'Vesuvian Torzella'

It is also called Greek cabbage or "torza riccia", in July 2006 it was included in the list of the traditional food products from Campania. It is a country plant which can be eaten raw, steamed, boiled or sautéed. It has a lively and sharp taste, it tastes like broccoli and turnip tops, it is rich in vitamins A and C, calcium and glycoside which protect from cancer. It is a gift of winter, in fact it stands up to cold. It is picked between November and March at different times.

It has become famous thanks to a masterpiece of the Neapolitan cuisine, the 
"menesta maretata" (wedding soup) which was invented in the Seventeenth century and is usually prepared the twenty-sixth of December and in the Christmas period in Naples. This dish, a distant relation of the Spanish "olla podrida", a substantial dish prepared with pulses, meat pieces and spices, includes meat and vegetables like pork rinds, lard, broccoli, lettuce, chicory, Endivem escarole and "torzella".

Giovan Battista del Tufo wrote:
It was called "potaggio di broccoli" by Vincenzo Corrado in "Cuoco Galante" (1773) but was also included by Giulio Cesare Cortese in its ironic short dialect poem "La Vaiasseide" (1604), by Felippo Sgruttendio in "Li spanfe de la foglia" and by Bartolomeo Zito, "lo Tardacino", in "Defennemiento de la Vaiasseide" (1628). In this work by Bartolomeo Zito and in the recipe by Ippolito Cavalcanti (in "Cucina casarinola co la lengua napoletana", 1837) the preparation consists in cooking the meat, adding the torzella and boiling. Cavalcanti added Endivem escarole and some basil.

Cortese wrote that the cleverness at cooking this delicious soup was one of the few good qualities of maids who were described as loose women with obscene culinary metaphors. In the works by these authors many beloved vegetables are mentioned.

The torzella is particularly important, it can be found even in the "Lo mercante" fairy tale by Cortese: Cienzo, saying goodbye to Naples, mentions this vegetable.

Nowadays in the article "I tesoretti" in June 2007 in Il Manifesto supplement the Slow Food editor John Irving remembered Naples at the time of Norman Lewis and in the second postwar period and his rounds in the city. He mentioned the torzella among the vegetables found at market and he said that it wasn't possible to find it anymore. It was described as something like broccoli which grows wild in the countryside around the city. He wrote that many people speak about it but few people really remember it. Mr Irving asked Gaetano, a 25 year old greengrocer, if he had never seen a torzella. "Never"- the boy answered - "but I know that once it was one of the main ingredients of the wedding soup".
Maybe Gaetano doesn't know that the torzella is back again.