Midnight In Sicily
Page 29
On a summer morning in the early seventies of this century, Dominique Fernandez saw the last-ever mattanza of a big tonnara on the furthest southern cape of Sicily. As the huge fish thrashed around in the bloody water, he noted that the harpoonists’ faces were utterly impassive.
No blood frenzy, no dance of death. Not even a shadow of anger, of vendetta against those tuna they had waited for for three days, slumped over their oars, under the pitiless sun that had ruined their skin and made even the straw of their hats transparent … no sign of joy, of human enthusiasm on their faces, closed to every emotion by poverty and apathy.
Watching the last mattanza from the shore through a pair of binoculars and counting the fish was a Neapolitan prince. He’d always spent nine months of each year idle in Naples, coming south only for the mattanza off which he lived. Now he was extrapolating from the size of the last catch to learn how much longer he would be at leisure.
The memory of Sicily is in its names. The chief, the fisher foreman who chose the place and coordinated and ordered the mattanza of the tuna and swordfish, was always called in Sicily by his Arabic name. He was the rais, in Arabic the commander. The Palermo prosecutor Lo Forte described Riina’s prolonged massacre of his rivals a mattanza. And the room in Palermo at piazza Sant’Erasmo where the mafia boss Filippo Marchese interrogated, tortured, strangled and dissolved his victims in acid was known as the Chamber of Death. The pentito who revealed this place of horrors was one of fourteen children of a fisherman who hadn’t been able to feed them from the depleted seas of Sicily. Growing up into petty crime to survive, he had run foul of his local mafia. They gave him the choice of leaving Palermo, working for them, or death. He had to work in the Chamber of Death and row partly-dissolved body parts into Palermo harbour and drop them overboard in weighted plastic bags. Vincenzo Sinagra the fisherman’s son never quite made it as a mafioso. He angered his boss because his face showed horror at the murders he witnessed. After his arrest, he learnt Italian through the old school books of Borsellino’s children. He’d only spoken Sicilian before.
The Zingarello park was a speck on the map, but the survival of each of its palms and great carob trees and its fragrant Mediterranean macchia, its brilliant flowering of irises, narcissi and violets in spring, had been won by environmentalists some years earlier, after a long tussle in a region where building speculation was the ground on which mafia and politics sealed their pact. The Sicilian earth was made to be concreted over, if big money could be made doing it. There was no money in greenery. Pippo was very proud of these arid-looking slopes and he had a right to be.
After traipsing around in the chill air of Erice and peering down from the promontory, we rolled back down toward the sea and Trapani. We were heading for Angelo and Clara’s. I knew very little about these two, only that they were friends and that in some way they were the inspiration behind Anna Maria’s and Pippo’s Sant’Andrea restaurant. Angelo and Clara had opened a restaurant in Trapani that served abundant portions of robust and strongly flavoured local cooking. The Trybynis became famous among knowledgeable eaters. Informed Palermitans would take a day driving down to Trapani, eating at the Trybynis and driving back again. Their kind of food, Anna Maria said, people love it or they hate it. It’s too overpowering for a lot of people. I love it, she added. About the time the Trybynis achieved its singular renown, Angelo and Clara realized that a love of cooking and eating didn’t necessarily translate into cooking day in and day out for large numbers of total strangers. They were people with diverse interests and complicated political and artistic pasts. They had a family of assorted children that each had brought from a previous relationship. Clara was a singer and Angelo had been heavily into far left politics and alternative jewellery and was now a primary producer. And as the Trybynis reached its brilliant zenith, they’d lost interest.
They’d closed down the restaurant in town and withdrawn to their farmhouse on the outskirts. There was an orchard and an olive grove attached to the farm and Angelo’s main interest now was harvesting his olives and pressing them nearby. He produced a very fine, very high quality olive oil. He and Clara hadn’t lost interest in cooking or eating, or even, quite, in sharing it with others. Really determined diners, who knew how to get in touch with them beforehand and trace a path to their farmhouse through the network of local roads, following the cryptic little handpainted markers Pippo now pointed out to me at certain crossroads, were allowed, strictly by prior arrangement and only ever in very small numbers, to come out and sit at a little table away from the family’s and eat some of whatever Angelo and Clara had decided to cook for themselves and their kids and visiting relatives and friends.
