Pituni – another fantastic fried thing

Most of the Sicilian food that I cook and write about here is essentially Palermitan, or is ubiquitous to the whole of Sicily, and so is close to generic as you get on that often fractious island.  I hardly know the east of Sicily – just from overnight stays as a tourist, sights out of hire car windows, a port to catch a ferry from.  And Messina, at the furthest east, almost touching mainland Italy, I have never visited at all.

My only connection with that part of Sicily is via my friend Vincenzo, who somehow has a better English accent than most British people I know, and who allows me to practice my stumbling Italian on him in exchange for food.

This Christmas just gone, with no-one going anywhere, especially not back to Messina, Vincenzo was due to miss only his second Christmas with his family since he moved to the UK, 14 years ago.  Whilst stoical, there was one aspect of those family reunions whose absence would be most keenly felt; the Christmas Eve pituni ritual!  A gathering of all the women from the extended family, to assemble piles of savoury, deep fried semi circles of stuffed dough.  Favourite fillings demanded, dreaded anchovies to be excluded in Vincenzo’s case.  

‘Could I make him pituni?’ 

As you may have twigged, I like a challenge – so I said ‘sure’, knowing full well that scarole, the right cheese, even decent tomatoes, would be a tough find in Birmingham, in December. ‘Leave it with me’, I breezily replied, confident that in one of my 1.5 metres of Italian recipe books, there would be plenty written about such a strongly treasured part of Messina’s food culture.

Well how misplaced was that confidence?  Nothing in Coria, nothing in Boni, not so much as whisper in Hazan. Artusi was silent, the nuns characteristically tight lipped.  I found just one recipe, in the Mary Taylor Simeti’s incomparable Sicilian Food.  I love this book, it’s definitely worth buying if you’re interested in Sicilian culture and food, but the recipes don’t always work out for me (the Chancellor’s Buttocks were far too lardy for my sometime vegetarian tastes), so I turned to the internet for additional advice.

As with imagined ailments, so with food you’re not sure of: never look on the Internet.   My God!  To say that people hold strong opinions on the subject of Pituni is like saying that Donald Trump’s hands are slightly on the small side.  Anyone writing about food who is from Messina, or who has visited Messina, or has a relative from Messina, has the definitive recipe for what I thought was a ‘just’ street food.  It must only be bought from this cafe, the dough must never contain yeast, the dough must always contain yeast. Include wine, don’t include wine.  Without anchovies, it is inedible. But most importantly, ALL other versions are wrong.  

I’m used to Italians forcefully expressing their opinions on food, but this was really taking the pituni.  Keeping  my northern European head down, I retreated to rethink my strategies.

My thoughts were that if Simeti, (an American who had almost accidentally landed in the midst of a Sicilian family) gave a recipe, she would have had it verified; the opprobrium that meets a misjudged recipe in Sicily can be too a strong risk to take.

Secondly I consulted Vincenzo, what did he actually want in them?  ‘Oh you know, some cheese, some ham, some greens’.  

‘So, it doesn’t have to be scarole’

‘Hmm, no’

“Or the proper cheese?’

‘Nooo!  Any cheese – but you can use the cheese my mum sent, that’s what we use, Galbanino, I’ll bring some.  BUT NO ANCHOVIES’

So, I made yeasty dough, as does Simeti, using semola rather than 00 flour, and substituted cime di rapa for failed Scarole, the cheese was not ‘authentic’ but it was completely true to one family’s tradition, chopped tomatoes and oodles of black pepper.  We used a side plate to to make our circles, filled them, folded them, sealed them, and plunged them into hot, hot oil.

This is fun; dangerous, sometimes volcanic if the filling leaks out.  The dough bubbles, the pituni are so buoyant they have to be held down, like the Duke of Clarence in his barrel of Malmsey.

Frying them individually, one assembling whilst the other watched the ferocious roiling oil, became exciting, raucous and entertaining; mixing up fillings, burning fingers and mouths as we were too impatient to let fresh pituni cool, eager to try the next combination and savour the sweet, bitter, crisp, melting combination.

They were delicious – the greens ever so slightly bitter, cheese sweet and stringy, tomatoes steamed from within.  This was one of the most sociable things, one of the most enjoyable things I had ever cooked.  I get why it is such an important tradition to Vincenzo’s family – scale it up to cousins, aunts, uncles, nieces and nephews, grandparents. It must be an impressive, vocal, wonderful cacophony.

So, the recipe, that I made, that is in no way the definitive recipe, but is now my recipe. It is not the pituni you can buy in Messina, I’m sure, or the one Vincenzo’s family celebrate Christmas Eve with.  It is probably not close to Simeti’s version, and I know that there are some that would refuse to even allow me to call it pituni.  But, it is pituni in spirit – because it brought people together, talking, eating, laughing and cooking.  And in that sense, it is the perfect recipe.

For the dough 

1 teaspoon dried yeast

280 ml of lukewarm water

500g semola flour

1 teaspoon salt

2 tablespoons of olive oil.

Dissolve the yeast in the water, and leave somewhere warm until a foam floats on the surface

Add all the other ingredients into bowl, and gradually add the water – you may not need it all.

I mix and knead the dough in my food mixer, using the dough hook for ten minutes.

Once the doughs smooth, stretchy and soft, put it into an oiled plastic bag and put it in the fridge overnight. This slow rising and pricing makes for a more flavoursome final dough.

The next day, take the dough out of the fridge, and let it come up to room temperature a few hours before you’re ready to start cooking.

For the Filling 

(You can use your own imagination here; Simeti suggests anchovies, scarole and Tuma or primo sale cheese, but also an onion and caper filling, which didn’t work for me).

A good sized bunch of Cime di Rapa chopped roughly.

Diced cheese (we used Italian Galbanino – which is bland and sweet, but melts beautifully into pure white stringiness – the closest I could think to describe it, it Babybel)

Tomatoes; skinned, deseeded and chopped.

A lot, I mean, an awful lot, of freshly ground black pepper.

