by John Keahey
Mario told us that the prolific French painter Jean-Pierre Houël captured, in the mid-1770s, a scene of men, each hauling a large ice block on his back out of the cave’s mouth, the slight hole in the ground near where we were standing. He said that painting is in the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, Russia. I could find no representation of it there, but the Encyclopedia of Kitchen History, referring to a book by Houël, not a painting, says
In Sicily, the Bishop of Catania claimed a considerable revenue from snow and ice harvested from Mount Etna’s slopes.… To keep ice throughout the hot Mediterranean summer, according to the painter-engraver Jean Hoüel’s Voyage Pittoresque en Sicilie (Picturesque Journey in Sicily, 1784), the Order of Malta established a lava-roofed grotto on Mount Etna consisting of double carved wells into which workers compressed snow. They loaded the frozen chunks onto mules for delivery to boats carrying them to kitchens on the shore.
Later, as our group of nine sat in the dark in that “lava-roofed grotto,” perhaps twenty feet below the surface, with droplets of groundwater sprinkling us from the bumpy lava ceiling that scraped our hard hats as we shifted about, we could only imagine what it must have been like.
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“Remember, for us Etna is a paradise, not a hell.” Mario admonishes us later up the road as we leave the van behind and hike up to the top of a massive crater two-thirds of the way to the top. Thinking about how de Maupassant described his slippery ascent more than 120 years earlier, I fear for the worst on my hike. But the trail is well defined through the packed lava cinders, and it gradually, gently, skirts the hills. But this lower crater is as close as we will get to the three-thousand-meter (9,842 feet) summit.
We stopped at a point where we had a perfect view of craters of various ages laid out in successive waves before us. On the summit is one of the four active cones; today, only a gentle hint of smoke floats above it. Just below that cone is monte frumento delle concazze, an inactive crater formed five thousand years ago. Below that is a cone formed from an 1865 eruption that wiped out hundreds of acres of birch trees. One hundred and forty-four years later, a scattering of low-lying vegetation is barely poking through the now crumbling lava from this flow. This patch of lava is just beginning to show plants with names like Etna tansy, achillea, and Etna milk wetch. A few centuries from now, the yellow-flowered Genista aetnensis will show up, followed by birch and pine forests.
The mountain is a regional park; much smaller Vesuvius, near Naples, is a national park. This is a point of contention for Sicilians who believe Etna should get the national designation. Etna has 270 craters, Mario says, every one of them representing an eruption. Some eruptions cause little damage, but some have been murderous.
De Maupassant obviously did his research. He detailed several, including the ancient Greek lyric poet Pindar’s report of one in 474 B.C. There also was an eruption in 1669 that destroyed much of Catania, including its port. The duomo there used to be next to the water; today, it is several blocks away; the land in between rests on top of the lava flow.
Some of Etna’s eruptions, of course, occur out of the four summit cones, like the last big ones in 2001 and 2002 that wiped out tourist stations, ski lifts, hotels, restaurants, bars. The 2002 eruption lasted twenty days and was “very violent. It sent up a cloud shaped like a cypress tree. The Catania airport was closed for three months because of the ash” potentially fouling airplane engines. Other eruptions shoot out of vents lower down on Etna’s flanks, like the one that caused the 1669 Catania disaster.
The “cypress tree” image formed by smoke during an eruption must be a common phenomenon. A nineteenth-century American writer, Bayard Taylor, witnessed an eruption in 1852 as he rode in a carriage along the sea while traveling from Catania to Messina. His carriage stopped just before Taormina, and he saw, pouring out of the summit, “a mass of smoke four or five miles high, and shaped precisely like the Italian pine tree.… It was like the tree celebrated in Scandinavian sagas … that tree whose roots pierced through the earth, whose trunk was the color of blood, and whose branches filled the uttermost corners of the heavens.”
Just a few hours earlier, while he stood on the streets of the coastal city Acireale to wait out tremors and listen to a thunderous noise from the summit, a local resident standing next to him commented, “‘Ah, the mountain knows how to make himself respected. When he talks, everybody listens.’”
