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A Year in the World

Page 17

by Frances Mayes


  And thus the mindset that secretly approves of those bold ones who take the law into their own hands. Before the Mafia, many admired the bandits who demanded protection fees from towns and robbed and pillaged Sicily for generations. What have the little people ever gotten from the law? The South is only changing now, slowly, slowly. Any benefit that’s ever come their way has been taken by someone.

  Sciascia is wildly but subtly comic at every turn in these stories, especially in The Wine-Dark Sea. You have to love the characters in these stories.

  Fatalism this deep is often comic—the absurd is only the other side of the mirror. In Lampedusa, the prince suffers from existential loneliness. Sciascia’s characters have more heat. They’re involved in love and honor and idealism and craftiness and cynicism. They’re closer to the complex Sicilians of today. Both writers force the reader to unravel the stereotypes forever.

  When I first went to Sicily, I wrote innocently, “It is easy to see why all those conquering hordes wanted this island. The landscape is everywhere various or dramatic. Anytime the perfume of orange and lemon groves wafts in the window, the human body has to feel suffused with a languorous well-being.” Already the spirit of the place was beginning to imbue my mind. The sun can break stones, Pirandello wrote. Place will have its way with us. I’m fascinated to the core to learn how fundamentally different Sicily is, to learn that the world is not small, is not reduced to phrases such as global economy or global village or one world. These ancient people are not like us. I am so thankful for that.

  My favorite place to read is the public garden. When I leave the hotel, I tell Ed, “I’m going out to drink a cup of beauty.” He’s on the terrace with his notebook.

  A bench above the sea, that endless vista, and a good book. An olive tree was planted for each soldier killed in World War I; the names are still nailed onto the trees, and I notice that four of them commemorate boys from the Cacopardos family. Such a sacrifice from one family. The garden with many eccentric follies was built by Florence Trevelyan Cacciola, a Scottish woman who escaped to Taormina in 1889 after a scandalous affair with Edward VII. She settled down to the calmer pastimes of bird-watching and gardening and married a local professor. The family donated the garden to the city in the 1920s. Someone should write a book about the Mediterranean gardens designed and preserved by expatriates. This one steps down in long terraces, offering many places to read or embrace your true love. Behind my bench, a circle of orange trees. Beyond where the eye can see lies Gela, where Aeschylus died when a tortoise carried by an eagle dropped on his head—a fate both my writers would understand. The sun seems to pass through my body. I angle the brim of my hat, find my place, and fall into the world of the book.

  Tasting the South

  Italy

  Oh, for a beaker full of the warm South . . .

  —JOHN KEATS

  Dear Steven,

  Yes, we are still travelling in the South. Put Sperlonga on your list. A white village with houses like sugar cubes above the sea, arm-wide cobbled streets running under Moorish arches, and outrageous flowers swagging off balconies like bright skirts of ballgowns. To Ravello tomorrow, one of my favorite perches. When I go to Ravello, I’m always on a honeymoon.

  You asked what’s great to eat when you and your friend venture south of Rome next month. You know my philosophy—ask well-fed, happy-looking people on the street for a restaurant suggestion. At hotels, the staff sometimes directs you to touristy places, but if you ask specifically, “Where would you eat on your anniversary?” you get a different answer. You are going to love the food.

  I lived in Italy for years before I understood pasta. The first sentence uttered by Italian bambini must be Pasta, mama, per favore, pasta. Not only a food, pasta symbolizes home, friends, family, all the good things, and down South this holds even more strongly than other areas that may have their moments with polenta and rice.

  When our friend Roberto from Cortona drove to Scandinavia for a vacation, he took a dozen large pelati, cans of tomatoes, in his trunk, along with boxes of dried pasta. Only we, the foreigners, were surprised. Italians fear finding themselves without pasta. I have friends who have eaten pasta at least once a day their entire lives. Do we have an equivalent in our culture? I don’t think so. The Mexicans have the tortilla.

  Pasta seems eternal but isn’t. Only since the eleventh century have Italian housewives wielded the rolling pin, turning out fettuccine, tagliatelle, spaghetti, and hundreds of other shapes—shells, ears, wheels, butterflies, even little radiators. Remember the big pasta seashells stuffed with cheeses and shrimp that I made for you? Down here those shells come in several sizes. In the South—pasta, pasta, pasta, big portions, served more al dente than in the North. The texture is toothsome, even chewy. Along with olive oil, it’s the keystone of home cooking.

