The menu

The simpler sister of the mussel soup Neapolitans make on Holy Thursday, one of the city's Holy Week traditions. The juices left at the bottom are mopped up with bread: in Naples this is called “fare la scarpetta”.

As early as 1884, Matilde Serao describes the “little paper cone” of tiny fried fish bought from the friggitore: it is the ancestor of the cuoppo di mare.

The name comes from the way the cheesemaker “mozza” – cuts off – the stretched curd by hand to shape it. Mozzarella di Bufala Campana has had PDO status since 1996.

It has no documented inventor. The most widely told story links it to Marinetti’s Futurist dinners at the Grand Hotel Quisisana on Capri, in the early twentieth century.

In Naples they say “'O purpo se coce dint'a ll'acqua soja”: the octopus cooks in its own water. It applies to people too: sometimes you have to let them stew in their own juice, patiently.

Pastecresciute were among the fried foods sold in the streets of Naples. Chopped seaweed in the dough is a Neapolitan habit, rare elsewhere in Italy.

Meatballs were a fixture of Sunday lunch, born as a way to use up stale bread. The ragù they cook in is at the heart of Eduardo De Filippo’s “Sabato, domenica e lunedì”.

Naples and Sicily both claim it as their own. One of the earliest written recipes is Neapolitan: Duke Ippolito Cavalcanti published it in the nineteenth century in his treatise on cookery.

The name comes from the French “croquettes”. In Naples it is also the panzarotto of the street fry-sellers, who sold it crying “Panzarotte, caure ca còceno!”.

In the nineteenth century the oyster sellers’ stalls in Santa Lucia sold oysters from Lake Fusaro, where the Bourbons farmed them.

In Naples it is the all-but-obligatory dish of Christmas Eve. The story goes that Eduardo De Filippo, faced with an empty larder, invented spaghetti “a vongole fujute”: with runaway clams – that is, without any.

Scialatielli are a fresh pasta that originated on the Amalfi Coast in the twentieth century. The name is linked to the Neapolitan “scialare”, to enjoy life to the full.

In Naples, potato gnocchi were called “strangulaprievete”, priest-stranglers. Alla sorrentina, they are baked in an earthenware dish with tomato, mozzarella and basil.

“Azzeccata” is Neapolitan for “stuck together”: the pasta should stay creamy and compact, enough to hold together on the plate.

Originally, paranza was the fry of small mixed fish that fishermen kept for themselves. Today in Naples the name is also used for mixed fried prawns and squid.

Together with capitone (eel), baccalà is the Christmas Eve fish in Naples.

On the night of 23 to 24 December, Neapolitans crowd Porta Nolana and the other fish markets for the Christmas Eve dinner.

Octopus is one of the oldest street foods in Naples: in 1884 Matilde Serao describes the women who sold it boiled in seawater.

Friarielli are the flowering shoots of a variety of turnip top. The origin of the name is uncertain: the most widespread theory traces it to “frijere”, to fry – meaning, here, to sauté in a pan.

In 1884 Matilde Serao names the “women frying peppers” among the street trades of Santa Lucia, alongside the oyster sellers.

It was born in Lorraine, at the court of Stanisław Leszczyński; it was brought to Naples by the monsù, the French cooks of the great families. Here “si’ comme a nu babbà” is a compliment.

Legend has it that it was born on Capri by mistake: a pastry chef forgot to add the flour, and the cake turned out better that way.

Created on the Sorrento peninsula in the late 1970s, in Carmine Marzuillo's pastry shop, with lemons from the coast.

At the end of the seventeenth century Antonio Latini wrote: “Here in Naples it seems that everyone is born with the genius and the instinct for making Sorbets”.