#1 The art of the holiday food-gorge

about trying to write about food in Naples

Hello!

Welcome to the first edition of Crust. This is a newsletter that is not quite sure what it’s going to be yet, but it knows it’s going to be full of all sorts of food-talk.

This first edition is a bit more on the creative side - it’s something I wrote when I got back from holiday in Naples and wanted to write about all the food I ate but wasn’t sure how… I hope you enjoy :) If you do, tell all your friends to subscribe, and absolutely feel free to plaster it all over social media.

---

The art of the holiday food-gorge

What I really want to say about Naples is — well, I can’t honestly write the sort of serious sociology of food that I’d like to (where I’d make great claims about Italian culture and cuisine), as satisfying as it is to sit with a spritz and my friend Will and declare ‘what the Italians get right’: for one, we say, ‘an appreciation for excellent ingredients’ — like the absolute cheek of the crudaiola at Trattoria Malinconico, which was just plain rigatoni with diced fresh tomatoes (undoused in glugs of olive oil or obscene doses of salt like I might have done) because the mastery was that the rigatoni was sarcastically al dente and perfectly seasoned (it must have been boiled in a 1:1 ratio of water to salt) and the tomatoes were just tomatoey (who was it that said the best cooking makes ingredients taste like themselves?);

or, for another, teenagers and pizzas and piazzas — like on the first night, Saturday night, when we arrived late and headed into the centre and ate pizza on some steps by some jazz and then wandered and people-watched and eventually settled on one square in which every Neapolitan teenager was arranged into groups, or stuck clumsily between groups, like teenagers are everywhere, and we stared as they found themselves a shopping trolley, which they took apart (good old fashioned fun) and used the basket as a go-kart and a sled and a palanquin and something to swing round in circles and get dizzy in and we smiled when we noticed that the boy pushing it was always longing to be the boy being pushed but that when he got in it, implicitly requesting his turn, it was somehow totally the wrong move and no-one really wanted to push him, and we thought about how all teenagers rhyme but if this were the UK there would be bottles everywhere and at least 3 ambulances would have been called and maybe the reason the Italian teenagers can have a good time late at night with no alcohol is (we improvise) because of a different, family-centred approach to eating and drinking together which makes everyone less stupid about getting wasted —

but I can’t honestly write the sort of sociology of food that I’d like to, where I’d make these great claims about food and Italian culture, as satisfying as it is to sit with a spritz and my friend Will and make declarations about ‘what the Italians get right’: for one, because I might be under the influence of “the Napoli effect” (the inevitable heightening that comes from sitting in a breezy lowkey trattoria that we are so smug to have found, nestled between men on their lunch breaks tucking into bolognese as reliably as rhythm, or man-alone (perfectly-italianly) in a suit and shades with a glass of vino casa - the same vino that the waitress brings us in a carafe and, as she puts it down on the table, warmly, knowingly reminds us, with a nod to just how much food we’ve ordered, to go ‘piano’…);

or because I probably can’t separate my experience of these seemingly perfect moments that we eat across the city from how drunk I am on the flowy spirit of being on holiday with my friend in a new place where all we want to do is eat as much as we can and talk about it; or because, mostly, I am an outsider and there’s no real way for me to holiday around, glee-drunk, dripping into delis where they feed me fresh mozzarella and marinated melanzane and oily zucchini, having just shared a pizza fritte with Will and downed an espresso to try and un-fill myself for more — I can’t be doing all this and simultaneously conduct serious ethnography into what it really is that the Italians get right and why it really is that Napoli is so fantastic and the food is so perfect, or what food really means to Neopolitans —

because instead what I’ve done, by going somewhere to eat and think about food and pleasure and the place and the buildings and the people and the piazzas, is I’ve set out to furiously paint the city as I go, in the most romantic way possible, and I’m just excited to find threads and textures and pieces that suit my composition.