by John Keahey
An interesting note here: Coria informs us that “meatballs are prepared at home, not in restaurants, where they are never made: Sicilians are suspicious by nature.”
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Ragusan Meatballs
Purpetti di maiali
(Serves 4)
Ingredients
Olive oil for frying
1 onion, finely chopped
½ bunch fresh flat-leaf parsley, chopped
2 or 3 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1 pound ground pork
2 eggs
1 tablespoon red wine
sea salt
pepper
caciocavallo cheese
In a large skillet over medium-high heat, warm the olive oil.
In a medium bowl, combine the onion, parsley, and garlic with the ground pork. Incorporate the eggs, red wine, sea salt, and pepper to taste, and add the shredded caciocavallo. Take small amounts and form them into the shape of meatballs (walnut-size, oval-shaped balls, not too thick, but do not flatten them). Fry the meatballs, turning occasionally, until browned, about 7 minutes. Drain the meatballs on paper towels and serve right away or they lose their aroma and crispness.
VARIATIONS
The initial mixture for the meatballs can be made thicker with the addition of bread crumbs, or softer with the addition of a little milk.
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The dew lay heavy on the field of wildflowers carpeting the ground where olive trees spilled down a hillside. This crowded grove is sliced in two by the road to Caltabellotta, a small village with a commanding view of the Mediterranean. On a clear day, I suspect, one could see North Africa from here. Heading north past the town on narrow roads is Corleone, deep in the hilly interior. And north from there is Palermo. But that was not my plan.
These trees are massive, twisted, gnarly, and whorled at their base, indicating their advanced age. They grow shorter in Sicily than they do elsewhere, and therefore the olives are easier to harvest, usually in October, than they are in Greece or mainland Italy. Planted hundreds of years ago on the flanks of this mountain below Caltabellotta and northeast of the south-coast city of Sciacca, they were young at a time when much of Sicilian history passed by.
They looked like trees I had seen many years ago in a remote, lightly traveled section of Calabria. There I had encountered an old man with a freshly sawn olive-wood log perched on his shoulder. He told me that many of his trees were planted at the time of Christ. And this Sicilian grove also resembled trees surrounding a pensione in Sardinia. Those trees, the property owner had assured me, were a mere six hundred years old.
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This Sicilian hillside appeared to have been in a fire long ago. But the black tree trunks were producing fresh, young olive branches festooned with long, thin, silvery-green leaves. One trunk was split down the middle, as if hit by a lightning bolt. It, too, was showing healthy, thick new growth on both sides.
I had once been intrigued enough to look into olive-tree lore. Some authors, particularly American writer Mort Rosenblum, report the existence today of groves in France and Italy that indeed could have been planted by imperial Romans as many as two thousand years ago. But while trees growing today are not likely that old, their deep, sturdy root systems could be.
Those ancient clumps of roots are capable of surviving fire, extended drought, earthquakes, and rampaging armies. When the aboveground tree dies of old age—the upper torsos do not usually survive beyond seven hundred years—new sprouts will emerge from the original root system, a cycle repeating itself endlessly until the roots are dug up to make room for a road, a house, a parking lot.
In modern times throughout the Mediterranean, such removal does not necessarily mean the death of a tree. There are tree farms that sell, for thousands of euros, large reclaimed olive trees set into sturdy wooden containers.
It was the Greeks who introduced to Sicily, perhaps by the sixth or fifth centuries B.C., olive trees and grapes for wine. Today, the island, with its volcanic soil, delightful climate, and rolling hills with a slightly cooler elevation, produces perhaps ten percent of Italy’s crop.
The Web site OliveNation (olivenation.com) describes Sicily’s oil as “sweet and delicate. Others can be as strong and peppery as their Tuscan cousins to the north. All are fragrant and appetizing … so much so that it has been said that the ancient Athenians preferred Sicilian olive oil to their own, even though some of the varieties grown in Sicily and Greece were the same!”
