by John Keahey
“It’s a combination of salty and sweet. That’s very Arabic in origin.”
Now the dessert is presented, a cassatine di Pasqua, or Easter cake. This is not cake in the traditional American style. The “cake” is sweetened ricotta cheese, flavored with cinnamon and lemon zest and baked in a raised, pie-shaped pastry shell. The crust is made using only water, yeast, and pastry flour, without sugar.
Renée explained that the dish is traditionally made around Easter because ricotta is at its best then, and there is an abundance of fresh eggs. Of course, each village and perhaps each family has its own version. In Modica, for example, it is served with no crust and with copious amounts of cinnamon on top. In Tinuccia’s version, the cinnamon is lightly sprinkled, the color a beautiful contrast to the white of the ricotta.
I was particularly dazzled by this light confection. Renée kindly figured out the recipe and sent it weeks later.
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Sicilian Easter Cake
Cassatine di Pasqua
(Serves 4)
Ingredients
14 ounces pastry flour, plus more for dusting
1 tablespoon of extra-virgin olive oil
salt
1 package of yeast
14 ounces of fresh ricotta sweetened with sugar, to taste
lemon zest of 1 lemon
2 egg yolks, divided
cinnamon
In a bowl mix the flour and a pinch of salt. Make a well in the middle of the flour mixture and add the yeast and then, gradually, a little warm water. Once you’ve mixed the yeast and warm water, add one egg yolk and olive oil and gradually mix into the flour to form a dough. Knead for a few minutes until soft.
Put the dough in a warm place and let it rise until it doubles in size. It should rise for about an hour, but the exact time will depend on many factors, including the warmth of your home.
Heat the oven to 400°.
Sprinkle some flour on a dry surface and, using a rolling pin, roll out the dough so that it is very thin and fits the pan you are using.
Place the pastry shell in a round pan (you can use a rolling pin to roll the dough up onto it and then place it in the pan).
In a small bowl, mix the remaining egg yolk with the sweetened ricotta and lemon zest.
Spread the ricotta mixture into the shell.
Make a nice crust around the edge by folding it down over the side, and sprinkle the top generously with cinnamon.
Bake the cassatine for 15 minutes. It should remain slightly moist and not dry out.
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The shape of the crust varied from family to family, says Tinuccia. When I made it, I used a regular pie tin. My crust turned out a bit thick. It expands during baking, so when the recipe says to roll it out into a “thin, delicate sheet,” it means thin.
Dessert in general was served only in wealthy households. Everyone else used fruit or nuts. Due to the extreme poverty of the war and postwar years, desserts did not become a regular staple in most households until the 1960s, Tinuccia says.
Following this remarkable, satisfying dinner, we go into the living room and are warmed by a fire in a large, stone fireplace. Here, through Renée’s interpreting skills, I learn how Sicilians feel about their wines.
Tinuccia’s husband, Paolo, is with us, and he points out, for example, that the province of Trapani, on the island’s west coast, has more vineyards than Tuscany. Commonly grown across the island are whites such as Ansonica, Catarratto, and Chardonnay. Reds include varieties such as Cabernet Franc, lighter than its cousin Cabernet Sauvignon, which also is grown in Sicily, along with the Calabrese grape, or Nero d’Avola, common to both the island and the mainland. There also is the slightly bitter Sicilian variety known as Perricone, which is commonly used as a blending grape with other varieties. Other common Sicilian reds include Frappato di Vittoria, thought to have been cultivated for at least three hundred years around the province of Ragusa, near Noto.
Sicilian grapes not used on the island are sent north to Italy and France, where vintners blend it with their own grapes, says Paolo. This is clear recognition, he says proudly and with enthusiasm, of the high quality of Sicilian grapes. This has led to foreigners coming to Sicily and purchasing vineyards.
“The Swiss and Tuscans can now produce their own Sicilian varieties,” Paolo says. Winemaking in Sicily has gone global.