  You’ve heard, I’m sure, that Marco Polo brought pasta back from China. He didn’t. He brought back some breadfruit concoction, decidedly inferior to a mound of steaming macaroni. Maybe the Etruscans invented it, maybe the Romans, or Arabs. No one recorded the moment when the first plate of lasagne plonked down on the table. I like to think the creator was a Neapolitan nonna, with a house full of grandchildren, who said to herself, Let’s just see what happens if I pinch this dough into pieces and throw them in boiling water instead of baking the same old griddlecake in the ashes.

  From visiting us, you know pasta in Tuscany. The pasta down South ups the ante. We use red pepper flakes decorously in Tuscany. Here, they tip the jar. Almost everything is served all’arrabbiata, angry. A famous dish in Puglia, spaghetti alla zappatora, ditch digger’s pasta, has a tomato sauce with red-hot peppers and lots of garlic. In Sicily there’s a rigatoni alla carrettiere, cart driver’s rigatoni, a basic but spicy tomato sauce, this time on chewy rigatoni. The origins are not aristocratic, but the aristocrats eat these dishes, too. Italian cooking crosses classes smoothly—there is no codified, developed haut bourgeois cuisine. In the grandest palazzos they’re serving pasta with chopped tomatoes and basil. Nothing beats an old-fashioned maccheroni al forno, macaroni cooked in the oven with mozzarella di bufala, spicy sausage, and tomato and meat sauce. Macaroni with ricotta equals soul food. You meet many oven pastas here; they’re not common in Tuscany. Hard ricotta salata, similar in taste to feta, often is tossed with cinnamon, sugar, and milk, certainly a throwback to the Arabs. Often the ricotta is combined with ground almonds and pistachios, also a bow to the Arabs, but a good use of what lies at hand.

  Around Naples a favorite spaghetti is alla puttanesca, in the style of the whore. Maybe they’d worked up an appetite! The lively sauce combines anchovies, tomatoes, capers, olives, chile peppers, and lots of olive oil. How basic can it get? Mary Taylor Simeti, in her Sicilian memoir On Persephone’s Island, describes lasagne cacate, so delicious sounding with its layers of meat sauce, sausage, onion, ricotta, and pecorino. Delicious until you learn the translation for lasagne cacate—shitty lasagna. Sicilian humor—don’t be deterred from trying this lusty pasta.

  Bring along Clifford Wright’s A Mediterranean Feast. A copy lives on the backseat of our car when we travel. His detailed history of pasta, plus his grasp of the interrelationships of the various Mediterranean cuisines, makes for exciting reading aloud as Ed swerves along the coastal roads. My other read-aloud companion is the classic The Food of Italy by Waverley Root. Some information seems dated, but still fresh is his fine grasp of the food within its culture.

  Delicate nuanced food, as in the French cuisine you love so, with its ephemeral sauces, its airy soufflés, does exist, but 99.9 percent of what appears on the plate is of the hearty plow-the-fields and fish-the-sea persuasion. La cucina casalinga, home cooking. As you hop about in Italy, the variety from place to place is absolutely astonishing, especially given that most food springs from la cucina povera—the poor kitchen, the make-do kitchen. Wild greens, nuts, fish, game, fruit—all the things free for the gathering—appear in every area but in different guises. The Sout
h, I’ve read, is always different, no matter what country, no matter what topic.

  Sicily was my introduction to the food of the southern Mediterranean. Everything we tasted seemed revelatory. Street vendors sold tasty panelli, chickpea fritters. We stopped in tiny shops for a slice of sfincione, pizza topped with large breadcrumbs. Because we were in Palermo on San Giuseppe’s day, all the pastry shops offered sfince, rice fritters made with ricotta, cinnamon, and candied fruit. All of Palermo seemed like a picnic.

  In Bella Tuscany, I described the first dinner on that trip. N’grasciata, which means “dirty,” was suggested by the concierge after we prodded him for an authentic restaurant. The name did not inspire confidence, but we took his word that “the name is just a way of speaking. They have their own fishing boat. I will tell them to expect you.” The place was clean and bare, filled with Sicilian families and groups bent over their plates. Most had napkins tucked into their dresses or shirts. There we first met pomorola, the South’s intense, reduced tomato sauce that makes all others seem sissy. They served a tris of pastas: bucatini with sardines, currants, and fennel, orecchiette with bitter greens, and plain spaghetti revved up with the pomorola. Then the carts began to roll out of the kitchen—baby octopus, fried frutti di mare, whole grilled fish, every little swimmer arrived at our table, along with grilled eggplant, roasted potatoes, and salad. When I could eat no more, the waiter grew concerned. “Signora, you must.” He took a bite of squid to show me there was no cause for alarm. When I smiled and shook my head, he gently grabbed a handful of my hair, pulled back my head, and held the fork to my lips. I ate.

