Sicilian new edition green 16/4/09 12:37 Page 1 SICILIAN FOOD Sicilian new edition green 16/4/09 12:37 Page 2 Sicilian new edition green 16/4/09 12:37 Page 3 SICILIAN FOOD Recipes from Italy’s Abundant Isle Mary Taylor Simeti GRUB STREET . LONDON Wakefield Press 1 The Parade West Kent Town South Australia 5067 www.wakefieldpress.com.au This book was first published as Pomp and Sustenance: Twenty-five Centuries of Sicilian Food in the USA by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. 1989. This edition published in Australia and New Zealand 2009, by arrangement with Grub Street, London. This edition copyright © Grub Street, 1999 Text copyright © Mary Taylor Simeti, 1989 All rights reserved. This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced without written permission. Enquiries should be addressed to the publisher. ISBN 978 1 86254 850 3 Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material. Doubleday: Excerpts from Homer, The Odyssey, translated by Robert Fitzgerald. Copyright © 1961 by Robert Fitzgerald. Reprinted by permission of Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. Garzanti Editore S.p.A.: Excerpt from the English translation of The Viceroys, by Federico De Roberto, published in 1972 by Garzanti Editore, Milano. Reprinted by permission. Pantheon Books, Inc.: Excerpts from Two Stories and a Memory by Giuseppe di Lampedusa, translated by Archibald Colquhoun. Copyright © 1962 by Wm. Collins Sons and Co., Ltd., and Pantheon Books, Inc.; and excerpts from The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa, translated by Archibald Colquhoun. Copyright © 1960 by Wm. Collins Sons and Co., Ltd., and Random House, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Pantheon Books, a Division of Random House, Inc. Sellerio Editore: Translation by Mary Taylor Simeti of a brief excerpt from Pani e dolci della Sicilia by Antonio Uccello, published by Sellerio Editore, Palermo, 1976. Reprinted by permission. George Weidenfeld & Nicholson Limited: Excerpts from The Happy Summer Days by Fulco di Verdura. Reprinted by permission of George Weidenfeld & Nicolson Limited, London. Illustrations reproduced from 1989 edition with thanks. Printed and bound in India Sicilian new edition green 16/4/09 12:37 Page 5 Contents Preface 7 ONE Of Ancient Abundance, Epic Appetites 11 TWO The Gardens of Paradise 55 THREE The Staff of Life . 93 FOUR … And the Stuff of Dreams 123 FIVE Princes, Priests, and Not So Humble Friars 155 SIX Virgins' Breasts, Chancellor's Buttocks, and Other Convent Delicacies 187 SEVEN Street Fare 215 EIGHT I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream for Ice Cream 233 Appendix A Few Suggestions About Eating in Sicily Today 250 Bibliography 255 Index 263 Sicilian new edition green 16/4/09 12:37 Page 6 Sicilian new edition green 16/4/09 12:37 Page 11 11 ONE Of Ancient Abundance, Epic Appetites I learnt to cook so well in Sicily that I will cause the banqueters to bite the dishes and the plates for joy. Alexis of Tarentum, fourth century B.C. The first foreign visitor to set foot on Sicilian shores was, some say, the archetypal traveller himself, Odysseus, who circumnavigated the island in a state of perpetual astonishment at the abundance of its fields. On the east coast, at the foot of Mount Etna, he saw the land of the Cyclops, so rich that despite the ignorance of its gigantic inhabitants, who neither tilled nor ploughed, “grain –/wild wheat and barley – grows untended, and/wine- grapes, in clusters, ripen in heaven’s rain.” To the west, in the city now known as Trapani, . he saw an orchard closed by a pale – four spacious acres planted with trees in bloom or weighted down for picking: pear trees, pomegranates, brilliant apples, luscious figs, and olives ripe and dark. Fruit never failed upon these trees: winter and summer time they bore, for through the year the breathing Westwind ripened all in turn – so one pear came to prime, and then another, and so with apples, figs, and the vine’s fruit empurpled in the royal vineyard there. Currants were dried at one end, on a platform bare to the sun, beyond the vintage arbours and vats the vintners trod; while near at hand were new grapes barely formed as the green bloom fell, or half-ripe clusters, faintly colouring. After the vines came rows of vegetables of all the kinds that flourish in every season, and through the garden plots and orchard ran Sicilian new edition green 16/4/09 12:37 Page 12 12 SICILIAN FOOD channels from one clear fountain, while another gushed through a pipe under the courtyard entrance to serve the house and all who came for water. Homer, The Odyssey, ninth century B.C. It is not mere intellectual whimsy to begin a discussion of