Vegetable oil for deep frying.

When you’re ready to cook, you’ll need at least two pairs of hands; one to assemble and one to cook.

Take some of the dough and roll it out as thin as you can (2-3mm).  As this has been proving, the dough will be stretchy and springy and resist being told told what to do, but persevere.  Too thick, and you’ll have raw dough on the inside. 

Take a side plate as a template and cut a disc out of your rolled dough, placing a mix of the cheese, tomatoes and greens on one half (leaving a gap around the edge to allow you to seal the pituni.  

Wet all round the edge with water, then fold in half and with your fingers, press the dough edges together to get a tight seal.  If the pituni are not properly sealed, the steam and liquid from the filling will react explosively with the hot oil.

Have your oil heating, and doors and windows flung wide, and when the temperature has reached 190 degrees centigrade, add your first half moon.  If you don’t have a thermometer, take a tiny ball of dough and drop it into to oil, if it fizzes and floats, the oil is hot enough.

Frying needs constant attention, the pituni balloon up as they expand, so will float on the surface of the hot oil; don’t be afraid to dunk them to ensure they’re fully cooked.  When one side is golden brown, flip them over and repeat.

Drain onto kitchen paper, and continue with the next one.  

Now, these are best eaten just at the moment when they’re still almost too hot to touch – but you can let them cool, and reheat them in the oven, if you want to be more formal, and less sociable in your consumption.

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Biancomangiare, fit for a Norman

British people find this a daunting thing.  It’s best not to tell them what’s in it, lest entrenched prejudices and fears are (justifiably) roused.  Just present it, a fait accompli, raising ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’

However, people from the Mediterranean; Sicily, Sardinia, Cyprus, rhapsodise over this, tear up at the thought of their island’s version of it. It is memory of a dish. It is a pudding of almonds, pistachios and rosewater. A jelly with no gelatine. Virginal white, like the travertine of Ortigia.  There is wobble, sensuality, opera even.  Am I getting carried away?  Perhaps.  It is, after all just a blancmange.

And with that single word, I can hear the klaxons sounding on five continents.

Images of lurid, set-foam pink frightening the horses.

Stick with me.

Imagine the summer heat of Sicily, the almond harvest has hit the markets, and you are weighed down by their velvety abundance.  What to do?  What to make?

One of the most refreshing things you can do is to make almond milk (as ever, this is a very, very distant cousin of the stuff you buy in cartons).  You can mix just a few bitter almonds into the mix to intensify the flavour from their added cyanide kick  (not essential, especially if you’re of a nervous disposition).  And then the sun of Sicily, sitting on the same latitude of North Africa, has already ripened those almonds to perfection, imbibing them with a depth of flavour you will seldom encounter anywhere else.

The milk is easy to make in the UK too, take at least 250g of dried almonds and blanche them in hot water.  The word makes it sound fancier than it is. The hot water loosens the brown papery skin around the almonds, so you can pop them out, all creamy white sweetness.  It is not a chore if you do it in front of the TV, or whilst chatting to friends with a cup of tea.  Then blitz the denuded nuts, and soak them in cold water for 24 hours with a teaspoon of almond extract to compensate for any flavour lost in transit.

Strain the steeping wonderfulness through a clean cloth, muslin if you have it.  The nuts will have lost most of their flavour, but you can still use them in baking, once they’ve dried out. 

The bone china drink you get out is essence of almond.  It is perfumed, and when sweetened and chilled, can transport you to an imagined world of sultans, of Cleopatra, legendary cities and wild adventures.  It smells and tastes like decadence distilled.  And its ability to refresh and restore in the leaden heat of Palermo in August, only adds to its magic.

Can it be improved?  Well yes.  It can be made into a pudding, for sculpting and moulding.  For adding theatre and silliness to a meal.

Take your litre of fresh almond milk, and use a little of it to mix up 70g of cornflour.  To the rest, add 100-200g caster sugar.  This is a sliding scale of Sicilian.  The more Sicilian you are, the more sugar you’ll add.  Grate the zest of a lemon into the sugar and milk and gently warm through to dissolve the sugar.

As soon as this has happened, add the mixed flour and remaining almond milk.  Turn up the temperature, and stir continuously.

Very quickly, it will sputter and bubble, and the milk will thicken to a set custard consistency.

Before you started, you could have had a rummage around the back of the cupboard, pulling out any odd little cake tins or jelly moulds you may have inherited, or bought from Ikea on a whim.  You can lightly grease them with almond oil.  If you don’t own any frivolous cake tins, small glasses will do.

Turn the heat off, and with not a moment to lose, fill your chosen molds with the now scalding milk., which will rapidly become sullenly viscous as the temperature drops.

Once it’s cooled to room temeprature, chill until you’re ready to serve.

Turn it out and decorate as you see fit; chopped green pistachios work, I make a praline with the leftover ground almonds and sugar (then blitz it to a powder). There is a Cypriot version of this that uses rosewater – so the dried rose petals I can get in my local Iranian deli work really well for that.

As a pudding, it’s easy to make, (24 hours of soaking aside), and it’s even easier to make it look special, camp, grand.  But so delicate to taste, a one hit flavour and a smooth, becalming texture.  This is not the blancmange of post war Britain, sucking the joy off the table, but a Blancmange of William the Good and his legendary Norman court.  Something otherworldy.  Something mythical.

Ingredients

• 250g whole almonds (if you want a stronger flavour, use more, up to 500g if youre especially decadent).  And if you can get fresh, you’re laughing.
• 1 litre of water
• 70g cornflour
• 1 lemon
• 100-200g caster sugar

Nuns and Frock Coats

In Bitter Almonds, the biography of pasticerria owner Maria Grammatico that she wrote with Mary Taylor Simeti, there is a section of recipes at the back of the book. These are the ones practiced in the time warp convent where she lived and worked as a child and young woman just after World War 2. In a time a grinding poverty, and starvation, the convent acted as a kind of workhouse, offering a degree of physical, if not emotional, shelter for destitute and orphaned girls.  In exchange they helped to make the pastries and sweets that the nuns then sold to supplement the convent’s dwindling income.  It’s a strange and compelling book, a snapshot of something unique to Sicily, typically both troubling and beautiful.   Some of the recipes laid out are familiar staples of Sicilian culture across the island; cannoli, cassata.  Others are more esoteric, and with no pictures to guide you, these are recipes that you have to take on trust and run at with blind faith if you attempt them.  

