La Genovese is puree of onions flavoured mainly with meat and is considered one of the greats of the Neapolitan kitchen – a dish that bears witness that there was cooking before the tomato! Some people say that in the 16th  century, the private chefs of the Genovese merchants living in Naples made this dish. The merchants eventually returned to their own homes in Genoa, but many of the chefs remained because leaving the beautiful city simply wasn’t an option. “They set up shops or stands selling food to the public, many of whom didn’t have kitchens in their tiny, one-room apartments (bassi).

The sauce that was to become known as la Genovese was their specialty“. As with all things in Naples, there are  many versions of the truth. Genovese merchants – there certainly were. However, the Spanish Viceroys were in charge of matters in the 16th century and Naples wasn’t doing that well – the Viceroys were far more interested in themselves than in the welfare of anyone around them. Furthermore, the rich Genovese were very rich, very very very rich and it’s doubtful that a chef would choose to remain in a city so that he could cook on the street. The early recipes for La Genovese are different to the sauces of today and that’s to be expected – it would be terrible if the food didn’t evolve at all. In 1837,  Ippolito Cavalcanti gives a recipe in his Cucina casarinola co la lengua Napolitana (Home Cooking in the Neapolitan Language) that is essentially a French glacede viande, a meat stock reduction. At that stage then, it hadn’t become an onion sauce yet. It contained the French mirepoix, though – equal amounts of diced onion, carrot, and celery to flavour the rich sauce. In this recipe, the onions took over with the carrots and celery practically a token in relation to the huge quantity of onions.

In Naples meat is an expensive a food and not a high quality one and it was reduced to the role of flavouring the onions, not vice-versa. Often no beef was used at all, only scraps of salami and ham, a prosciutto rind or a bone. Some people even began to make the sauce without any meat. Maccheroni with a sauce of only onions, a finta Genovese (fake Genovese), became a fast day-dish and still is. Today La Genovese is back to being a meat dish. In the newly affluent Campania, it’s made with enough meat so that the meat itself , sliced and dressed with a bit of the onion sauce can serve as the second course. A green vegetable, preferably peas will be served with that. The sauce, that tastes quite like the gravy from a Jewish-American pot roast, is really the most important thing, however and it’s always served with ziti or mezzani or long tubular maccheroni, a slightly larger version of bucatini that’s often broken into three- to four-inch lengths or cut into shorter lengths in the factory. Napolitans would find penne acceptible, too. Using water to cover the meat and onions and not relying only on the meat and onion juices for a sauce is the basics of cooking this rather old-fashioned  Genovese.  The only contemporary thing about the recipe would be the tomato paste as a colour and taste enhancer – it’s totally unacceptable to traditionalists who insist that la Genovese predates the tomato – and they’re right.

LA GENOVESE

Ingredients

• 600 g onions, sliced
• 500 g lean beef mince
• 3 carrots, thinly sliced
• 2 celery sticks, cleaned and finely sliced
• 50 g salami Napoli, diced
• 40 g Prosciutto crudo, diced (you can also use pork shoulder here)
• 100 ml passata (that’s a loose tomato paste)
• 1 glass dry white wine
• 3 generous tablespoons olive oil
• 2 tablespoons lard
• Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste

Method

• Heat the oil and the lard in a heavy based saucepan over medium heat.
• Add all the onions and sweat until just soft and then add the beef, the carrots, the celery, the salami and the prosciutto (or the cured pork shoulder).
• Cook, stirring and breaking up the beef if it clumps with a wooden spoon.
• If you follow our directions for mince in the basically section, it will not clump.
• Continue this until the meat has browned.
• Dilute the passata with a little water and add to the saucepan.
• As soon as the liquid has reduced completely, pour over the white wine and allow the sauce to simmer very gently for at least two hours.
• Just before serving this, mash down the sauce with a fork until the onions are smooth.
• Serve hot with rigatoni, paccheri or any of the pastas mentioned above.