* * *
I ask Renée for another recipe, one featuring eggplant. This is a vegetable that always causes me trouble. There must be a way that I can enjoy this plant that, in its purple-black magnificence, looks as if it should taste wonderful. It always tastes bitter to me, no matter who cooks it. I have stayed away from it, even in Italian and Sicilian restaurants, because Pasta alla Norma, for example, seems to call for the eggplant to be cut into cubes and then cooked in the tomato sauce. The cubes seem overcooked, mushy, and bitter in my opinion—not crunchy like vegetables should be.
Renée comes up with a “true” Sicilian recipe that she figures will overcome my objections. Sicilian-American friends back home scoff. They claim that Pasta alla Norma always includes cubed eggplant simmered in the sauce. When they eat the one I cook, courtesy of Renée’s faithful transcription, they become believers. It shows that often what families cook from one province or village to the next can, even using the same ingredients, differ dramatically.
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Pasta alla Norma
Sicilian style
(Serves 6)
Ingredients
2 medium eggplants
sea salt (Sicilian, if possible)
extra-virgin olive oil (Sicilian, please!)
4 cloves of garlic, divided
1 can of whole tomatoes, preferably San Marzano, crushed by hand
pepper, to taste
dried oregano, to taste
1 teaspoon sugar
1½ pounds pennette rigate
peperoncino chile peppers, sliced (or dried red-pepper flakes)
fresh basil leaves, torn by hand
1 cup freshly grated ricotta salata
1 small onion, finely chopped
Cut the eggplant lengthwise into thin slices. Do not peel. Remove the bitterness from the eggplant by placing the slices on a plate and sprinkling them with salt. Place another plate on top of the layer of eggplant and then put something heavy, such as a large pot or a cutting board, on top. Let the eggplant sit for at least twenty-five minutes. It is ready when you see brown bitter liquid on the bottom of the dish. Pat the eggplant dry with a paper towel or rinse quickly with water and then blot dry. The amount of time you should press eggplant depends on how bitter it is.
Meanwhile, cover the bottom of a large skillet with extra-virgin olive oil and add two cloves of garlic, each sliced in half to release the garlic’s essential oils. Simmer over medium heat until the garlic is golden; do not let it turn brown. Add the crushed tomatoes. Add salt, pepper, and dried oregano to taste. If the tomato sauce is not sweet enough, add sugar a few minutes before ladling the sauce over the pasta.
Bring a large pot of salted water to boil, making sure you have enough water to cover the pasta. Follow the instructions on the package for cooking times.
In a large skillet over medium heat, fry the remaining two cloves of garlic in olive oil until they are golden, then remove them from the pan. Fry the eggplant slices in the olive oil until they are golden and then drain them on a paper towel–covered plate to remove the excess oil.
When the water comes to a boil, cook the pennette rigate until just al dente. Drain the pasta and transfer it to a large ceramic serving bowl.
Ladle the sauce onto the pasta, sprinkling peperoncino flakes over it, and arrange a layer of fried eggplant slices atop that. Decorate the family-style serving plate with a border of basil leaves, and sprinkle a generous amount of ricotta salata on top. You can never have too much, so be generous and remember to have extra sauce, cheese, peperoncino, and basil on the table for your guests. Enjoy!
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Food is such a part of Sicilian life that some island-born writers weave the subject into their work. Andrea Camilleri has his detective, Montalbano, frequent his favorite restaurant and eat dinners of fresh-caught fish or, at home, enjoy fantastic meals made for him by his housekeeper. The character becomes lost in a state of ecstasy during these scenes, picking up a plate of mullets, holding it an inch from his nose, and inhaling the fragrance. He often fails to notice the passage of time, and only when he gets a phone call wondering where he is does he remember that he was supposed to pick up Livia, his girlfriend, at the airport—an hour ago, and it’s a two-hour drive away.
In The Snack Thief, Montalbano is eating in a newly discovered restaurant in Màzara, where he “gobbled up a sauté of clams in bread crumbs, a heaping dish of spaghetti with white clam sauce, a roast turbot with oregano and caramelized lemon, and he topped it off with bitter chocolate timbale in orange sauce. When it was all over he stood up, went into the kitchen, and shook the chef’s hand without saying a word, deeply moved.”