My tongue is not nuanced enough to discern significant differences in oil grown in different places, but I can tell the difference between light and heavy. This difference is particularly found in the oil from olive trees grown near Trapani, on the west coast, around the tiny village of Scopello. It is light and not meant for heat in a skillet. This light, slightly nuanced oil is best used for dipping bread, or sprinkling on salads or mounds of steaming, fresh pasta.
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In rural Sicily, pointing your car in just about any direction and going for it reaps wondrous rewards. You can find small villages that suddenly appear on hillsides or hilltops and possess perhaps a handful of streets and one, maybe two, local restaurants that almost never see a tourist. There might not even be a menu; guests are served whatever is being prepared that day.
Such experiences have always turned out well; experiences in heavy-duty tourist-oriented restaurants have not. You know the places. They are the ones with large asphalt parking lots with long painted stripes that indicate parking for tour buses. Many times I have wandered into a tiny room with a handful of tables where the father is clearing off one to make room for a new customer; the son or daughter is collecting orders; and the mother, cheeks reddened from the heat and dressed in a white cap and full-body white apron, is stirring a large pot or, with lightning speed and flashing steel, chopping a mound of fragrant basil in a narrow kitchen.
Perhaps it’s the idea, a golden image in the visitor’s mind, of such a scene in a small family-run place that makes the food taste so good. But it is more likely the leg of lamb, cooked to tender perfection so that the meat, simmered for hours in a rich sauce, is hard to keep on the fork; or the pasta, cooked al dente in a way that most non-Italians or non-Sicilians can never match; or the fresh vegetables steamed to just the right crunchiness.
There is never a sense that you need to hurry through your meal in these places. They exist in neighborhoods of large cities, such as Palermo, Siracusa, or Noto, or in smaller villages, such as Racalmuto or Castrofilippo. Some are clean, well-lighted places. Others, like the Shanghai in Palermo’s Vucciria, might give you concern as you walk up a narrow stairway badly in need of paint and plaster.
However, when you twist your fork around those strands of pasta, lightly coated with an unpresumptuous sauce, and pop it in your mouth, followed by a gulp of mineral water con gas and then a bit of crisp bread, you forget about that stairway and luxuriate in the aromas of the place and the smile of the family member serving you. They are everywhere in Sicily. You just have to search them out. Most of the time, you won’t be disappointed.
To name them, as The New York Times’ travel section or popular guidebooks do, is to change them.
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Food writer and historian Clifford A. Wright, in his sweeping work A Mediterranean Feast, writes that Sicily’s richest agricultural period was during the Arab years of the ninth and tenth centuries. The Arabs had introduced, along with an extensive irrigation system, many of the crops and fruits the island is famous for today. A significant number of the varieties of vegetables grown there under the Muslims were not known in Europe at that time. And I found in another book, Food: The History of Taste, that we have the Arabs to thank for that marvelous Sicilian dessert cannolo. H. D. Miller, who wrote an article in that book, said the dish, called qanawāt, involved “pieces of dough made into tubes, deep fried and filled with a variety of sweets.”
In November 2009, I was treated to one of these Arab-based confections in
Noto, where the owner of Pasticceria Mandorlafiore (almond flower), Marco Braneti, took a few moments to demonstrate his skills. He handed a small individual cassata, made that morning, to my son Brad, and disappeared into his kitchen. Moments later he emerged with a just-made cannolo. The ricotta filling was light, the freshly made tube was just-right crunchy, and the ends of the ricotta emerging from the tube were each dipped in crushed Bronte pistachios from the slopes of Etna. The cannolo certainly derives from the Arab influence, Marco believes.
While that theory may not be questioned by food historians, I found in a bit of research that the origins of the cassata are in dispute. It can be as big as a cake or, like the one Brad had delightfully devoured, made for the individual.
Italian studies professor John Dickie, in his book Delizia! The Epic History of Italians and Their Food, proposes that cassata “does not derive from the name for a bowl in Arabic, as is often claimed. Much more prosaically, it originates in the Latin for cheese.” He’s not sure it has Arabic origins, and it wasn’t until the 1700s that the green-and-white color combination was used. The way it appears today, with candied-fruit slivers arrayed on top of the ricotta coating over sponge cake, is an even more recent invention.