contemporary Sicilian food with Odysseus.The gardens of Alcinoüs as Homer describes them, with their constant supply of fresh fruit and vegetables, olives to eat and to press, and vineyards to give wine, vinegar, and dried grapes, contain the very essence of Sicilian cooking. The raw materials present in The Odyssey, prepared according to the techniques described by later Greek and Roman authors, still dominate the Sicilian table today, a continuity all the more remarkable in the light of the many subsequent invasions. The conquerors who followed the Greeks increased and enriched the range of Sicilian cooking, but they failed to alter its basic character. Like the mythical gardens of Alcinoüs, Sicily herself became synony- mous with abundance. Here the colonists who had set sail from the poor soils and eroded hillsides of archaic Greece found mountains hidden by thick forests, fields covered by volcanic loam of extraordinary fertility, pastures so redolent of spring wildflowers that hounds could not follow the scent of their prey. Just as their dogs were confounded by this abundance of perfume, so the colonists themselves were also led astray. Corrupted by the climate of plenty,they abandoned the simple, measured, even abstemious diet that had heretofore been the lot and the vaunt of Greeks of all classes, and by the fifth century B.C. Syracuse, the richest and most powerful of the Greek cities on the island, had become the gastronomic capital of the Mediterranean world. The Greek invasion was from the very beginning an agricultural rather than a mercantile one, and the wealth of the colonies was derived from the production and exportation of agricultural goods – wheat, cheese, oil, honey, and timber to the homeland, fruit and vegetables to the Greek and Phoenician colonies of North Africa, a scant hundred-mile sail to the south. These products were much appreciated at home on the island as well, where they became the basis of a distinguished local cuisine. The earliest notices of these culinary developments are very fragmentary: Syracuse produced the treatise by Mithaecus and the first school for professional cooks, which was run by a man named Labducus.The master of them all was not a Syracusan, however, but a man from Gela named Sicilian new edition green 16/4/09 12:37 Page 13 Of Ancient Abundance, Epic Appetites 13 Archestratus, a gourmet of such refined palate that it was said he could detect a difference in flavour between a mullet caught during a waxing moon and one taken during the waning. Archestratus travelled throughout the Mediterranean, a fourth-century B.C. Michelin inspector, spreading the gospel of good eating and passing judgement on what the local markets had to offer; five stars to the eels fished off the coast of Messina and to the herrings from Syracuse; three stars to Sicilian tuna caught near Tindari or Cefalù, but five to that of Byzantium. And have a tail-cut from a she-tunny – the large she-tunny, I repeat, whose mother-city is Byzantium. Slice it and roast it all rightly, sprinkling just a little salt, and buttering it with oil. Eat the slices hot, dipping them into a sauce piquante: they are nice even if you want to eat them plain, like the deathless gods in form and stature. But if you serve it sprinkled with vinegar, it is done for. Archestratus of Gela, fourth century B.C. Only fragments of Archestratus’s poetry have survived, incorporated into The Deipnosophists – The Sophists at Dinner, a lengthy compendium of gastronomic thought and practice written six centuries later by Athenaeus of Naucratis, for whom the precepts of Archestratus represented a golden age of moderation. Yet Archestratus’s constant exhortations to simplicity indicate that overindulgence and excess were already the rule. One foreigner who visited the court of the tyrant Dionysius in 387 B.C. was so disgusted by the licentiousness and the gourmandising he found there that he wrote an epistle home to say so: And when I came [to Sicily] I was in no wise pleased at all with “the blissful life,” as it is there termed, replete as it is with Italian and Syracusan banqueting; for thus one’s existence is spent in gorging food twice a day and never sleeping alone at night and all the practices which accompany this mode of living. Plato, Epistle VII, fourth century B.C. The measuring stick Plato used to judge anyone’s lifestyle was undeniably straight and narrow. Still, the self-indulgence and the overeating that he condemned were not unique to the court of Syracuse.The Golden Mean Sicilian new edition green 16/4/09 12:37 Page 14 14 SICILIAN FOOD had fallen into disregard throughout the island, and everywhere fabulous banquets were consumed in the shadow of outsize temples.