were thrown around our household in reference to my weight were chunky, heavy, and plump. As a child, I was probably never more than eight pounds overweight. But for my mother, that was enough to call for drastic measures.

Bonnie Salango Wilson was born in Princeton, West Virginia, during the Second World War. Her father was a Presbyterian minister who was the son of Italian immigrants; they had come from Calabria at the beginning of the century. Although my great-grandparents were devout Catholics, they allowed a Presbyterian Sunday school to use their basement when my grandfather was a little boy. He thought the Sunday school was fun: Protestants were so child friendly! After college my grandfather enrolled in a Presbyterian seminary. His parents never worried about his conversion from Catholicism. It was enough that one of their eight children was a man of the cloth.

So my mother was born to an Italian American preacher in the South. Things weren’t easy for a preacher’s daughter in the 1950s—Bonnie was expected to be well behaved, accomplished, and, most of all, beautiful. And the definition of beautiful for my mother, a naturally curvy Italian-looking woman, did not leave any room at the seams. Beautiful meant skinny.

Bonnie Salango stopped eating breakfast and lunch in the early 1960s, and hasn’t partaken in those daytime meals since. She has never weighed more than 120 pounds, and looks, still, like Elizabeth Taylor in her prime. My mother showed my sister and me the photo of her in a West Virginia local paper when she graduated as valedictorian from Georgetown’s foreign service school. When I saw the picture, I didn’t feel proud of her achievement. I felt proud of her thinness underneath that robe.

A “chunky” daughter was simply not going to cut it.

So it doesn’t surprise me to hear that when I was reprimanded by my mother at the age of three for picking my nose and eating the boogers, my response was, “Why, Mommy, do they have too many calories?” In elementary school, my lunchtime “treat” was a Flintstones chewable vitamin. The teachers at Saint Patrick’s were told that when cartons of milk were distributed to the class, Katherine should be given skim rather than whole. “Sweetheaaaaart,” my mother would tell me in her Appalachian twang, “remember to always git the blue!”

“Mommy, why am I the only one that gets blue and everybody else gets red?”

She explained rationally and I understood rationally. So many extra calories, and for what? I trusted. I felt fine when the box appeared and I saw my blue carton buried in a sea of reds. And then one day in first grade my best friend, Robin, skinny and blond and a whole-milk drinker until high school, insisted that I take a swig from her red carton. At once my world was shattered and new horizons appeared.

That first crunchy, steaming bite of sartù did the same thing to my twenty-one-year-old body that a swig of cold whole milk had done at Saint Patrick’s Episcopal Day School in the fall of 1981. My carnal transformation was under way, and there was no going back.

Written by Katherine Wilson in "Only in Naples- Lessons in Food and Famiglia from My Italian Mother-in-Law", Random House, New York, USA,2016. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.