There is something other worldy about this book, in its recounting of a vanished existence slowly dying.  A way of living that had outlived its purpose, becoming embittered and resentful in the process.  The nuns may have disliked that Grammitico took her training and repurposed it for her own and her family’s benefit, but it is likely that without her steel, much of their knowledge, and with it, the pleasures given, would have vanished, along with the silverware of the closing churches and monasteries around them.

This recipe, for a liqueur called ‘Rosolio alle erbe’ has been on the ‘to do’ list for a while.  It needed summer to come, to let me grow the herbs .  It doffs caps to all those famous and monetised liqueurs from monasteries across Europe, from Benedictine to Buckfast.  That they drink it (or something similar) in The Leopard reinforces its archaic mystery.  Anything whose colour prompts a writer to summon the word ‘bilious’ is a thing of both awe and trepidation, and to my warped and curious imagination, demands I give it a go.

The steeping rapidly leaches all the vibrant chlorophyll green out of the herbs, staining the alcohol a deathbed jaundice.  The smell when you come to add the sugar is equally challenging, ‘silage’ I think, might capture it 

At this stage, I began to lose my faith.  Both in the nuns and in Maria.  Apparently, this cordial used to be served at weddings.  My suspicion was that it was used to clear the room at the end of the night.

So like an unwanted raffle prize, it was shoved in a cupboard and almost forgotten, until two months on an adventurous friend demanded to try this oddity.  Out came the little French, hand engraved glasses.  If we we’re going to do this, we’re going full on Lampedusa.  I’d taken the recipe at its word and added some artificial colouring to recapture that biliousness, creating a gothic scene of dainty glasses cupping a dangerous, arsenic shot of poison.  It’s a drink so visually strident that it induces a simultaneous sense of theatre and malice.  The two months of abandonment had also worked wonders.  Silage was gone, to be replaced by a strange, sweet medicinal elixir – the whiff of fermented weeds had vanished to be replaced by something potent, romantic, that smelt and tasted like the inside of a cedar wardrobe from an EM Forster story.

1 lire 40% vodka

20 fresh bay leaves

Cinnamon stick

25 leaves of lemon verbena

6 leaves of spearmint

2 cloves

a thumb sized strip of lemon rind

Mix all the herbs and vodka in an airtight jar and leave to infuse for two weeks in the dark.

Then strain out the herbs, and add a sugar syrup made by dissolving 1 kilo of caster sugar in one litre of water, and simmering for 10 mins, until it’s reduced to about 3/4 litre.  Cool and then mix into the vodka.  

If you like, you can add green food colouring, but it’s not essential.

Bottle, and store for at least two months before drinking, ideally in a frock coat, and sporting a handlebar moustache.

Frying Tonight!

Why would you cook street food at home?

I don’t mean the street food of a thousand dank food festivals; waffles covered in artery clogging cream and salted caramel, or the piece of meat so pulled that it is all but impossible to answer ‘animal, vegetable or mineral?’  I mean the stuff that world over, has been created to be eaten on the hoof, as a ready meal to take to work, and above all, to be cooked in the open air, or at the very least, in a non-domestic setting.  Remember the childhood stigma suffered by the kid that lived above the chippy?  Street food is pungent and clingy.

Homesickness and loss are two reasons to cook it at home, because ‘real’ street food is inherently bound to its place of origin, it can both define and be defined by this.  It is the taste of childhood, normality, home. It reeks of identity.  More pragmatically though, you need open windows, a stiff through breeze,  and the extractor fan to be working at full pelt, without those three preconditions being met, then there is no reason good enough to justify breaking out the deep fat fryer to make Arancine, no matter how wistful your Sicilian other half has become.

Arancine (female) if you’re from Palermo, arancini (male) if you’re from Catania.  And it’s ‘arancheeneh’, NOT ‘arancheeneee’, which I still say every time, to the exasperation of the resident Sicilian and the amusement of my more tolerant Italian teacher (although her patience runs out over my inability to roll my ‘r’s).  For me, the feminine ‘Arancine’ seems right, as they’re supposed to look like oranges (Arance), hence, little oranges (arancine).  Forgive the Italian 101.  This seems to me like common sense, and I’m loyal to my Palermitan.

These are piping hot balls of deep fried rice, surrounding a parcel of (traditionally) either ragù, with peas, or mozzarella and ham.  Dainty, they are not.  The rice has a familiar taste, incongruously rice pudding like (perhaps this is why so many British friends wrinkle their noses at the mention of arancine).  There’s a cafe/bar attached to the Teatro Biondo in Palermo, just round the corner from the tourist hot spot of Quattro Canti. There, you can buy arancine the size of baby’s head, for breakfast.  They sit alongside an alternate riotous excess of cannoli, Genovasi, brioche, countless fruit tarts, marzipan fruits, gelato, more gelato. That Sicilians are not all the size of a house, is astounding.

But the best I have so far eaten was in a tiny backstreet place in Taormina, the cliche of an Italian hill town, with added Etna and Grecian ampitheatre.  Its east coast position places it firmly in the Catania school when it comes to the name, and therefore, you buy ‘Arancini’.  These were through the monumental arch, past the church, past the tourists and past all the street sellers of belts, whirling fluorescent toys, and hair braids.  You had to duck past a fancier restaurant where Americans were sipping monstrously expensive Spritz from branded balloon glasses.  I loved Taormina, I loved all its overt tourist fleecing brashness.  I loved that the Duomo has a black Madonna, painted by God Himself, and wrapped in millennia of silver.  And then, these arancini.

