At Easter, Pastiera brings to the table work that began well before the first slice. Wheat grains soak until tender, then meet ricotta, citron and chocolate inside shortcrust pastry scented with orange or vanilla. This is how the Touring Club Italiano’s 1931 Guida gastronomica d’Italia described the traditional Easter sweet of the Province of Naples.
Broth, rice moulds and honeyed spheres
With Struffoli, the gesture becomes smaller and more playful. Flour-and-egg dough is shaped into little balls, cooked in a pan with butter, gathered under honey and scattered with coloured sprinkles. The same guide placed them between Christmas and Carnival and noted that the sweet was shared with other regions: a Campanian celebration with wider kinships.
Sartù asks for more room. In Naples, it is a baked rice timbale cooked in tomato sauce and filled with meatballs, sausages — preferably cervellatine napolitane —, mozzarella, chicken giblets and mushrooms. For a moment the filling disappears inside the rice; it returns when the knife opens the timbale.
Winter takes the kitchen in another direction. Minestra maritata gathers pork rind, cheek, ear and neck, pezzentella sausage, ham bone, chicory and cabbages into meat broth. Pizza di scarola encloses escarole cooked with oil, anchovies, capers and black Gaeta olives before going to an oiled oven or a frying pan. The 1931 guide preserves both preparations: two different ways of keeping many things together in one dish.
Campania’s listed names
These five names did not remain only on the pages of an old guide. MASAF now lists Pastiera, Struffoli, Sartù di riso, ’A maritata and Pizza di scarola among Campania’s traditional agri-food products. The register supplies a contemporary frame; inside it, soaked grain, broth, filling and the hands that prepare them still matter most.
From one table toward a wider map
To follow this table is to cross the year without leaving the kitchen: Pastiera at Easter, Struffoli between Christmas and Carnival, soup in the cold, Sartù and Pizza di scarola between oven and pan. Five dishes cannot contain Campania. They open a door onto a larger landscape, where every preparation leaves another story waiting nearby.