I took a small bite of the confection Brad was eating. It was teeth-achingly sweet, the thin, green marzipan border almost impossible to finish. But the ricotta–sponge cake combination was the best I had ever tasted. Perhaps there is a place elsewhere in the world where you can get cassata or a cannolo this good, but I doubt it.
John Dickie, ever the realist and not prone to sentimentality, warns us not to have romantic notions about the origins of Sicilian cuisine. “Whatever flavors and smells characterized Islamic Sicily’s civilization of the table, most of them, like the planisphere, [an eleventh-century Persian star chart] have been irretrievably lost.”
This skepticism aside, Noto’s pastry master Marco believes in Islamic origins for many of the pastries that come out of his shop. He points to the pistachio and almond cookies found only in the province of Siracusa.
“These are from recipes of our grandparents,” he said. Knowing their origins “tells you about poverty, about a people who survived on bread, cheese, and olives, who enjoyed sweetness wherever they could find it” in these simple honey, flour, and egg-white concoctions.
He adds, proudly, that he does not use anything “industrial” in the making of his pastries, pointing out that Noto is known for its artisan pastry tradition. He is not about to break with that tradition.
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When Muslim rulers displaced the Greek Byzantines in the late ninth century, they reversed the Roman and Byzantine practice of amassing large swaths of land by breaking up the latifundia, or expansive estates. Smaller parcels were handed out to the Muslim immigrants, and villages were created to house them.
When the Normans arrived, a new social structure focusing on barons developed. They, said Clifford Wright, were allowed to “rape the land” by re-creating the Roman and Byzantine idea of “large and inefficient agricultural estates.” Many rebellious Muslims were eventually chased out of Sicily; whole villages disappeared. Of course, by this time, Arab blood was flowing freely through the veins of the islanders, mingling with the blood of ancient Greeks, Carthaginians, and a few Normans. Many Islamic traditions, including styles of dress for Christian Sicilian women, remained for years after the Normans arrived.
As far as the island’s cuisine was concerned, it likely bore no resemblance to the cuisine we celebrate. In fact, Wright tells us bluntly that “the very poor of Sicily had no cuisine.” He looked at inventories of household goods from the medieval period that showed most peasant homes had no foculàri, or slow braziers. Also, prepared food that was sold for consumption included a large tax, making it impossible for the poor to purchase it. Their homes did have “batteria da cucina—spits, fryers, and pans—[that indicate] the simplest of cooking methods.”
Today, in a land famous for its olive oil, it is tough to imagine a time when it was too expensive for most people to use. Wright says that from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries “animal fats such as butter, bacon, lard, mutton fat … and beef suet were used in Sicilian cooking.”
“In fact,” he writes, “the preferred cooking fat in fifteenth-century Sicily was butter.” It was common practice, he said, for farmworkers to carry butter, not cheese, into the fields to eat with their scraps of bread.
Olive oil has been a product of the Sicilian landscape since the beginning of recorded time. The colonizing Greeks, three thousand years ago, planted trees in abundance. But “it [olive oil] was rare and expensive until recently,” says Wright. Jews on the island during the Middle Ages started buying oil in quantity “as pork fat was forbidden to them,” and Jewish merchants sold the product. Such a modest production during those centuries means that oil “was used on bread or for seasoning dried vegetable soups.”
Another point Wright makes is that chickens were not included in the historical Sicilian cuisine. Chickens were expensive, compared to pork and veal, as were their eggs. “This accounts in part for why there is almost no chicken cookery in Sicily.” But there are plenty of recipes for the cooking of other animals, especially the organs, a custom coming from Tunisia’s influence on the island during the Arab period.
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Noto, that unique baroque city in the southeast of Sicily near Siracusa, is a culinary heaven. I discovered it through the recommendation of a new friend, Renée Restivo, a Sicilian-American New Yorker. She spends part of each year in Sicily conducting cooking programs through her organization, Soul of Sicily. Its mission: to educate people not only about Sicilian food, particularly the cuisine found in the southeastern part of the island, but also about that food’s connection with local agriculture. Apart from the food angle, she and a group of Notinesi are working to save much of the wide-open spaces around the city from development.