 

The bar is basic, and busy, it reminded me of the chip shop round the corner at home, where queues form early and, in a flight of true Brummie romanticism, are longest on Valentine’s Day.  Similarly, at the cafe in Taormina you queue and you wait under a glaring fluorescent light; there’s a chest high glass display cabinet, which also acts as the counter where you place your order.  I half remember that in there were other offerings, (although none as grand as those in the theatre cafe in Palermo).  But we were here for our little oranges, recommended as the best by Marco, the friend who we were staying with down the hill in less glitzy, less rapacious Naxos.

These arancini need to be assembled and fried to order; the sticky, cold risotto rice, stained gold by saffron, is moulded into a palm shaped cup to hold the filling (we had one ragù and one mozzarella).  Then the rice is formed over to encase its hidden depths.  And this being the east coast, the shape is that of a rounded cone, rather than the sphere of Palermo.  Finally, your dinner is dipped in egg yolk, rolled in breadcrumbs and deep fried in olive oil until the colour of toasted coconut tobacco (I’m showing my age).

The whole thing only takes ten minutes, so you grab a stool in the alley outside, awaiting your turn, with a beer.  Mostly Italians, or rather, mostly Sicilians, are at the few other tables and stools, or sitting on steps and in doorways.  There’s a homeless guy with his hopeful dog in tow.  They’re looking for the rare tourists who’ve gone off-Baedekar and stumbled down here to bite off more than they can chew. Or, more realistically, for the more charitable locals who know them by name and will perhaps buy them both an arancino and him a beer.  This is in no way an idyll, but it is more human and humane than the coach tour feel of the main streets.  The smell is of hot oil and humidity, there are discarded Styrofoam cartons and empty plastic tumblers of dying froth, waiting to be cleared by an overworked, although largely absent teenager.  The street is wet, but it hasn’t rained in weeks.

With your fingers you break open your ball of scalding, sticky rice to an eruption of musty saffron; the filling is viscous and dangerous, but even in the dark, suffocating, summer evening heat of Sicily, the whole thing demands urgent attention. The suddenly discovered ragù, simmered and honed for hours, smacks you in the face.  It is outrageously confident, shouting ‘I am meat! I am peas! I am sauce!  Eat me!’  In contrast the mozzarella version is, if not more demur, then more subtle, sinful in its richness, smokily infused by the ham – the Fenella Fielding of arancini.  Cold beer in hand to sooth a burnt mouth, inadequate, Lilliputian napkins half catching the leaking oil and oozing cheese, these are a thing to be eaten greedily and shamelessly.  There is gluttony here. This is street food.

North & South

June 2019 is reminding me that I don’t live in Sicily.  I live in Birmingham.  High latitude, rain catching Birmingham.  This is turning into one of those summers where the temperature lingers around 20 degrees, and it rains, and it rains, and it rains.  This time last year we were about to leave for Alicudi and the embrace of Mediterranean heat: it was all geckos, seafood, swimming and unrelenting sun.  But even in Birmingham, the sun shone kindly, cherries ripened, oyster festivals were visited, grass withered.  But holidays and summer are delayed this year; instead there is rain and grey and depression. 

Britain offers some consolation in one of what the Sicilian calls ‘the northern fruit’; strawberries, bringing the first of the major battles with the local pigeons and squirrels.  Even in the gloom, still they ripen, needing only a few hints of blue sky to suddenly swell and blush to a deeply, sensual scarlet.

They are the most luxurious of fruits to grow. So extravagant in terms of space, maintenance and protection, offering a repayment of a fleeting two weeks of glut and gorging.  The downside of last year’s holiday in the sun meant that we missed the strawberries, they came and went in the time we were away.  I imagine they were incomparable last year, ripened to perfection by that mythically hot summer. 

It is a sadness that strawberries have now become ubiquitous and eternal.  The strawberries of shops are a poor and tortured thing, to the extent that so many people have forgotten, or worse, never tasted, the intensity of a freshly picked, perfume leaking free range strawberry; its intense blood redness is the difference between oil paints and crayons.

The downsides; to achieve fourteen days of life affirmation they need space to sprawl, and nets to ward off rapacious birds and mammals.  But even nets will be stomped on and nibbled through, so accept that some will be lost. Slugs and snails adore them too, so here you must decide which preventative measure (if any) your conscience will allow.  The plants, although easy to look after, don’t like to be disturbed too often, which means your strawberry patch can turn into a weed patch the moment you turn your head, but weeds can also hide some of the fruit from eagle-eyed pigeons.

I asked the Sicilian how they use strawberries at home, because I could only think of Italian gelato, granita and a little tart of custard and glazed alpine strawberries. You see punnets of these alpine berries for sale there – tiny, intense things (so, typically Sicilian), they call them Fragoline di bosco; strawberries of the forest.  But he drew a blank.  I asked another friend from Milan, and one from Rome, with a Sicilian partner – they too came up with the triumvirate, along with a Roman standard of strawberries, lemon juice and sugar.  So perhaps then, when he calls them ‘a northern fruit’, he’s right, perhaps they thrive in our dampness, our scudding leaden skies and disappointment of British summers; they exist to guarantee us wan northerners some unqualified joy during their constrained window.  

Last year I tried to bring back some of those strawberries of the forest, knowing that I would have missed my own fat Brummie versions.  But they didn’t travel well.  A delayed flight and three hours in the car from Stansted, turned them to mush and mould.  They were a reminder that of all the crops, the strawberries are the worst to be away for, there will be no other chances until next year.  They were also a reminder to make the most of the glut, to capture its essence in jams and ices, so that a spoonful can whisk you back to a moment when you were squatting, with stained fingers, searching for the stab of red beneath green, and loading up bowl after bowl with your rewards.

