Sicilian Odyssey (9 page)

By the time we’ve finished our antipasti—olives and marinated raw tuna preserved by the Signora herself, a slice of salami, fresh bread—a French couple has come in, and the Signora brings out four plates of steaming pasta with a sauce that’s a local specialty,
alla trapanese,
made with chopped uncooked tomatoes, basil, parsley, good olive oil, and more minced raw garlic than you could dream of serving, at home, to your most intimate friends. But of course it’s marvelous, as is the fish, a whole fish for each of us, cut into three large sections, lightly breaded and fried, head, bones, tail, and all. Part of what makes this simple meal taste so especially good is that it has been prepared with such affection, and for us alone (or almost alone). It is the fulfillment of a certain sort of travel fantasy: the Sicilian mama who cooks for you, just as she would cook for her own children.

We thank the Signora profusely, we tell her it was the perfect meal for una giornata brutta, we take her picture, she insists we go out on the rainswept terrace to look at the stormy ocean, she swears that it’s usually beautiful,
bello,
she points to the poster on the wall that makes Scopello look like a beach in the Bahamas. We assure her that it doesn’t matter, that’s how good the food was. She wipes her hands on her apron.

“Tutto semplice,”
she says.
“Tutto naturale.”

But of course it’s naturale, semplice. That’s the secret of Sicilian food, it’s all in the ingredients, the very best, the very freshest elements prepared with the minimum of needless complication, pretension, or fuss, and with the maximum personal style. The Sicilian culinary palette, the vocabulary of its kitchen is—as any Sicilian cook will tell you—a relatively limited one. Olive oil, garlic, flour, eggs, ricotta, fish on the coast, meat inland. But every cook prepares every one of those same dishes just a little differently so that no two tomato sauces are the same, one cook’s
pasta con sarde
(that sublime, uniquely Sicilian concoction of sardines, pine nuts, raisins, fennel, and bread crumbs) will never be mistaken for another’s. It’s thought that the sweet, salty, and sour flavors in pasta con sarde are (like the regional passion for ice cream and sweets) a legacy of the Saracens. Indeed, much of Sicilian cuisine is the fortunate result of centuries of foreign invasion.

In her cookbook,
La Cucina Siciliana di Gangivecchio,
Wanda Tornabene remarks that the “painful defeats” suffered by her country are responsible for the variety of its cuisine. “Each culture—from the Greeks, Romans and Arabs to the French and Spanish—has left behind its own imprint on our eating habits.” The Greeks brought their grapes, olives, and honey, the Romans their wheat and grains, the Saracens their “love of all things sweet, from sweet-and-sour dishes to sauces and candies.” Moreover, the characteristic dishes of each part of the island have been heavily influenced by the culture that dominated that region; thus the Arabs bequeathed couscous to the citizens of Trapani and western Sicily.

To understand why Sicilian food is so good, just visit the markets. Whenever we arrive in a new place, the market is frequently our first destination, because each market is unique and tells you something about the character of the city. Located in the semicircular arcade of the Piazza Mercato del Pesce, with the ocean just behind it, Trapani’s market is small, sweet, and low-key, though it’s the only one in which the vendors call out to us and expend some energy on trying to sell us something. Perhaps it’s because the city gets so few tourists in midwinter—perhaps they imagine we’ve moved into town and might actually be able to do something with a half kilo of monkfish liver or a chunk of pressed
bottarga,
tuna roe.

It’s partly because of architecture that the fish market in Catania seems so raw and primal that it’s almost scary; it’s the kind of place that you hope your vegetarian friends—the ones who still eat fish—never get around to visiting. A sort of balcony or balustrade runs along one side of the market, from which you can look down on the action below—which, from that angle, suggests a killing floor or the site of some ancient, bloody sacrificial ritual being enacted by members of a secret cult or guild. The faces of the vendors are reddened by the wind, their hands scarred and thickened. The smell is powerful, to say the least, and the light takes on a silvery-blue cast as it shines on, and is reflected by, the scales of the fish; the silver-blue is intensified by contrast with the red blood and the red tarpaulins stretched over the stalls.

At the same time, everything seems clean and orderly, aesthetically arranged, the garfish and the eels in silvery rings, the small pink rouget in tidy rows with their heads up, like the glittering tiles of a mosaic. It’s as if each vendor is trying to outdo the others with the beauty of his presentation, the perfect color coordination of each display. And it’s remarkably educational. From watching the fish sellers in Catania, we learn how to bone sardines (by hand, pulling the skeleton out with your thumbs) and how to open sea urchins (cut the top off with scissors and, with one flick of the wrist, shake out the dirt and sand, leaving the sweet center inside). And so the market begins to seem less like a sacrificial blood feast than like an anatomical dissecting theater, a temple of science and study.

We eat lunch at the small trattoria right in the market. From our table, over plates of
pasta ai ricci
and grilled swordfish, we watch a fishmonger slice into a tuna that must weigh eighty pounds, a creature so impressive and awe-inspiring that the other vendors gather around with their hands behind their backs and just stand there staring reverently at the tuna. Eventually, without leaving our table we watch the whole thing break down, as the lunch hour begins, and each stall shuts up, the men go home—and the market disappears completely, as if it had all been a mirage.