Mario, our guide, looks at me. “American people often see it as a ‘gentle giant.’ It is a giant, but not gentle. We respect it and take from it when it lets us.”
In January 2011, just eighteen months after my visit, the volcano came alive once more. No new cones were formed, but existing ones spewed lava and ash, forcing authorities to close Catania’s Fontanarossa airport for a few days. This time, no villages were affected; property damage was minimal.
After going a bit higher and taking in the hazy view across the Strait of Messina toward Calabria, we hike back down. There is one more destination, this one primarily for the two French teens and the Scottish teenager who have been delightful, involved companions on this journey. It is Gole dell’Alcàntara, the gorge carved out by the river through lava. The teens want to wade in the cold, cold water of the river after the long hot day in the van with a broken air conditioner.
It’s an hour’s drive. We clomp down more than two hundred stone steps into a magnificent gorge with incredible lava formations revealed over the eons by the rushing river, now at a low level after the flood-level spring.
Mario confides to me quietly, as the two families frolic in the water amid several dozen other waders, that this is his least favorite part of the trip. “I love the geology,” he says, pointing to the rolled-oats shape of the stone and the tall, narrow walls shooting up to a tiny patch of blue sky. “But the people”—he gestures at the loud, raucous Sicilians surrounding us—“don’t respect this place for what it is. Look at the trash,” he says, pointing to plastic water bottles and candy wrappers, some floating in the river. “People say to me, ‘You live in a paradise! Why does everyone here treat it so badly?’ To me, it is a mystery.”
FOURTEEN
Food
Eat to live, or live to eat are not axioms [Sicilians] adhere to: they eat, of course, to satisfy nutritional needs related to the body, but they live also because through eating they want to satisfy needs of a spiritual nature. This is so even if they are about to eat pasta con le fave [pasta with beans].
—Giuseppe Coria, (1930–2003) Sicily: Culinary Crossroads, translated by Gaetano Cipolla
UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR Francesca Corrao grew up in the Sicilian interior and Palermo. In the midst of my visit to her Rome apartment, where we spend four hours talking about a range of subjects dealing with the place of her childhood, she excuses herself to make lunch. After a few moments in the kitchen of her comfortable home, located a few streets up the side of a hill opposite the Trastevere train station, she set a table on a sun-dappled terrace overlooking a Catholic convent for Eastern European nuns.
Sicilians and Italians love to eat out-of-doors, even in chilly weather. But this is July, and Rome in July is sweltering. At one point she grabs a short hose and waters down the light tan deck tiles baking in the Roman sun.
“I am doing something very Arabic,” she shouts from the terrace over the gurgle of running water. “They would pour water over tiles in their North African or Sicilian houses to cool them down and make it pleasant to sit. Please”—she motions—“come. Sit.”
A finely decorated table, starched-cloth napkins, heavy knives and forks, all in place, greet me. She sets down a large bowl of pasta coated in what appears to be a light tomato-based sauce sprinkled throughout with herbs, spices, and bits of vegetables. Then she sets down a covered skillet. “Chicken,” she says. “I hope you like chicken. It will be our secondo.”
She has prepared three courses in fewer than fifteen minutes. A green, leafy salad also was presented in typical Italian fashion: at the
end of our meal. “Amazing,” I say. “I have Italian friends who can throw together a meal this wonderful almost as quickly. When I cook, it takes hours. How do you do it?”
Francesca shrugs. “I don’t know,” she says. “But when you learn to cook at age eight standing at the elbow of your grandmother, it becomes fast and easy.” No recipes, she says; they are all in her head.
It seems that cooking comes naturally to Sicilian women and some men. Food is the center of family life, and children are usually surrounded by two or more generations of aunts, grandmothers, and sometimes uncles and grandfathers, who are more than willing to teach. It becomes, as Francesca Corrao indicated, second nature. She doesn’t really remember learning; she just did. It was like, decades ago, when a journalist I knew asked ski professional Stein Ericksen at what age he learned to ski. Ericksen was puzzled by the question. “I don’t know,” he replied after a few moments’ reflection. “Do you remember learning to walk?”