Strawberry and Lemon Granita (for 8-ish)

Granita in Sicily and Granita in the UK are different creatures.  Both should be intensely flavoured – the essence of their ingredients.  In Sicily they are fleeting and transient, melting to chilly cordial before your eyes in the summer heat.  They are a shot of their parts, like a fruit espresso (or in the case of coffee granita, an actual espresso), refreshing and restorative.  In the UK, particular in this summer, they retain their form for longer, but rarely is there heat strong enough to demand granita. In the heat of Sicily granita invokes an emotional as well as a physical response.  Save it for sunny, warm days.  It is too easy to catch a chill in this country and anyway, it works so much better when the air is a little sticky and the sun too hot, and you’re not in a grey British summer.

500g ripe as you can Strawberries

200g Sugar

Juice of one lemon

75ml (or less of water)

Remove any leaves from the strawberries, halve and cook them in a splash of water.  Once they’ve disintegrated, liquidise them.

Bring the water to the boil, then add the sugar and stir until it’s all dissolved.

Take off the heat and leave to cool.

Push the liquidised fruit through a very fine sieve – fine enough to take the seeds out, and then stir your strawberries into the sugar and water.  Finally add the lemon juice and stir.

Taste it.  It should be Type 2 Diabetes sweet, as frozen things never taste as sweet as they do at room temperature

Now chill the mixture for a few hours and then put it in a freezer in whatever container you plan to store it in.

If you were to use an ice cream maker her, you’d get a smooth sorbet.  Granita should be gritty and crystalline.

So every hour or so, take the container out of the freezer and scratch it with a fork, to get your icy grit.  One frozen, it’ll keep indefinitely, but I try to make small batches for almost immediate

Once it’s ready, serve it in tiny glasses, the camper the better.

No pressure!

There are some recipes that I’ve been tip toeing around,  because of their complexity, because of my ignorance; there’s the fear of being branded a cultural appropriater, the knowledge that I’ll get them wrong, but without a reference point to know just how wrong I got it.

So it is with Pasta al Forno.  This is not a formalised recipe, like Pasta alla Norma.  But then, it is THE recipe.  A simple name, ‘baked pasta’, belies a complex, time consuming holy grail of dishes.  YouTube it and there are more Nonna’s out there making Pasta al Forno, than are imaginable.  It is a dish for Sundays, for celebration, a dish of a diaspora, for welcoming home the Prodigal Son. But more than anything it is the domesticity of Italian cooking distilled. It is sacrosanct. I’m terrified of this dish. Because I am not Italian, to attempt this feels fraudulent almost.

But it had to be done. I tried.  And because I’m not Italian, because I don’t have to play by the rules if I don’t know them all, I tinkered, just a little.  Don’t tell the Sicilian.

If you want a lumpen show stopper, something to bring a cheer from the family that will stretch far enough to satisfy the hungriest of teenagers,  this is it.  It is aubergines, ubiquitous to Sicily breadcrumbs, ragù, pasta (of course), more aubergines, cheese, ham, peas (if you like), layered and assembled into something that is satisfyingly homely, maternal and unpretentious despite the effort and detail that goes into it.  You can try to prettify and gentrify but you will fail, and in so doing you will fail to grasp the point of it, as a celebration of abundance, togetherness and sharing.  Only a fool would make this without guests or family to share it with, you’d be eating it for days.

This though is the Palermitan version, or my Palermitan’s version, with added Milanese input.

Of course, there is pasta al forno, and then there is the proper pasta al forno, as made in Palermo.  For starters, there is only one acceptable pasta, anelletti (think spaghetti hoops), most other versions are far less dictatorial.  It was described to me as a ‘leftovers, whatever is in the fridge’ dish, with no real recipe.  I was then told exactly what those leftovers should be.  

So, I’m not going to give recipe of weights and volumes here,  as the scale of this thing should shift to match the size of your personal domestic set up.  

To begin then, start your ragù, ideally the day before you’re making your bake.  (I tend to make ragù in cauldron sized batches that I freeze into meal sized portions – it saves a lot of time and washing up).

Ragù is a complex business.  One that I sometimes feel I have no place or right to start getting involved with.  There are essays and debates and probably wars raging over what constitutes the proper ragù.  The intricacies and complications that have been wound around this sauce are endless.  Perhaps, one day, I’ll write something about these; sticking my head above a parapet for the inevitable onslaught.  But for now, my ragù is a meat sauce – beef or beef and pork mince, with a soffritto of carrots, onion and celery, passata (plus the same volume of water), white wine, garlic, a bay leaf, simmered for hours – as many as you have (as long as it’s above 3).  If it gets too thick, add more water.  I add an anchovy, one of those salted, oily slivers from a tin.  It dissolves and wallops up the umami.  I also add a 50p sized blob of astrattu,  the unique salted tomato concentrate created by the sun on the roofs of people’s homes in Sicily.  This is unlike anything you’ll have come across outside of Sicily.  It isn’t just tomato paste.  It is something other.  You know how a really good sun dried tomato can taste like sweet marmite?  Exaggerate and embellish that thought. This is obviously not an option unless you’re visiting Sicily (although maybe there are places you can find it here that I’ve not discovered yet), so don’t get too hung up on this addition.

 

My ragù is definitely not canon.  The Sicilian I feel disapproves.  But it’s mine, and I think it’s nigh on perfect.

Once your ragù has simmered its way to a suitably decadent richness, turn it off, cover it and let it sit in the fridge for 24 hours, where, like the best of soups, stews and curries, it will use this time for inner reflection and self improvement.

The next day you are ready to begin.

Slice two large aubergine thinly into steaks and fry both sides in deep, good olive oil until browned.  You can pre salt these slices to draw out some of the water, but make sure to rinse and dry them before frying.  While they’re cooking, oil a sprung cake tin, and coat the inside with breadcrumbs.

Drain the cooked aubergine slices and use them to line the tin, leaving any long edges hanging over the sides of the tin.

Chop a third aubergine into chunks and fry these until brown

Hard boil your eggs

Precook your pasta for half the time on the packet (3-4 mins usually).  Anelletti is a bugger to find in the UK, so improvise – penne is fine, if not Palermitan, I use ditaloni, which is a short tube, still not Palermo style, but hey!  Needs must!

