‘What did you eat?’
Then he understood. Livia was trying to be there with him, at his house in Marinella. She was imagining him the way she had seen him so many times before, trying to annul the distance by picturing him as he performed the customary acts he did every evening. He suddenly felt overwhelmed by a feeling that was a mixture of melancholy, tenderness, regret and desire.
‘Caponata,’ he said in a choked-up voice.
How on earth was it possible to get a lump in one’s throat simply by uttering the word ‘caponata’?
– Andrea Camilleri, The Wings of the Sphinx, an Inspector Montalbano mystery
The first time we stayed in Sicily on holiday I got up early one morning and walked to the square, where I found all these old guys with their little three-wheeler Ape Piaggio trucks parked up. In the back were boxes of tomatoes, aubergines, artichokes and all kinds of other vegetables. The way things work is that if a local family has a small piece of land, the men get up at about five in the morning, pick their produce, then pack it into boxes and drive to the square. Then at about 7.30 a.m. a bigger truck comes along from the greengrocer’s in town and the driver buys one box from this guy, two from the next … and that is how the local people make a living.
Later in the day, you see these same guys driving around the village with more vegetables in the back of their Apes, tooting their horns, so you can come out of your house and buy them in your street. Sometimes when I drop in on my friend Vittorio, in his restaurant kitchen in Porto Palo, he will say to me: ‘Drive towards Menfi, and just before you get to the village, on the corner of the last road on the right, you will see a box of tomatoes.’ He will have called someone he knows and said, ‘I need more tomatoes,’ and the guy will have said, ‘OK, I’ll leave them on the corner of the road for you.’ Such a funny, fantastic way to run a restaurant.
But what it shows you is the freshness of the ingredients, always. That’s what strikes me every time I go to Sicily. Even if you don’t grow your own vegetables, every day you can buy ones that have been harvested by someone else in your village that morning – each vegetable seems to have many different seasons, which keeps them going almost all year round. And the flavour! You can see why Sicilians don’t elaborate their dishes, when a tomato or even celery delivers so much taste all by itself. I remember picking up a head of celery in the market, to put into a chicken stock, and the guy selling it said, ‘No, have this one, it is much better’ – and gave me a very woody-looking one instead. Back at the house I put about two stalks into the pot, as I would usually, and the stock turned out to taste only of celery – that aniseed flavour you get from celery, which is usually quite subtle, was huge – so sometimes you have to balance what you do, because of the unexpected strength and richness of flavour in the vegetables.
What I see everywhere is a great love of greens: so many recipes with broccoli, especially with anchovies and pasta, but the broccoli is different. Known as sparaceddi or sparacelli, it is bigger, quite leafy, with greeny-gold heads, the colour of the sprouting broccoli we see in the UK when it flowers, and with a sweeter, less grassy flavour.
Also, they have something I never saw in Italy before: tenerumi, which is the curly tendrils, stalks and leaves of the zucca trombetta, or trumpet pumpkin. This is a long, curvy, pale green kind of cross between a courgette and a squash or pumpkin that is hard on the outside and soft inside, with seeds. It is one of the squashes that is often candied and used to decorate cassata and other desserts.
The first time I saw tenerumi, which tastes of courgette, but is somehow ‘greener’, I was embarrassed that I didn’t know what it was. Fortunately the guys in the market didn’t know I was a chef when I asked them what to do with it! They told me blanch it briefly, then heat some olive oil in a pan, add some garlic, chilli and chopped tomatoes, put in the tenerumi, let it wilt like spinach and serve it with pasta, and it was so good. Traditionally, tenerumi was also just boiled and then some broken-up bits of spaghetti were added to the pan, along with some sautéed garlic and tomato – so the dish ended up more like a brodo (soup). Or it was put into a fish soup, with clams, calamari and mussels.
This simple way of blanching and then sautéing is used for every kind of greens, such as chard (which are smaller and less aggressive in flavour than the ones we get in the UK), cardoons and chicory – not spinach so much, because it is too fragile. They prefer the sturdier greens with stalks, which can be chopped up and blanched first, followed by the leaves. When the drained leaves are quickly tossed in oil, garlic and chilli, they can be put out as antipasti, cold or hot, or eaten with fish or meat. If the greens are to be eaten with pasta, when they are lifted from their boiling water to drain, the pasta goes straight into the same cooking water, so that it takes on some of the colour and flavour of the greens. When the pasta is drained it is just mixed with the sautéed greens, and the flavour of the vegetables is so intense you don’t need anything else.
The Sicilian use of cauliflower is amazing, too, especially the purple ‘bastardu’ cauliflower that grows in the volcanic soil below Mount Etna, and has its own sweet, delicate flavour. What do we do in Britain with cauliflower? Cover it with cheese, and that is about it. There, they use it in so many sweet and sour combinations of vegetables, or make a fantastic salad with cauliflower and black olives (Insalata di rinforzo). In the bakers’ shops you can buy schiacciata (Schiacciata con salsiccia), which is a kind of baked pie made with a focaccia-like dough that is rolled out into two rectangles, one thicker than the other. The thicker one is covered with pieces of cauliflower, together with the likes of sausage meat or anchovies, raisins, olives, caciocavallo or pecorino cheese, oregano, and sometimes tomatoes. Then the thinner rectangle is put on top, pressed down to seal, and the whole thing is baked, then cut up into pieces.
The other vegetable that is synonymous with Sicily is the aubergine (Melanzane). One of the most famous dishes is pasta alla Norma, that brilliant, vivid combination of aubergine, tomato and salted ricotta (Reginette alla Norma), and most of the aubergine dishes are variations on similar combinations of ingredients. In one restaurant I ate a beautiful dish of pan-fried aubergine, which was rolled up around a filling of ricotta, marjoram, ricotta salata (which is the hard, aged, and quite salty ricotta that can be grated), then covered in tomato sauce, topped with caciocavallo cheese, and baked. In another place they served something similar, but the slices of aubergine were layered on a big plate, with tomato sauce, basil and ricotta salata, then cut up in slices, and you ate them just as they were, cold, as an antipasto.
Equally famous outside of Sicily is caponata (Caponata), the mix of fried aubergine and other vegetables in a sweet and sour sauce, made with vinegar and sugar, that owes much to the Arabs, who introduced the growing of sugar cane to the island. Until then honey was the only sweetener. As always, you would make caponata with whatever vegetables you had, and there are so many different recipes, four of which I have included in this chapter.
When you look at old books on Sicilian food, no mention is made of what a recipe would be served with; there is just a feeling that you would make it and put it on the table with whatever else you had, so all of these vegetable dishes would make a great