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There are at least dozens, if not hundreds, of cookbooks boasting the finest recipes in Sicilian cuisine. Some appear to be thrown together with little explanation about how they represent Sicilian versus Italian cooking. Others might call for substitutions of products easily found in the United States that no self-respecting Sicilian would ever use. Still others are full of history, the literary equivalent of, say, Burt Wolf’s television series Travels & Traditions, in which he places the food he talks about in fascinating and detailed historical perspective.
Among the best cookbooks—and there are others as well—are Sicily: Culinary Crossroads by the late Giuseppe Coria, and Clifford A. Wright’s A Mediterranean Feast, in which he examines the culture of food and its culinary origins in several Mediterranean areas.
Coria’s book is wonderfully translated and in a new edition by Oronzo Editions. It breaks down, in its introduction, the contributions of the eleven periods of foreign domination by various nations or groups of colonists and warriors that have occupied Sicily for good or for ill over the centuries. Since it’s impossible for historians to discern the diets of the indigenous peoples on the island who greeted the first settlers, the Greeks, Coria starts with what the Greeks brought: great cooks and writers of some of the earliest cookbooks. He says that “[F]rom the fifth century B.C., Siracusa, Agrigento, and Gela were the birthplaces of the finest cooks.”
Even the Greek luminary Plato was impressed with the colonizers’ culinary traditions. He wrote of the people of Agrigento, the south-central Sicily city that has a collection of the most durable Greek temples in the world: “They always build as if they expect to live for eternity; they always eat as if they expect to die the next day.”
Mary Taylor Simeti, writer of several books and articles about Sicily, tells us, in an article in Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture, that “the first cookbook in the Western world (unfortunately lost to us) had been written by Mithaecus of [Siracusa],” where a professional cooking school had been established. And she writes that Greek-Sicilian chefs trained there went on to serve aristocratic Roman families.
Another thing she points out is that the first “pasta asciuta, dried and then cooked in boiling water,” was “documented in Italy in twelfth-century Sicily.” Prior to this moment, an Arab geographer mentions that a substance known as itrya was produced—a type of vermicelli.
Meanwhile, Coria informs us that Greek-Sicilian writers described soups full of crustaceans, and they wrote about how Odysseus was drawn to the Sirens not only by their sexual power, but also by their “grilled anchovies, roast suckling pig, young squid accompanied by a superb wine for lunch, and then with fat mullet, bowfin fillets, and scorpion fish for dinner.”
A third-century B.C. culinary writer offered descriptions of all kinds of fish, “and for each the best method of preparation.” Coria described a variety of breads, and what each type should be eaten with (olive oil, wine, vinegar, cheese). Others wrote about how to prepare tuna roe, where to find the best honey (the Iblei Mountains near Ragusa), and ways to cook various birds, including a type of quail known as skylark, which Coria said is still consumed in Sicily. I didn’t see that particular dish on any menus, but I am sure skylarks are still consumed in some homes.
These early Greek colonists, then, began mingling with the indigenous peoples on the island, particularly in the east. Within a short period of a century or two, as we have seen, the Greeks evolved from colonists to Sicilians. Then, by the first century B.C., the Romans came onto the scene and took over for four centuries. Sicily was the Roman Republic’s first province, and by this time, Greek influence had been spreading across the island for as many as six centuries. Rome left around A.D. 307 as the empire neared its end.
During Roman rule, the island was controlled by various functionaries, some of who robbed the islanders, enriching themselves and their republic-turned-empire.
It is well-known that Sicily was Rome’s breadbasket, primarily growing the wheat that fed much of that particular empire. So bread was never lacking among the general populace, Coria tells us. But foodwise, writes Coria, “the Romans left few traces.” There was something called cudduruni, a type of flatbread that could be referred to as the first “pizza,” although that honor rightly goes to the Neapolitans many centuries later.
