Sartù di Riso

This is not simple food. This is not restrained food. This is Neapolitan baroque, a dish born in the kitchens of nobility where French-trained cooks called monzù transformed humble ingredients into edible architecture. The name comes from 'surtout,' the elaborate French table centerpiece. That tells you everything.

Sartù breaks my usual rule about what you keep out. Here, you keep nothing out. The rice must be creamy with Parmigiano and egg yolks. Inside that rice, you hide ragù napoletano, tiny meatballs no bigger than hazelnuts, sweet peas, wedges of hard-boiled egg, cubes of mozzarella that melt into strings when you cut the first slice. It is excessive by design.

I teach restraint. I teach simplicity. But I also teach honesty about what Italian cooking actually is, and Italian cooking includes this: the food of feast days, of celebrations, of showing off. Neapolitan grandmothers make sartù for Christmas and Easter. They make it when someone gets married or graduates. They make it to prove what they can do.

This is a project. You will spend half a day in the kitchen. The ragù alone takes hours. The meatballs must be rolled by hand, each one uniform. The rice must be cooked properly, enriched, cooled just enough to handle. Then you build: rice lining the mold, filling in the center, more rice to seal it. When you unmold this golden dome and cut the first wedge, revealing all those hidden treasures, you will understand why Neapolitan cooks have made this for three hundred years.