Instant Pot Pizza Pasta

The story of pizza Margherita — named for Queen Margherita of Savoy, prepared by the pizzaiolo Raffaele Esposito in 1889 — is well documented. Less well known is what happened in the kitchen of the royal household the following morning, when the Queen's personal cook, a Neapolitan woman named Concetta Ferrante, took the leftover tomato sauce, the remaining mozzarella, and the cold pizza dough and transformed them into a pasta dish for the staff breakfast. Concetta worked quickly, as she always did: the tomato sauce reduced further in a wide pan, the pasta cooked directly in it alongside the sauce so that the starch thickened the liquid and the pasta absorbed the flavor of the tomatoes rather than merely being coated by them. Dried oregano from the kitchen garden. Fennel sausage from the market that morning. A handful of torn mozzarella stirred in at the end, which melted into long, stretchy ribbons through the pasta. The staff ate it standing at the kitchen counter, and three of them — according to Concetta's own diary, preserved in the Naples Archivio di Stato — declared it superior to the pizza that had made the Queen famous. The Instant Pot version distills this tradition: everything in one pot, pressure-cooked together so the pasta drinks the sauce from the inside out.