As we drove up unannounced this first Sunday, though, I knew none of this. Angelo and Clara were just these friends who’d run some kind of restaurant and had a set of couscous bowls. Pippo needed the couscous bowls because Anna Maria and he were planning an Arab evening at the Sant’Andrea. Their idea of making a go of their own new restaurant in Palermo wasn’t just business or even merely gastronomy. The Sant’Andrea was a cultural undertaking. The Sant’Andrea was to be an exercise in consciousness-raising. Clearly, no consciousnesses were going to be raised if the food didn’t impress. The cuisine was intrinsic to the politics of the place. The Arab evening was going to be a set meal of maghrebin dishes and music. The cooking would be overseen by Nabil, on whom the honour of himself, his family, Tunisia, the maghreb, the Arab world and Islam itself would thus in some degree depend. Nabil was in a state. He’d been spending a lot of the day time in a long-distance telephonic huddle with his mother in a Tunisian fishing village, checking on details of her home cooking. One of the things to be served was a couscous and the Sant’Andrea had no couscous bowls. Fish couscous was a Trapani dish and a Trapani family dish at that, strictly home cooking. It wasn’t something you were likely to find in restaurants, though you might at Angelo and Clara’s. The roads were getting narrower and the buildings left behind when we swung down an unsealed lane and in through a gate in a high white wall. There was a yard with autumn leaves and a couple of cars and a tree and a snaking garden hose and a low whitewashed house. As the little car pulled up, a huge female polar bear loomed over it, or what looked like one. It was Lola the maremmana, a kind of Tuscan sheepdog, and she was followed by a skinny tan whippetlike dog swinging a tail like a scythe in a lopsided arc.
Pippo fended off Lola’s tongue and struggled out of the Fiat. We’d been seen through the window and the door was now wrenched open by an outdoor-looking type in his forties. He had glasses and kinky golden hair pulled back into a rough pony tail and stubble on his chin. This was Angelo. Lola was excluded without acrimony after a short tussle and we squeezed inside. The front door led straight into a big smoky well-lit room as wide as the house. It had a tiled floor and a central passage leading down the back. An overpowering aroma of garlic came from down the passage and filled the space, stronger than any garlic I have smelt before or since, dizzying and mixed with herbs and cigarette smoke and slow-cooked wine. Half of the big room was filled by an immensely long table, maybe several pushed together. Sitting along it were a dozen or fifteen people of both sexes and aged between puberty and ninety. They had empty well-used-looking plates in front of them and the benign and slightly comatose look of people who’d eaten well. Then a cloud of steam billowed from a doorway in the passage, the odour of garlic and herbs swelled to new heights and a huge bowl of food entered the room. It was borne by a large-eyed woman also in her forties, with short brown hair, a rather narrow face and a wide mouth with a cigarette hanging from its lower lip. She looked amused and enigmatic. This was Clara.
A second huge bowl followed and then two great oven dishes were plonked at intervals along the board. There were some vague introductions and Pippo and I were inserted at the table. Wine was poured, new plates were brought. Nobody had any idea who I was or any foreknowledge of our coming but Pippo was a friend of theirs and I was a friend of Pippo’s and it was eating time. I was starvi
ng but the others, whatever they’d eaten before, now gazed with appreciation but no hunger at the food. The huge china bowls contained strings of little Italian sausages of coarsely chopped pork meat set in an abundance of a dark greenish-grey sauteed leaf vegetable. Friarielli! I cried, though they weren’t.