Different kinds of small breads, focaccia, were developed, including some with various ingredients cooked into the bread itself. Sicilians call these ’mpanate. The Roman writer Cato handed down actual recipes for some of these bread dishes, including one called placenta, “made with flour, cheese, and honey from the Iblei Mountains” north of Noto and west of Siracusa “… and the recipe for mustaceos, which would become the pasta mostaccioli,” a smooth or ribbed tubular pasta cut at the ends on a diagonal and about two inches long. It is a bit longer than the more common penne.
Coria credits the Romans for developing Sicilian appreciation for asparagus and for teaching them “to eat only fresh meat and cook it well, never to age it; to store snow in caves for use in summer.” And the Romans taught Sicilians to “cook liver in nets.” The “net” in this case refers to the fibrous membrane taken from a pig’s abdomen and boiled in water for a few moments. A pig’s liver is cut into chunks; the now pliable, stretched-out membrane also is cut up to wrap around those individual chunks. Properly seasoned, these pieces can be pushed onto skewers and roasted over a fire, or they can be fried in a skillet with finely chopped onion and bay leaves.
Coria’s book has the precise recipe for ficatu nno ’ntrigghiu. The dish is well-known, I am told, in Siracusa. I never came across it during four or five visits to that city. I am still debating whether to make the dish; I may have to taste it alone.
Beyond a handful of such unique dishes, the Romans also get credit for bringing many species of fruit trees to the island before they were supplanted by the next wave of invaders: the Franks, Goths, and, for another long stretch, the Constantinople-based Byzantine Empire.
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There is a recipe from Messina that Coria included in his book. It is simply “Oven-baked Pasta,” or in Sicilian, Pasta ’ncasciata. He describes the name as “Pasta in a Chest” and writes: “It was originally cooked inside a pan that was covered with embers placed on top of the cover, so that the pasta was cooked with heat from above and below.” It is a process similar to Dutch-oven cooking. This recipe, published with permission of Oronzo Editions, makes its preparation a bit easier.
* * *
Oven-baked Pasta
Pasta ’ncasciata
(Serves 6)
Ingredients
Extra-virgin olive oil
1 onion, finely chopped, divided
10 ounces (1¼ diced pork
¼ cup pork rind, roughly chopped
10 ounces (1¼ cups) firm, dried sausage, crumbled
2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1 tablespoon strattu (thick Sicilian tomato paste) diluted with a little water
3 tablespoons chopped fresh or c
anned tomato
sea salt
2 pounds cauliflower florets
1 pound rigatoni
caciocavallo cheese, sliced finely
grated pecorino
For the sauce, heat a little olive oil in a skillet over medium heat, and gently fry half the chopped onion until golden. Add the diced pork, pork rind, sausage, garlic, and tomato extract. Fry, for a few minutes, mixing well, then add the chopped tomato and enough water to cover. Cook until the sauce has thickened. Season with salt to taste.
Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil and blanch the cauliflower until just tender, about 5 minutes. Strain, reserving the water for the pasta, and set aside. Coat the bottom of a skillet with olive oil and gently fry the cauliflower florets and the remaining onion. Bring the pot of water from the cauliflower to a boil and cook the rigatoni until al dente, 8 to 10 minutes. Drain.
Heat the oven to 350°.
Once drained, mix half the pasta with one-third of the cauliflower, one-third of the sauce, and a few slices of caciocavallo. After blending, pour this mixture into an ovenproof casserole (the “chest”) and layer on some of the sauce, cauliflower, and cheese. Put the second half of the pasta over these layers and then add the remaining cauliflower, sauce, and caciocavallo slices. Top with an abundant amount of grated pecorino. Bake covered until the cheese has melted and the flavors are combined.
VARIATION
Some people add fried eggplant and slices of hard-boiled eggs between the layers.
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Still another of Coria’s recipes is worth mentioning here: Ragusan Meatballs, or Purpetti di maiali. He writes that “Sicilians love meatballs so much there is no food they have not shaped into balls.” He especially finds that meatballs made from wild hare and wild rabbit are exceptional, and that ball-shaped sardines are classics. Cooks can also make balls out of vegetables, such as eggplant, potatoes, mushrooms, and artichokes—and even certain sweets.