In a collection of culinary writing about food from Provincia di Siracusa, the Italian periodical Del mangiar siracusano, editor Antonino Uccello uses excerpts from both the writer Leonardo Sciascia and the poet/journalist Corrado Sofia about their experiences with food.
Sciascia noted the “rich island of orchards” in the area around the coastal village of Avola, just a bit west and north of Noto. He particularly singled out the almond trees there that produce some of the finest almonds in the world. They bear the name of the village and are “less dry than the others, fuller, better in weight and a perfect oval shape that makes one recall the female faces of Antonello.”
His reference to Antonello is poignant. Sicilian Antonello da Messina (1430–1479) was a fifteenth-century Italian Renaissance artist who painted the portrait of one of the most iconic figures in Italian art, the Virgin Annunciate. It shows Mary being interrupted at her reading by an unseen angel who informs her of her Immaculate Conception. The painting shows her expression the instant she is told she is pregnant. Mary’s face, framed by the blue headscarf that drapes down around her shoulders and is clasped at her breast, is an almond shape.
Sciascia waxes poetic about what can be done with these sublime almonds. He refers to confetti, the Sicilian word for candy-coated almonds, and two types of torrone, or slivered almonds mixed in either white- or caramel-colored nougat.
An ingredient in this confection that, to Sciascia, is as important as the almonds is the honey from the bees of Avola. This honey comes from the area encompassing the Iblei Mountains. Sciascia writes that it “is the best and in such quantities that some scholars want to give the bees the name of the town. In both types then, the torrone is particularly good: fragrant, full of aromas, and at times coated with chocolate.”
His obsession with Avola almonds and honey is similar to the obsession Sicilians have for the Bronte pistachio, grown near the village of Bronte in Provincia di Catania in the rich volcanic soil of Etna. This is the same soil that produces the remarkable lemons and blood oranges islanders hold in reverence.
Sofia, meanwhile, delves into the world of roasted peppers and other delicacies cooked over an outdoor fire. He tells how the “common people” of his youth would gather around the fire and tell their stories. “Over charcoal fry the snails, the pot bubbling on the stove with the beans.…
The smell of the soup with the oil, the breaded fried onions and stuffed with dried tomatoes, these scents remain in the memory of my childhood with the smell of sage, wild herbs, branches of orange or from vines that are to increase the flames.… The [storytellers’] chatter is the sauce, better than the bread they eat.
The roasted peppers were the most frequent and hardy dish. We toasted the peppers on the grill, peel them, cut in thin slices, leaving a few pieces of skin blackened by fire. For the flavor and the sauce you add tomatoes and roasted them with a lot of olive oil—dense, green, full of aroma, which served mainly to temper the fire of the burning peppers. [We didn’t have forks.] Each used a knife or made a fork out of a two-branch cane with which to “fish” in the great common dish.
Lynne Rossetto Kasper, in her book The Italian Country Table, mentions Corrado Sofia. In his memoir, she says, he described how Sicilians made what we refer to as sun-dried tomatoes. Rossetto Kasper calls them “oven-candied summer tomatoes.” She says Sofia “remembers how the women on his father’s farm used to make them in the leftover heat of the bread oven after the loaves came out.” The heat would gradually decline in the charcoal or wood-fired ovens. She writes that the tomato slices are “slow-roasted with olive oil until their edges have a lacy golden crust and the tomatoes taste like candy.”
Sounds marvelous? They are. Her book has a recipe for accomplishing this dish using a modern, temperature-controlled oven.
FIFTEEN
Un Giro
To have seen Italy without having seen Sicily is not to have seen Italy at all, for Sicily is the clue to everything.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Italian Journey (1786–1788)
GOETHE, GERMANY’S foremost writer of the eighteenth century, made this oft-quoted statement in his well-known eighteenth-century travelogue. It is no doubt true on many levels, but Goethe never explains what he means by it. Does he mean that he believed Sicily to be, in his time, well behind the Italian peninsula in its development? Perhaps he felt that the mainland, particularly the north, once was like what Sicily represented to him during his visit: backward, still medieval.
