SEEING RED
In her quest for the perfect tomato, Fiona Donnelly heads to Naples, the source of the world’s most famous red sauce.
In a quest for the perfect tomato, we head to Naples, the source of the world’s most famous red sauce.
TThe queue at Pizzeria Gino Sorbillo is five deep and as long as a Neapolitan summer evening when we turn up unfashionably early to avoid the crush. Those who fail to grasp the drill – gently insinuate your way to the front, give the man with the clipboard your name, then never let him leave your sight – could loiter on the flagstones of Via dei Tribunali for a long time. Somehow, though, in the haphazard way of Italy, the system works.
When in Naples thoughts inevitably turn to pizza. The evening crowd outside our pizzeria threatens to block this narrow artery of Centro Storico, the city’s moody, labyrinthine old quarter. Along with L’Antica Pizzeria da Michele, Pizzeria Di Matteo and Pizzeria Starita, Gino Sorbillo is among the city’s most celebrated pizzerie, the handiwork of the eponymous Gino, scion of generations of distinguished pizzaioli.
To kill time we duck next door to Vinorum Historia Enoteca and order brimming plastic cups of local aglianico, a rustic and savoury red, and falanghina, a lively Campanian white wine. Forty minutes later we’re ushered past Pizzeria Gino Sorbillo’s two shiny wood-fired ovens and upstairs to a marble-topped table in the simple dining room.
Naples, founded as the Greek settlement of Parthenope around the 9th century BC, is home to what are traditionally acknowledged to be the world’s best pizze. Its oldest pizzeria, Antica Pizzeria Port’Alba, opened as a stall in 1738 and still operates from a modest shopfront. When we show some interest, craning necks to admire the handsome wood-fired oven, we’re piloted inside for a better look. We leave clutching a slice of pizza a portafoglio – neatly folded in four like a wallet and stuffed in a brown paper bag – for just two euro.
Later at Gino Sorbillo, we order pizza Margherita, the city’s famous red, white and green pie created for Queen Margherita in 1889, and still considered the best means to judge a pizzaiolo’s deftness. Pizza bases here are made with a sourdough starter. The base is deeply flavoursome, puffy-edged and lightly freckled, and topped with a slick of crushed organic Italian tomatoes and molten discs of fior di latte misto, a mozzarella made with cow’s milk and buffalo milk from the nearby Matese region. There’s a single fresh basil leaf at the centre. It’s hard to find bad pizza in Naples, but the balance at Gino Sorbillo between the chewy, almost nutty-tasting base, the creamy cheese and the tart tomato sauce is faultless.
A cornerstone of great Neapolitan pizza is great tomatoes, although the fruit is a relative newcomer to the city. It was a Neapolitan cook named Francesco Gaudenzio who first suggested crushing and cooking the saffron-coloured pomodoro (“golden apple”) in 1705. A little over a century later another Neapolitan, Don Ippolito Cavalcanti, suggested using the sauce to dress pasta, ensuring its enduring popularity. Tomatoes went on to star in all Campania’s finest dishes, from spaghetti Napoletana and parmigiana di melanzane to the olive-studded chiummenzana sauce from nearby Capri and, of course, on many of the region’s best-loved pizze.
I’ve come to southern Italy in search of the perfect tomato. My guide is Giovanni De Angelis, whose career has been pretty much dedicated to the topic.
“Naples is the capital city of the tomato,” says De Angelis, a director of L’Associazione Nazionale Industriali Conserve Alimentari Vegetali, which represents the country’s fruit and vegetable preserving industry. It’s a big business, with an annual turnover of about €6.1 billion, which includes the nation’s
€3.1 billion canned tomato output. Sixty per cent of Italy’s total tomato production is exported; about 40 per cent of Australia’s canned tomatoes come from Italy.
For Neapolitans, the humble tomato represents much more than a cooking staple. “In each of our cans there’s a strip of our land. Just as Capri represents the best of Mediterranean style and beauty, Naples represents tomatoes,” says De Angelis. “There’s an important bond between the country and the produce – the tomato business has a kind of soul.”
Italy’s first tomato-canning plant was established in Campania. This preservation method enabled the perishable produce to be sent worldwide as pelati, or peeled tomatoes, and paste, called conserva. The elongated Roma variety, which is peeled and canned