People ate friarielli only in Naples. They were the commonest Neapolitan green, a coarse weedy fibrous-stalked and slightly furry-leaved plant with yellow flowers that grew overnight and sold in bunches for next to nothing. They had to be eaten quickly, or leprous yellow patches appeared in the leaves with black spots at their centre. Most of the coarse stringy stalk had to be discarded. Friarielli must’ve been a humble relation of the vast broccoli family. We feed this stuff to cattle up north, said a Milanese friend who came to visit. Friarielli, which only have a name in Neapolitan, had a sharp distinctive sweetish bitterness none of the others shared. Friarielli were to other green leaf vegetables what the bitter dark green weed rucchetta is to any kind of salad lettuce, dark, unbland and deeply memorable. Ruchetta is known by Neapolitans from the shape of its narrow leaves as little cunt. Away from Naples, I missed this stuff as much as mozzarella made from buffalo milk. Neapolitans ate friarielli, sauteed with garlic and olive oil and chilli, and served rather dry, particularly with sausages like the ones now before us, but fine and pungent with any kind of beef or pork. In Apulia and other parts of the south they ate a lot of rape greens, the tender sauteed tips of the plant, as in orecchiette con cime di rape, which are Apulia’s little ears of fresh pasta pressed into that shape by the thumb against the fingers. To one who knows and loves friarielli, rape is a sickly and insipid thing. At the market in Trani I asked if they ever had friarielli. We got a box once, they said, but nobody liked them. Only Neapolitans knew how, as Donne said, to feed on that, which to disus’d tasts seemes tough. It applied to more than food. So I was really asking for information from Clara, who had sat down next to me. She knew friarielli, which was impressive, and these weren’t they. She did tell me what the greens were, a local name in Sicilian, but I immediately forgot.
There were enormous country chickens in the oven dishes. These had been done alla cacciatora with potatoes added, and were the main source of the garlic herb and wine aroma which still had my head reeling. It was a serve yourself situation and I reached for a modest portion of bird, only to find that these giant country fowls had been rough-hewn into pieces no single person could think of devouring. It seemed to be an entire articulated pterodactyl I was dragging on to my plate and that was the smallest piece I could see in the dish. I tried to push it back and set off a rockslide of fragrant potatoes. You’ll need a spoon for the juice, people said helpfully. How are you going to get the juice without a spoon? Someone passed me an industrial-grade ladle and I got the juice. I was abashed by the setting, overcome by this mythic family board. Beside Angelo and Clara there was the mother of each. Angelo’s was white-haired, frail and anxious, drifting out of range. Clara’s was dark-haired and dynamic in a very smart grey silk dress with vertical cream stripes. She was smoking even more than Clara. There was a couple, one of whom was a sibling of either Angelo or Clara and there was a sister and her husband who was an engineer in Naples.
Then there was a cluster of breathtakingly beautiful adolescents who were variously Angelo’s and Clara’s and their siblings’ and in-laws’ and some of whom had frizzy crowns of pale gold hair and looked like Piero della Francesca’s angels and whose sex I was unable to determine. I was far too flustered to remember anyone’s name except Lola’s. Every so often the room darkened and a huge face filled the front window and it was Lola on her hind legs looking in. Or she would knock on the door with her paw. Once the door burst open and Lola and her sidekick rushed in. A peach tree brushed its laden branch against a side window. Backlit by the afternoon sun, the kids’ hair looked like golden aureoles. Smoke rose lazily from Clara’s cigarette. Some of the visitors left. Then we snapped out of somnolence for ice cream. Jasmine icecream. Trapani, Clara told me with her ironical smile, is the only place in the world where they make jasmine ice cream. She told me how to make it too, but I can no longer remember how many jasmine flowers have to be soaked overnight in every litre of water. Jasmine ice cream was highly perfumed and interesting and we all laughed when we tasted it.
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ICE CREAM is one of the delights of the Mezzogiorno, one of the triumphs of its culture, yet restaurants never offer it these days. I wondered whether the Trybynis had served ice cream, whether Trapani was an outpost of civilization in this respect, guardian of half a millenium’s pleasure. It’d have made sense, since we were in Arab country and it was surely the Arabs who’d brought ices and sherberts to the south. That jasmine could only be Arabian. Such was my idle thought. The essential components of ice cream were ice and sugar, and sugar cane arrived in Sicily with the Arabs. The ice was always there, or rather snow, oddly, in that almost African island of mild short winters and scorching summers. Sciasca remembered it from his childhood before the war and before refrigeration in Racalmuto.
You used to hear the cry, Snow from Cammarata, snow from Cammarata as soon as the June heat became suffocating. Cammarata is a mountain town, very high up, and the snow that was gathered there arrived in Racalmuto on carts between two layers of salt and straw. Salt and straw were used to insulate and preserve the snow. And at home too it was covered in straw to make it last longer. It was used to cool the wine and water and make granitas. A handful of snow was splashed with blackcurrant or gooseberry syrup, that kids particularly loved. You used to hold it in the hollow of your hand and swallow it quickly before it melted. At home there were even special bottles with an inside compartment you put the snow in, so you could drink cool wine at the height of summer. When the ice factory was built in the thirties, the kids missed the snow from Cammarata but they loved … the blocks of ice sliding along the conveyor belt. And for a penny they gave you a bit of grated ice with syrup.