Mix together the pasta and ragù, then layer this with the aubergine chunks, ham and cheese (I mix parmesan and mozarella, but caciocavallo, if you can get it, will add Sicilian authenticity), alternating until you fill the tin, and inserting hidden halves of boiled egg in a symmetrical ring.

Fold over any overhanging aubergine, scatter over more bread crumbs and bake in the oven for 40 minutes.

Best eaten the next day (making this a three day project), this is a rib sticker of a meal.  Hearty and calorific, it takes no prisoners.  But as it is delicious, fantastic, smothering, you will welcome, and embrace your captivity.

Fennel, sprung spring and more sardines

The clue here is the name.  Wild.  Unbiddable and unmovable. One of countless umbelliferous plants, this family (Ferrula) has barnstormed a place into human civilisation as one of our keystone herbs.  If you think of any writer trying to capture their version of a mediterranean idyll, fennel looms large – pungent, aniseed, flowers that crawl with drugged and clumsy pin-head beetles.  My favourite is Giant Fennel, whose hollow stalks become the homes for colonies of gargantuan petrol blue bumble bees all over Sicily, from the abandoned terraces of Alicudi to the 2,000 year old ruins of Agrigento.  There, you see, I’m off on my personal Mediterranean idyll, and its fennel. 

But, it is not exclusively a plant of the south, here too it will grow freely, uninvited and tall.  Acid green or lustrous bronze, the two forms both carry the same pungency, and promiscuity when it comes to populating your patch with their offspring.  Sadly it does not come with giant bees, but it still carries that unique flavour and smell; full of volatiles waiting to impart something of themselves into your food.  Without the sun, that Sicilian sun, those volatiles will be weaker, less concentrated, something you will need to consider when deciding your quantities.  And after the exuberant spring fronds, come the flowers and their seeds – medicinal, digestive, essential. 

The fennel of spring comes as an eruption of froth, powered by a delving tap root that is heading to the antipodes.  An established clump of fennel becomes a stubborn and resolute thing, a problem if it’s a weed, a heaven sent blessing when it’s a herb.  And that tap root, prone to snapping and source of all life, causes all sorts of problems when the plant pops up in the wrong place and needs to be moved.  A relocated fennel plant is seldom a happy thing.  They have a strong sense of place, and their place is where they germinated, and no where else.  Rehomed it will sulk and wither, the promised lacy abundance turning yellow and wilting.  Given time, there may be a recovery, a return to vigour, but this is never certain, no matter how green your fingers.  

As soon as spring has sprung, the tight froth of new growth will erupt skywards, that deep deep  tap root powering stalks, fronds and yellow insect magnet flowers up to six feet in the air.  Once it gets there, much of the greenery (or bronzery) will start to die back.  All energy is diverted to height and flowers.  So the window for cooking with fennel leaves is over by July.

There is one recipe, involving pasta, fennel and sardines, that for me more than any other, encapsulates Sicilian food.  It’s ingredients are mostly ordinary, foraged, last hour of the market, store cupboard stuff.  And then the smallest of extravagances are added. The flavours are sublime.  Oily fish shot through with aniseed, sweet raisins, crunchy nuts, heady saffron and starchy pasta.  This is cheap decadence that I could eat every day.  The bucatini makes for a strange first encounter, it’s a hollow, tubular spaghetti – fatter and  tricky to eat.  It’s like a secret test to set true Italians apart from us lesser mortals, their deftness in stark contrast to our air-sucking futility.  But the hollowness allows it to absorb more of the flavours and juices of your Sarde, so it’s worth the extra effort and humiliation.

Pasta con le Sarde (for four)

Sardines (fresh, 2-3 per person or 2 tins, in oil)

Wild Fennel, (a big fist full of a fronds)

25g Pine nuts (toasted)

25g Raisins (soaked in warm water)

25g Chopped almond flakes

75ml Olive oil

Breadcrumbs

4 Anchovies

450g Bucatini

Saffron

Onion

Garlic.

If your using fresh sardines, then clean them – heads off, guts out, fins clipped, back bone out.  If you’re using tinned, the messy work has been done for you

Boil your pasta water, heavily salted and then use it cook the chopped fennel fronds (having removed the toughest, stringiest centre parts) for no more than ten minutes.  Remove and keep your fronds, but keep the fennel scented water boiling and add the pasta, cooking for 6-7 minutes (check the packet).

If using fresh sardines, then keep half of the fillets whole, and chop the rest.  Fry the whole ones in abundant oil, browning them on both sides, and when cooked, take them out of the oil and keep them with your fennel fronds. (you can skip this bit if you are using tinned fish, as they will never have the same crowd pleasing looks).

Now fry your chopped onion with the garlic. Add the anchovies and saffron (steeped in a little warm water), then added the chopped sardines, stir through the raisins, nuts and half of the fennel.

Whilst everything is heating through, test your pasta. Once it’s ready, drain, and then layer pasta, remaining fennel and the fish sauce, garnishing with the whole sardines you kept aside.  Finally shake over a generous amount of breadcrumbs and flash everything in an oven on its top heat for five minutes.

Schrödinger’s Freezer

The freezer is on the blink. Scarcely a year old, and apparently it needs a new circuit board.

On the plus side, it’s so fiendishly modern that its insulation levels wouldn’t be out of place on the International Space Station. So nothing is rapidly defrosting, rather things are gradually just nudging their temperatures upwards every time I open the door. I have Schrödinger’s Freezer. I have to make lightning strikes in there, playing a 3D memory game as to what is in which drawer and snatching whatever is most vulnerable to the thaw.

I started with the fish, plural. I bulk buy frozen sardines, because, as I’ve said before, I bloody love them. So I had 20 sardines still board stiff, but too many and too good to risk losing to the whims of over complicated fridge electrics. I also wasn’t feeling particularly finicky , so no Sardine a beccafico for tea tonight.