  We were used to Italian markets, but the Sicilian ones were the most vibrant we’d seen. I wrote in my notebook:

  “Lines of lambs, gutted and dripping, eyeballs bulging, hang by their feet. Their little hooves and tails look so sad. Their little guts so horrifying. The rainbows of shining fish on ice, the mounds of shrimp still wiggling their antennae, painted carts of lemons, jewel-colored candied fruits, bins of olives, nuts, seeds—everything is presided over by dealers who shout, sing, cajole, joke, curse, barter, badger . . . A vendor holds out a basket of eels that squirm like live sterling silver. He gyrates his hips to emphasize their movement . . . I wish for a kitchen so I could gather some of the lustrous eggplants and clumps of field greens. My stomach is growling so loud it sounds like a tiny horse neighing. Cooks here are in paradise. I’ll never eat lamb again.”

  So, my friend, get ready. That one day in Palermo rocked my culinary world.

  Since then, we’ve returned to Sicily twice and have taken several trips to Basilicata, Puglia, Naples, Amalfi area, Capri, and Ischia. Like you, Ed enjoys an adventurous palate. He will taste anything and likes some of the most impossible things. When I’m curious but disinclined to order something, he launches right in. Fried newborn fish. Various kidneys. Head cheese. For Easter, Giuseppina served a platter of braised hearts, livers, and lungs—the thought makes my knees weak. Our neighbor stewed a porcupine who had been bothering his chickens. He roasts tiny songbirds. Ed holds out his plate for more while I’m still staring at mine. In the South, anything pulled out of the sea, he’s ready to meet with fork aloft.

  The cooking traditions along the southern outline of the Italian coast, and on the islands, go back so far in time that they blur. Ovid mentions the “sweet mullet and tender eel” of Taormina’s waters. Pliny the Elder was sipping Sicilian wines with pleasure in the first century. The Mediterranean coasts have been won and lost, won again, occupied and fought over. Greeks, Romans, Normans, Phoenicians, Arabs, Angevins—who were they—Carthaginians, Spanish, and on and on—don’t make me take the history exam! (American history is so much easier! One course, and you have a good grasp of it.)

  How all these invasions blend on the table makes the cuisine of the South so spectacular. The Arabs and Greeks left their fingerprints on every platter—but oddly enough, a main heritage comes from the Americas, the potato, corn, peanut, chocolate, turkey, string bean, pumpkin, and many other exotics those marauding explorers brought home. Once there was no tomato! Italy without the tomato! Imagine. No lemon either, until the Arabs brought them, along with lime, coconut, watermelon, artichoke, cinnamon, eggplant, bitter orange, and mango. What were they eating before? Legumes and fish? The Arabs even brought basic crops—sorghum, sugarcane, and hard wheat. While most of Europe dreamed through the Dark Ages, wherever the Arabs settled there was plenty of light. Waverley Root says, “You could draw a map of the limits of the Moslem invasion by plotting the places where . . . their flaky pastry became established.” They loved water and channeled it in quadrants through their gardens to symbolize the cardinal directions in the Garden of Paradise, so frequently mentioned in the Koran. They taught the locals advanced agricultural techniques such as irrigation, from waterwheels and buckets on pulleys to sophisticated connections of wells that linked to underground aquifers. By breaking up the immense holdings of landowners, they initiated a small farm system. Agricultural production burgeoned.

  Indigenous people are hardly mentioned in culinary histories. We learn what the invaders brought but not what the locals already were eating. Surely those living in the South had discovered their own big fish stews, though the Greeks get the credit for introducing, via Marseilles, the bouillabaisse equivalent. Today the fish soups of Lecce are famous. I hope you go there—one of those towns you can imagine you could have been born in—and feast your eyes on the fanciful baroque architecture. You can visit the workshops where craftspeople make exquisite papier-mâché crèche figures. I hand-carried an angel with billowing sea-green skirts home to California for the top of my Christmas tree.

