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June/Jul y 202 2 XIII MAGAZINE historic centre, the Mariterraneo restaurant, excellence in Salerno cuisine, appears ‘discreet’ to the tourist who ventures there. Emiliano Ciancio , owner and chef, uses products exclusively from Campania for his dishes, especially from the coast and Cilento. The sea in this corner of the country is rich in fish and its varieties are many: shrimp, squid, cuttlefish, octopus, amberjack, John Dory and white shrimp. There are also other lesser-known varieties of fish such as the triggerfish , whose flesh is tough, compact and very tasty, and the gurnard , excellent in pasta sauce. “When I cook fish, I like to combine it with some local products,’ says Emiliano Ciancio. ‘At this time of year, for example, I prepare cooked or raw prawns with (dried) Cilento white figs, which I also grate on pasta, and I also put it in stuffed squid with provola cheese, sage, a little chilli oil and salt crystals. In the octopus salad with cherry tomatoes, potatoes and basil, on the other hand, I put Avellino black truffle oil’. Fish soup with the catch of the day, with piennolo tomato puree, and spaghetti with fujute clams , a traditional poor man’s dish with Menaica anchovies and piennolo tomatoes, are the most popular dishes on the Salerno coast. Tradition attributes the paternity of spaghetti alle vongole fujute to Edoardo De Filippo who, one evening after the theatre, came home hungry and improvised a spaghetti dish, dressing it with what he found in his fridge: tomato, anchovies in oil and parsley. Three ingredients that combined gave the sauce a flavour very similar to that of clams: from then on the dish was called spaghetti alle vongole fujute, the clams that aren’t there. If we talk about the Amalfi Coast, we cannot fail to mention anchovy dripping. At one time it was exported by emigrants in little recycled bottles; today it is found all over the world thanks to its unique characteristics, appreciated by the greats of cuisine. Anchovy dripping is the symbol of the village of Cetara, a hamlet of two thousand inhabitants that has developed around a small beach. The freshly caught anchovies are cleaned and rinsed in water and salt before being placed in barrels under salt for about 5/6 months. This time is necessary for them to drain slowly and obtain a delicious oil that we all know by the name of Cetara anchovy dripping. Traditionally, dripping is used to season spaghetti but in reality it can add flavour to any dish: from fried fish to beef tartare, from salads to risottos. It has a very strong flavour, it is savoury, mineral, and you have to be careful in its dosage because a drop more and the dish is ruined. The red tuna from Cetara is also exquisite, a fish with high nutritional value, tasty and rich. FROM SEA TO LAND Another feather in the cap of Campania, especially of Controne, a locality in the Cilento hills that enjoys an ideal microclimate and has a soil rich in water from the numerous springs in the area, is the Controne bean (Slow Food Presidium): round, hard and not floury, with a definite flavour compared to other species. Its skin is very thin and highly digestible. Thanks to these peculiarities, it can be combined with any dish and with various types of wine, both red and white. It does not need to be soaked and cooking times are not as long as with other pulses. ‘The Controne bean is versatile,’ continues chef Emiliano Ciancio, ‘you can eat it in soups as well as in pasta, perfect for pasta and beans, which I whip with provola cheese, adding anchovy dripping at the end, before serving it’. As in most of southern Italy, in this small handkerchief of land, pasta is the most important dish in the local cuisine. There are many artisan pasta factories in the area, many of which export all over the world. Like Gragnano pasta, which manages to reconcile Gragnano’s pasta-making tradition with the use of modern technology: drying, for example; once regulated by opening windows or by exposure to the sun, to get the temperature and humidity just right, is now left to the task of modern static cells. This process takes a minimum of fourteen hours, up to a maximum of sixty hours, depending on the format, and the temperature is between 40°C and 60°C. But even before the advent of Gragnano, the pasta capital of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was Minori. Maccheroni, spaghetti, ziti and scialatielli appeared in the alleys of the village, left to dry slowly, taking advantage of the sea air. The typical pasta of Minori was - and is - the ‘ndunderi, a format similar to gnocchi that historians date back to the Middle Ages. Made with spelt and curdled milk, Minori pasta-makers had the intuition to modify the recipe by mixing flour and curdled milk, or alternatively ricotta, adding egg and grated cow’s cheese. The tomato also plays an important role here and there are several varieties. The Sorrentina variety has a coral red colour and its flesh is not very acidic and has few seeds. It is much larger and pulpier than the others. It is ideal for salads because it does not crumble, remains compact and crunchy, and is excellent for caprese with mozzarella. Pomodorino del Piennolo del Vesuvio, another local variety that became a PDO in