But I remembered something else. Something gruesome, barbaric, straight from a crap horror film, but delicious. If you decide to make these, keep everyone out of the kitchen, and pray your guests don’t arrive early, as few people will be brave enough to try them, having seen the preamble.

Polpette di sarde
(Sardine meatballs).

The Sicilian made these for one of his monumental feasts last year. They were a triumph, hoovered up with gusto, even though they’re a simple fish meat ball, fried until brown all over and then cooked again in a tomato sauce. I’m giving his recipe (that I’ve not seen in any book), which uses fewer ingredients (no raisins or pine nuts – which are often included). There’s also a north African version of these which is spicier.

You will need a sturdy food mill, a heavy, deep frying pan, a hefty knife, and to put aside any squeamishness you may be prone to.

Start by cleaning your sardines. You need to clip off the fins, scrub off any scales and take out the guts. Doing this under running, cold water makes the job mildly less revolting.

Then, take your knife, decapitate each sardine, flattening the remaining body out, so you can fillet out the back bone (These you can discard) Chop your fillet into two or three pieces and, steeling yourself, throw the whole lot, skin and all into your food mill. Get cranking. The kitchen horror story begins, as your fish are ground down and extruded as fine fish paste into the bowl below. This is as far removed from a ready meal as you’re ever likely to get, you will be not quite staring your dinner in the eye as it disappears down the grinder. At the end any of the tougher bones or fins you missed in the cleaning process should be left in your food mill, and you can start turning the fish paste into your polpette. In the UK, we’re very picky about the bits we will and won’t knowingly eat. But if you ever eat fish such as bream or bass with a Sicilian family you’ll see them picking out the eyes, finding the brain, chewing the whole head and spitting out the bones. It isn’t pretty, but these delicacies are good enough to permit the ditching of niceties. OK, so we haven’t gone this far with our meatballs, but there is sound reasoning behind this gothic almost all encompassing process.

The next bit is easy and less troubling.
Add bread (which you’ve soaked in water for ten minutes), beaten egg, garlic, parsley and grated pecorino, to the fish and mix everything thoroughly. The mix needs to be sticky enough to hold together when you form golf ball sized polpette, but not so damp that they stick to you hands. Most recipes will tell you to use breadcrumbs here, because they’re easier and people get breadcrumbs. You can weigh them, they’re orderly. But, they can turn your fish balls stiff, too congealed; by mixing in bread, squidging it with your hands, you avoid stodge. I don’t know why this works, but it does, it makes a big, big, difference.

Now heat up the olive oil and fry your balls when the oil sizzles if you drop a little of the mix into it. You want to brown them all over, so you’ll need to stand over them and turn as they cook. Don’t do this standing over the stove with a fag in your mouth; the other half’s mother would do. Ash does not improve the flavour.

Once they’re done, you can cool and store them in the fridge until you’re ready to cook your tomato sauce. (This also reduces the chances of horrified guests discovering your barbarism).

The sauce can be a simple home made passata, or you can make a more complex one by adding garlic, olive oil and basil. Although, despite this coming from a usually reliable recipe book, the Sicilian was visibly appalled at the idea of pairing basil with fish: “a Sicilian would never put basil with fish! And if they do they’re wrong”.

This is where you need trust your own taste. Being an oily fish. sardines pack a strong punch that’ll see off flavours that might overpower a less strident fish, but, I prefer the plain tomato version, it’s more in keeping with this simple version of the recipe. Plus, you have parsley in the polpette, so it’ll all get terribly confusing if you add basil.

Double up your passata with the same amount of water and then heat your sauce gently to a simmer, it doesn’t need to be ferociously boiling and sending little staining lava bombs of tomato all over your kitchen. Now add the polpette and cook them until they are heated through (30 minutes should be enough) and the sauce has reduced down to a sticky thickness.

Serve, perhaps with a few toasted pine nuts over the top for a bit of crunch. And have your ‘scarpetta’ ready, the ‘little shoe’ of bread to scoop up the sauce.

I was reading up on versions of this recipe (in Mary Taylor Simeti’s Sicilian Food) and apparently, it’s specific to Palermo. Elsewhere in Sicily, especially on the western side of the island, it’s more usual to make your polpette with tuna. So this would be a less gruesome version, using just steak meat, rather than all the bits that refuse to let you forget that this was once a living, swimming, silvery thing.

Ingredients
(makes 12 meatballs, allow two per person as a starter, or four as a main)

20 sardines
200-250g bread (crusts off and soaked in water for ten minutes)
Tablespoon of fresh chopped parsley
25g grated pecorino
1 egg (beaten)
1 crushed clove of garlic
Salt and pepper

500ml passata

25g pine nuts (browned in a dry frying pan)

Discovering Gelato

I candied a lemon.  A great, warty giant of a lemon that I grew on a tree in a pot.  It was given a gallon of water a day and a fed liquid seaweed almost as often.  And there, at 52 degrees north, ready for Christmas, was a tree bowed down with my incredible lemons, tucked away for the winter in their protective greenhouse.  It’s a big deal, growing lemons in Birmingham; huge!

The majority of these lemons got the gin and tonic treatment, but I snaffled a couple away for something a lot more special; a week long bath in warmed sugar syrup, that day by day, became more concentrated.  The end result was something of such overwhelming lemon intensity that there I was in danger of becoming transfixed, unable to resist the temptation to gorge myself on the whole thing in one slow-motion go.  Thankfully, and in a rare moment of delayed gratification, I resisted.

The candied lemon began as an experiment because I have a dream of making the perfect cassata, the celebratory Sicilian cake that out-camps pretty much any other cake.  Layers of ricotta, marzipan, sponge, and chocolate sport an elaborate headpiece of iced candied fruit. If you’re thinking Carmen Miranda, you’re not far off.  The drawback is that it’s very difficult to buy the requisite candied fruit here in the UK, there are some close approximations, but not the whole figs, clementines, pears and slabs of summer squash that should be used and can be bought by the kilo in the right shops in Palermo.