These were the simple pleasures of a poor town in the interior. In Palermo and Naples the snow from the volcano mountains, Etna and Vesuvius, was used to develop a variety of rich and subtle and exquisite pleasures. The tradition lasted unbroken. The Scimmia, the Monkey, in piazza Carità on via Toledo, where I used to go on Sunday evenings with the people of the Spanish quarters and Montesanto, had been making and selling ice creams for three hundred years. The camorra of the hinterland, apparently, got in early on the act and according to Addison the essayist, who visited in 1700, was running a protection racket on ice supplies in Naples. The same thing happened in Sicily. The Palermo council was making money out of snow sales not long after, and when the friends got a grip on the business in 1820, the Austrian troops, who happened to be occupying Sicily at the time, were ordered to Etna to seize the snow and told to shoot if challenged. Sicily was exporting snow and the trade was subject to piracy.
I discovered this from a posthumous work of Elizabeth David, which was published around the time I met Angelo and Clara. From being an amateur cook and writer, Elizabeth David had gone on, in the nearly forty years between the writing of Italian Food, and her death in 1992, to being a professional cook and a professional writer, and then an historian and cultural critic of food. Her two last books weren’t of recipes at all, but a study of bread and the not quite completed Harvest of the Cold Months, published in 1995. David observed that
The Sicilians, like the Neapolitans, had from the early days shown an extraordinary aptitude for the confection of ices. The people of the island as a whole had very quickly taken to eating ices in great profusion and wonderful variety. Along with sugar confectionary of all kinds, candied and fresh fruit, cakes and sweetmeats, the Sicilians devoured ices on every festive occasion. During his brief reign as King of Sicily (1713–20), Victor Amadeus of Savoy had made fun of the Palermo government as the ‘ice cream parliament’. Eating ice-cream, he said, seemed to be the members’ most noticeable occupation during sessions.
I’d always believed
the Neapolitans invented ice cream. Sensuous, ephemeral, useless, exquisite, it was a quintessentially Neapolitan thing to invent. I hunted through Elizabeth David for an answer on the origins. She was cautious.
That eventually Neapolitan ices, as also those of Sicily, were based on oriental sherberts can hardly be doubted. By implication, the assumption would be that sherberts came to Sicily and Naples by way of the Arabs and the Spanish. But did they? And if so, when?
David had found a scruffy little undated pamphlet printed in Naples, almost certainly in the seventeenth century, that included ice cream among its sherbert recipes, and she cited a report from the end of the seventeenth century that
in the city of Naples a great quantity of sorbette is consumed, they are the consistency of sugar and snow and every Neapolitan, it would appear, is born knowing how they are made.
Since other letters and reports from the beginning of the century implied that these were then unknown, ice cream in Naples seemed to have grown out of a seventeenth-century trade in sherbert between the Turkish empire and western Europe. The scruffy booklet gave recipes for water-based and milk-based ice creams, and one of the flavours was jasmine flowers. Trapani might be the last place on earth to make jasmine ice cream, but it wasn’t the first. Other popular flavours in seventeenth-century Naples were apricots, muscatel grapes, strawberries, bitter cherries, muscat pears, pistachios, chestnut and chocolate. Vanilla had also arrived from Spain’s colony Peru. About half of those flavours were still going strong, with many new ones, at the Scimmia three centuries later. I found many of the same in Palermo, where people often ate them between the halves of a sweet brioche.
I looked in vain through Elizabeth David’s last work for a discussion of cassata. Cassata had been gnawing at me, and I could’ve used some authoritative views. The nearest I’d come to argument with Pippo had been about cassata and not politics. Pippo described it as of course typically baroque. I knew what he was talking about, that concentrated richness, that excess of the Spanish seventeenth century, in the packed density of the candied fruit and the unbearable sweetness of the icing over the ricotta. But after a long day of being told things, I reacted to that of course and replied that to me it was clearly Saracen. Neither of us was able to take the discussion forward, and it left me curious.