Petto di pollo alla pizzaiola with potatoes

Alla pizzaiola means in the style of the pizza maker, and it describes not a technique but a shortlist: tomato, garlic, oregano, olive oil. In other words, whatever the pizzaiolo already had within arm's reach when somebody in the kitchen needed feeding and there was no time to make anything else.

Neapolitan cooking is full of these, dishes named after the trade of whoever improvised them rather than after a place or a family. It is a bit like naming a dish "the electrician", and it tells you exactly how it wants to be treated: fast, unfussy, made from four things you already own on a night when the alternative was cereal.

Traditionally the meat is a thin slice of beef, cooked in the sauce until it surrenders. Chicken breast works beautifully and costs considerably less, on one condition. You have to slice it horizontally into thin escalopes first. A whole chicken breast dropped into a pan of tomato takes about fifteen minutes to cook through and spends twelve of them turning into rope. Cut thin, it takes four, stays tender, and has enough surface area to properly drink up the oregano.

The oregano is doing more work here than it looks. Use dried, not fresh, which is unusual advice and completely correct in this one case: oregano is among the very few herbs that is genuinely better dried, which is why every pizzeria in Naples has a jar of it on the shelf and no plant on the windowsill. Crumble it between your fingers on the way into the pan to wake it up.

Boiled potatoes go alongside and they are not a garnish. They are there to be pressed into the sauce with the back of a fork, which is the main pleasure of the dish and also the reason it survives a night in the fridge so well. Sauce plus starch is the most reheatable combination there is.