This educator and writer about Sicilian culinary traditions made it possible for my son Brad and me to spend several nights in the house of Noto’s favorite son, the late journalist and poet Corrado Sofia (1906–1997). It is here, in the stunning countryside, that many of Renée’s cooking demonstrations and hands-on events for culinary tourists take place. Her students work with Notinesi cooks to learn how to make the pasta that is unique to this area of Sicily and to cook traditional meals.
We have the large house to ourselves. No one lives here on a regular basis. It sits on a hill overlooking the eastern end of the Val di Noto and, beyond, the Golfo di Noto.
The tree-studded property is flanked on its uphill side by a group of older, and a growing number of newly planted, olive trees, one hundred twenty in all. Just outside of the kitchen door is an herb garden full of sweet-smelling clusters of green that triggered a memory of something I once read that was attributed to the ninth-century Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne, a Frenchman. When asked if he knew what an herb was, he supposedly replied, “A physician’s friend and the praise of cooks!”
On the south side of the house is a terrace with the view all the way to the sea, perhaps four or five miles distant. At some point during the American and British invasion of Sicily in the summer of 1943, the British general Sir Harold Alexander, commander of Britain’s Fifteenth Army Group, dropped by this house to visit an old friend, Corrado Sofia’s father. They sat on this same terrace where my son and I sat late one night smoking two stubby cigars and contemplating the evening beneath a starry sky. Possibly they were smoking cigars themselves and drinking golden-yellow moscato di Noto, a delicacy in these parts and said to be superior to its forebear, moscato di Siracusa. Alexander wrote somewhere that sharing that moscato was a sweet gesture unlike any that he could have gotten in all of war-torn Europe.
Corrado Sofia had already made a name for himself in journalism and in Sicilian and Italian literary circles. He reportedly was the first journalist to break the news of the death of Luigi Pirandello in 1936; in addition to his poetry, he
wrote about the cuisine of his beloved city. The house, after Sofia’s 1997 death, was designated the “House of the Poet.”
For our first night, sixty-six years after Sir Harold’s visit, we discovered a remarkable meal laid out for us in the kitchen.
The antipasto, prepared by our host cook, Tinuccia, featured polpette di finocchietto, a mixture of rice, ricotta cheese, wild fennel, and eggs. Tinuccia said this was a traditional dish her grandmother would have made. The antipasto was followed by the primo, on this occasion a small penne pasta with a combination of yellow squash (zucca gialla), toasted slivered almonds, a hint of anchovies, and a sprinkling of hot peppers. Then the secondo, or as Sicilians would say, secunnu, arrived: a fish called lampuga in Sicilian. It most easily translates in English into “dolphin fish.” This is not the air-breathing dolphin mammal.
The lampuga is a seasonal fish, Tinuccia tells us via Renée, and is caught off the coast of nearby Siracusa. The dish is thought to have originated as seagoing fare because it keeps well in vinegar. In Tinuccia’s creation, it uses grated bread crumbs—“very traditional,” she says—along with slivered almonds and parsley. It is cooked “a sfincione,” or where the fish is dredged through the bread crumbs and fried. Served with it is a mixture of olives, peppers, eggplant, pine nuts, carrots, celery, and raisins—a playful combination of flavors.
Tinuccia says that the dish’s origins with fish as the main ingredient are from noble Sicilian families. Renée later said that the fish used in aristocratic family recipes was polipo, or octopus. And in Siracusano style, “a spoonful of finely grated bitter chocolate is sometimes added at the end.”
Without the fish it would be “peasant style,” with eggplant as a primary ingredient, a sort of caponata. Renée puts on her educator’s hat. Every province has its own version of the dish since the ingredients depend on what’s on hand at the time, she says. But every vegetable must be fried separately, with each kind taking a different length of time to cook. A basic tomato sauce becomes the base of the dish. A bit of sugar is added along with white wine vinegar.