So I thought I’d have a go at making my own.  The perfect cassata will have to wait a while, because although I candied my lemons, they weren’t right.  The Sicilian variety are solid, and maintain their shape and colour (with a little help from some food dye).  My lemon, was slightly shrunken, hollow and, as I took my eye off the ball for a moment, it had tipped over the edge from candied to marmaladey, more burnt umber than Mediterranean zing.  Delicious, though, as I’ve already mentioned.  

Whilst I could happily have sliced it up thinly, and eaten the whole thing to myself, furtively, in a semi dark kitchen, I wanted to find a way to incorporate the concentrated flavour into something else, in spite of it being February, an unseasonable gelato wormed its way into mind.

I’ve been trying to get to the bottom of the what separates gelato from Ice Cream.  

The ice creams that I’m used to making all start with a cooked custard of eggs, milk, cream and sugar – to which the flavours are added before the freezing and churning.  Depending on which recipe you’re reading, gelato may be exactly this.  Or something without cream.  Or without cream or eggs, thickened instead with cornflour.  I can sense a prolonged period of experimentation in the offing, but for now, I started with the recipe furthest from the custard base, and went for the cornflour version.

In many ways, it’s actually easier to make than a custard ice cream; you heat the milk, dissolve the sugar and then add cornflour, mixed with a little spare milk, and cook it through until it thickens.  Add in the lemon, stir, cool and freeze.

What comes out the other end is totally different from what I’m used to, and far more reminiscent of the gelato you get on the street in Catania or Noto.  For one, it doesn’t freeze solid, but retains a scoopable softness even at the freezer’s coldest setting.  So it’s instantly smoother and less prone to granularity – and yet, without the cream and eggs, it’s actually lower in fat, which makes it ‘better’ for you. There, who knew that gelato is actually the healthy option.  With its super concentrated lemon kick, I’d created what tasted like the best lemon curd/marmalade ice known to man.

I have friends who think that the time I spend in the kitchen, my willingness to even contemplate spending a week steeping a lemon in warm sugar syrup, marks me out in some way as a lunatic.

Perhaps they do.  But this lunatic now has a tub of the best, first-attempt gelato that home grown lemons can make.

 

 

 

Sweet & Sour Pumpkin

In a blog that is mainly about Italian food, this is going to sound very dumb, but this is a  recipe that is really very, very Italian.  And I mean that in a culturally alien, lost in translation way.  I don’t say this to discourage you, but I think it stems from the fact that we only really grow pumpkins to carve in the UK.  Other than that, and Covent Garden soups, we don’t really know what to do with them, they’ve just never quite caught on here.  Then there is the weather against us.  Winter squashes are, by definition, at their best, in the winter.  Their flavour deepens with storage and they store well after their autumn harvest  So the best time to be eating them is in the post Christmas lull, which is not perhaps the best time to be eating cold starchy salads in dingy Britain.  Also, who has fresh mint growing in the garden in February?  Finally, the mint, the vinegar, the sugar.  What the hell?  I just didn’t have enough life-experience to grasp what was happening the first time I tried this. 

Perhaps I should try selling this better.  For a start, there is deep frying involved and anything deep fried is, it goes without saying, good.

The first time I made this unsupervised, I made the stupid mistake of trying to shallow fry my squash, which just doesn’t cut the mustard.  They didn’t brown, they didn’t crisp up; they just soaked up the oil and turned to mush.  I gained new wisdom from the Sicilian: “basically, whenever I say ‘fry something’, I really mean ‘deep fry it’”

So assuming you have fried your squash in profligate depths of olive oil, you will have a plate of golden brown crescent moons of oily squash draining on kitchen paper.

Now, arrange them in a tray and douse with red wine vinegar, before adding chopped mint, salt, sugar and pepper.  It’s hard to give absolute quantities, as each squash, is different, absorbing more oil, needing less sugar, and the mintiness of mint can never be guaranteed if you’re buying it from a supermarket.  Keep tweeking, and don’t be concerned about sticking to hard and fast proportions.

Leave the sweet and sour and herbs to interact for a few hours, even 24 hours, and then eat as an antipasti, with bread (of course, as no Sicilian meal is complete without, at least, the option of bread) to soak up the juices.  It works well with other preserved or pickled vegetables.  I like it with artichoke hearts and cold, oily sweet peppers.

Maybe the first time you try this, you’ll be as perplexed as I was – a savoury dish that is sweet, but  tangy and minty.  But stick with it, work with the pairings, consider the bread to choose; have the patience to let it infuse for a day.  You’ll become extremely fond of this dish, it will become a thing you look forward to making in the dark depths of February,

And if, in February – this cold dish from a hot foreign island seems just too alien, warm it through in the oven – the heat makes it more northern, more acceptable to a Saxon taste.  There are versions that add chilli flakes for extra heat and another Sicilian version that is baked in the oven with onions. I have been known (when the Sicilian isn’t around) to add anchovies. All of these are good, and further justify the growing of rampant winter squashes if you have the inclination and the space.

Zucca in agradolce

One winter squash, peeled, deseeded and sliced into crescents 1-2cm thick.

2-3 cloves of bruised garlic.

Enough olive oil to cover your sliced squash in a deep frying pan.

Fresh mint*

Red wine vinegar (50-100ml)*

Salt and pepper.

*quantities will vary according to the size and absorbency of the squash, and your own tastes.

First put the cold oil and garlic in your big, heavy, deep frying pan.

Turn the heat on, and brown the garlic, then remove it from the oil (hang onto it though).

Fry the squash slices, in batches, in the oil, growing on both sides.   Don’t put too many in at once, as this cools the oil, which stops the squash from browning and they’ll start to disintegrate.

As they cook, drain them on kitchen paper, then arrange them in a serving dish.  Sprinkle over the saved browned garlic, chopped mint, vinegar, salt and pepper.  Cover and leave to steep in the fridge for as long as you can.

Serve at room temperature or warm through – as you prefer.