  Back to food—who knows who first threw a mess of fish into a cauldron? I know you like to trace origins, but separating influences way back before the Arabs becomes dicey. Certainly the Romans, as well as the Greeks, introduced many things to eat. Certainly the locals were stomping on their grapes all on their own and making some form of bread/pizza. But it is interesting to realize how many of the defining ingredients were either brought or popularized by the Arabs. All over the South, you find sublime gelato. The Arab touch is in the flavors, the pistachio of Lecce, the jasmine, myrtle, almond, watermelon, lemon, and orange. Sometimes in Sicily you can find rosewater gelato. What a gift.

  I can see you out early, walking and gazing, then pausing in a bar for espresso and some glorious little pastry. Ed swears that coffee in the South of Italy is the eighth wonder of the world. I’ll never forget his expression when we first landed in the airport in Sicily. I was already eating an arancino, a fried rice ball with creamy melted cheese or ragù hidden inside. He stared into the cup—I thought he’d seen a bug inside—then lifted his eyes, and I saw that it was, instead, a religious experience he was having.

  As far back as Homer, I’ve found mention of a strong black drink with mysterious properties. Again, the Arabs’ trade routes were influential in bringing coffee to Italy from Africa, but navigators from all over were plying the Mediterranean. The sea must have been like Los Angeles freeways. Coffee first arrived in Venice around 1570, where it soon became available in chemists’ shops. A coffee bar opened in Venice in 1640; by 1763 there were 218 in the city. Today there must be a thousand. Not everyone was pleased. Some fanatics considered coffee the drink of the devil and asked the pope to ban it. After one sip the pope is said to have exclaimed, “This drink is so delicious that it would be a sin to let only misbelievers drink it! Let’s defeat Satan by blessing the drink, which contains nothing objectionable to a Christian.” Little did he know he was sanctioning a sacred rite. The Caffè Florian in the Piazza San Marco, where we spent a late afternoon together and you snapped the picture of the couple kissing, still pours forth.

  But the coffee of Venice ranks only as semidivine. In Sicily and Naples, through the barista’s rituals of preparing the grounds, tamping them just so, and favoring true pump espresso makers (not automatic), coffee achieves an unparalleled concentration and complex
ity of flavor.

  I know you love artichokes. Wait till you try them here. Freshness makes a difference, as does knowing when to pick. They grow mainly around Bari and Brindisi and beautifully on Sardinia. Artichoke’s first cousin, cardoon, is a native, probably from Sicily. We plant these at Bramasole and struggle in the kitchen to release them from their stringy exterior. Poached in broth then treated to a few dabs of béchamel and parmigiano, they’re not just artichoke’s poor relation. Possibly the Arabs or North Africans evolved these thistles into their present states. Southern farmers drive trucks up to our markets in Tuscany with bundles of cardoons and five or six varieties of artichoke, still attached to the stalk. We are lucky enough to buy sackfuls of those prized, small purple-tinged ones. Ed makes a tomato sauce, adding garlic and onions, then stirs in a couple of dozen of these well-trimmed, barely steamed little princes—such a simple process, such a taste. Carciofi fritti, fried artichokes, taste better than French fries. A sprinking of coarse salt renders them addictive. I like to fry them in sunflower oil. Often a trattoria will have them, even if the menu does not say so. Ask!

  In Puglia, cooks like layers. In high-sided pie plates, called tielle, they stack seafood, potatoes, and vegetables, or they use rice, leading some to connect the tiella with paella. In method, it’s a kind of lasagna without the pasta. One fabulous recipe I found in Nancy Harmon Jenkins’s Flavors of Puglia is Artichoke Parmesan. Sliced hearts of artichoke are dipped in a batter and fried in olive oil. You then layer the crisp slices with mozzarella and a little parmigiano. Fresh tomato sauce is spooned sparingly over the top; then the dish runs into the oven for half an hour.

  The fact and fate of the South remains the sea. There are so many tiny places on the water where the fish is delicately fried—fritto di pesce—and the ambiance is enlivened by musicians who stroll in and out. At the Trattoria Dora in Naples, I ate a mound of cicale, plump crustaceans that resemble their namesake, cicadas. One of the waitresses burst out singing as she served the next table. The restaurant fell silent, and she held forth for fifteen minutes, then scooped up the pasta plates and swept, like the diva she is, into the kitchen while we applauded. Dining in the South goes like that. Fun. You must eat at Dora. Be sure to make a reservation.

 

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