Keep in mind that in the eighteenth century, Sicily and much of southern Italy were ruled from Naples by the Bourbons of Spain; Unification with the more developed north didn’t happen until 1861, three-quarters of a century after his visit. Sicilians, who spoke a distinct language, had virtually nothing in common with northerners.
Goethe’s section on Sicily is nearly devoid of any reference to the everyday people of the island. He makes an allusion, while describing his travels north of Agrigento toward Caltanissetta, to seeing, at a distance, peasants working in a field. He observes that “women live in these hamlets all the year round, spinning and weaving.” The men, meanwhile, live in the fields during the week “and sleep at night in reed huts.”
Leonardo Sciascia’s beloved Racalmuto is along this route; Goethe may have passed through. But wherever it was that he was observing the peasants at work, Goethe wishes “for the winged chariot of Triptolemus to bear us away out of this monotony.” (For the record, the Greek goddess Demeter taught the demigod Triptolemus the secrets of agriculture, and she gave him a chariot to go around the world spreading this knowledge.)
Goethe writes extensively about the geography and geology of the island, even praising the work of a fellow German who came before and studied the island’s minerals. And he takes note of the various ruins of ancient Greek temples. He generally likes the food. “The vegetables are delicious,” he declares, singling out lettuce as particularly delightful. The oil and wine are okay; he likes the fish, but says of the beef, without further explanation, that “most people do not recommend it.” He gives us descriptions about how “they” plant cabbages and how “they” rotate crops, once again giving us very little information about who “they” are.
Of course, he spent weeks on the backs of horses and mules making his giro, or tour of the island. It took place in 1787 throughout April and into May, wonderful seasons in the southern Mediterranean. It is not too hot or cold. The rolling hills are green and wildflowers are everywhere.
Goethe’s accommodations were typical of the time: small dirty rooms in houses or the infrequent inn, where “[c]hairs, benches, and even tables do not exist; one sits on low blocks of solid wood.” When he leaves the island in mid-May and arrives in Naples, he declares, “My journey across Sicily was quick and easy … My old habit of sticking to the objective and concrete has given me an ability to read things at sight, so to speak, and I am happy to think that I now carry in my soul a picture of Sicily, t
hat unique and beautiful island, which is clear, authentic and complete.” Again, there is nothing in that statement that refers to the islanders. But his is one of the few descriptions by an outsider that far back in time. His translators, W. H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer, obviously enamored of their subject, say only, “If Goethe did not tell everything, what he did tell was true enough.”
* * *
The early European travelers, such as Goethe and de Maupassant, often cross my mind as I go for long drives around the island. It took Goethe, for example, a month and a half to travel, in a V-like slash, south from Palermo down to the coast at Agrigento and then to the northeast toward Messina, where he departed by sea for Naples. In our time, of course, you can drive, in a horrifically long day, I suppose, around the entire island, staying on main roads that occasionally leave the coast and dart inland for brief stretches. Or you can crisscross it via a web of well-marked secondary roads—foot- and mule paths in the days of the early European travelers—connecting isolated villages.
Traveling on these narrow roads, I believe, makes for more pleasant journeys—journeys of unexpected discoveries—than following the autostrada or the truck-jammed main highways. All you need is a good map and a sense of adventure.
More realistically, it might take three to four hours to go from a remote point in the southeast, say Noto or Ragusa, to the west coast at Scopello, just west of Castellammare del Golfo. Or, over a few days from a base in a small village, say from Racalmuto, you can head in different directions each morning and easily explore a third of the island without having to move your luggage from inn to inn.
One such place was in Scopello. The first visit was in November 2009. My son and I arrived late in the evening, around nine. We had crossed the island east to west from just north of Catania in a rambling trip that took an entire day due to a handful of impetuous stops. One was to the hilltop town of Agira, birthplace of Diodorus Siculus, the first-century B.C. Greek-Sicilian historian. It is a town—its ancient Greek name was Agyrium—with a tenuous grip on the mountainside and prone to underground rumblings from Etna to the east. And we also stopped at Enna, situated in Sicily’s dead center and placed strategically on a high, almost-impregnable plateau that had mightily resisted countless assaults over the centuries by swarm after swarm of invaders.