Market, Catania

The markets of Palermo are—like its people—the most varied and the most fascinating in their variety. Though some southwestern cities—Mazara del Vallo, for example—host sizable numbers of Tunisian fishermen and guest workers, only the capital has a population of recent immigrants from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East substantial enough to create a visibly diverse community, notably different from the rest of Sicily, where generations of assimilation have mostly homogenized the identifiable differences between the groups who have inhabited the island, though from time to time you will see a particularly Arabic face or, alternatively, one with the fair hair and blue eyes of the Normans.

Market, Palermo

Most travelers head for the Vucciria, the oldest of Palermo’s markets, so it’s common to see busloads of tourists gingerly picking their way over the stones slimed with vegetable peels and slicks of offal. But my favorite market is the Ballaro; it’s larger, at once friendlier and more serious, and certainly more theatrical. Advertising their wares, calling out to prospective customers, the vendors sound like exotic birds in a tropical jungle. It’s a real cornucopia: mounds of artichokes with their leaves and stems still attached, piled three feet high; truckloads of
broccoletti
the size of basketballs that, with their odd purple and lime green coloring, look more like space aliens than cultivated vegetables. Each lemon and almond has its proper place, every olive stall—decorated with stalks of rosemary—is unlike any other; the conical heaps of spices, herbs, and dried legumes resemble something you’d find in an Asian bazaar. There’s so much bounty on display and for sale that even though you know that the Ballaro is located in the center of one of Palermo’s poorest neighborhoods, you can almost—at least for the time it takes to walk through the market—believe there is enough food in the world.

What the markets remind you of, and partly explain, is the earthiness at the heart of Sicilian cuisine. Nothing has been sanitized, there’s nothing squeamish or repressed about the Sicilian appetite, the Sicilian diet. In the
sfogliatelle
—the pastry coated with confectioners’ sugar and stuffed with fresh ricotta—we’re served for breakfast in Enna, the lightly sweetened filling still retains the tang of sheep’s milk. Fried fish arrives on your plate, bones, head, tail, and all. One of the most exquisite Sicilian dishes consists of tiny fish served, barely cooked, over pasta or else raw with lemon; it’s called
neonata
—which, of course, means newborn. You can’t help thinking that if anything on the American table is newborn or even underage, we don’t want to know about it, just as we make ample use of plastic wrap and packaging to spare ourselves the knowledge that what we are eating was ever alive.

In Sicily, by contrast, diners want to be assured—and rightly so—that what they are eating was
recently
alive. Whole lambs and goats and rabbits hang in the market place, not far from the stalls where you can buy and consume a plate of freshly opened sea urchins, or a chickpea or potato fritter, or a spleen sandwich, and savor it not far from a dog who happens to be enjoying a piece of raw chicken. There’s nothing forced or self-conscious about Sicilian cuisine; no one talks about comfort food because it
is
comfort food. There’s no nostalgia involved, because
la cucina siciliana
was never lost and rediscovered, never saved from the vile encroachments of the fast-food industry.

Nightly, on
TV
, you can watch advertisements for various disgusting products, including a sort of frozen patty made from a yellowish mozzarella and neon-pink prosciutto, covered with bread crumbs, equally suitable for the frying pan or the toaster oven. And the supermarket freezer sections offer such laborsaving items as zucchini flowers, breaded and prefried, needing only a brief immersion in hot oil or perhaps a few seconds in the microwave. But the energy and the vitality of the markets prove how much Sicilians are still cooking, as we say, from scratch. Anyone who wants to observe the reverence with which la cucina is still approached might want to drop by Palermo’s church of La Martorana early on a weekday morning, when the parishioners leave their grocery bags by the altar so that what they are taking home from the market can be blessed by the parish priest.

What arrives at your table in Sicily represents the culmination of a tradition. At Gangivecchio, the fourteenth-century Benedictine abbey that the Tornabene family has converted into an inn known all over the island and—thanks to the cookbooks authored by Wanda Tornabene and her daughter Giovanna—the wider world, that tradition functions like a special ingredient seasoning the meals that its lucky guests are served.

Part of Gangivecchio’s charm derives from the contrast between the patrician, aristocratic setting—the pergola covered with greenery, the fountain decorated with lions’ heads, the cobbled walkways, the courtyard of the abbey—and the rustic simplicity of the meals offered in its dining rooms: homemade pasta with a thick mushroom
ragù,
bean soup, crêpes stuffed with ricotta and covered with a delicate spinach sauce, homemade sausage, fried sweet and savory dumplings, and huge pork shanks that can’t help but increase the affection you feel for the gargantuan, bristled pig slumbering placidly in its pen near the inn.

The history of Gangivecchio is an archetypically Sicilian one: a story in which trouble and peril is, through determination, common sense, hard work, stubbornness, and a certain canniness, transformed into an occasion for triumph against all probable odds. The Tornabenes trace the history of their home back to a twelfth-century
B.C
. village, Engio, which antedated the Greeks, and which stood on the house’s current site. Successively decimated and revived (the town was forcibly evacuated after the revolt of the Sicilian Vespers in 1282), the town of Gangi recovered and the abbey thrived until 1653, when the population of the monastery was reduced to a single monk, left to guard the property and collect taxes. Rebuilt by a local squire in the eighteenth century, the estate passed from the church’s hands into private ownership, and in 1856 came into the possession of the Tornabene family.