A history lesson on a plate

( The Observer – 2008 – by Matthew Fort )

If you want to understand Sicily’s colourful past, just immerse yourself in its cuisine. Food writer Matthew Fort goes on a culinary odyssey.

‘Extra virgin olive,’ read Nato Sanguedolce’s recipe for salmoriglio sauce, ‘lemon juice, oregano and salt.’ Then, as a coda: ‘The extra virgin olive oil should be from Sant’Agatese olives, the lemons from Pettineo, and the wild oregano from the Nebrodi. And brush it on to the pork chops after they have finished cooking.’
So that’s the secret, I thought, remembering the sweet, sinewy meat, gilded with the heat of the barbecue, its delicate, almost languorous flavour pointed up by the singing salmoriglio. I knew that no matter how hard I tried, my pork chops would never taste the same.

Lunch had started at midday. Nato and his wife and their children, with several friends and their children, were gathered in a building that consisted of a room with a table, plus a kitchen and a store room, in the middle of an olive grove just outside Pettineo, a town high in the Nebrodi, a mountainous area with thick forests of oak and cork trees in the north-east of Sicily. I had met Nato at a honey tasting near Siracusa. Give me a call, he had said, when you reach the Nebrodi. I had taken him at his word.

Lunch was maccheroni con ragù di vitello (pasta with veal and tomato sauce), juicy slices of aubergine grilled over embers, fruity roasted corno di toro peppers with potatoes, a miraculous courgette stew, San Giuseppe sausages, and cured black olives. Nothing fancy or done to impress, but each mouthful had flavours of intoxicating vitality. It was as if the intense history of the island was packed into the dish. Perhaps it was.

At 4.40pm I lay back beneath an olive tree, head resting on a convenient root. Sunlight filtered through the leaves. I could still hear the laughter and conversation as I fell asleep. When I woke and rejoined the party, I was startled to see Nato uncoiling lengths of sausage and emptying what appeared to be a good part of a pig out of a bag, ready for grilling. That was what I had come back to discover, and put into a book if I could.

I had first come to Sicily in 1973, with my brother Tom. Neither of us knew much about the island – it just seemed like a good idea at the time. Sun-drenched. Wine. Food. We hired a car and spent our first night in Taormina, following in the footsteps of such diverse figures as Edward VII, Rita Hayworth and Truman Capote. On our first morning I pushed back the shutters on to a dazzling azure sea and a sky the colour of hydrangeas. There was a sweet warmth and perfume to the air. On the far horizon was a small cloud, like the head of a dandelion. After that came day after day of blue skies, sparkling seas, churches, temples, ice creams, shellfish and salads, pastries and puddings.

I can recall the caramel marine sweetness of grilled prawns, the soft chewiness of squid in batter as light as a butterfly’s wing, the charcoal-burnt edge just shading the delicate, flaking flesh of grilled sea bass. I remember the sausage epiphany I had in Erice, just two salsicce on a plate, plain and unadorned, that tasted more of pork than any sausages had a right to. The searing, brain- and tongue-tingling shock of lemon or coffee granitas, the soft, cool seduction of pistachio, chocolate, strawberry or melon ice cream. There were salads, crunchy and slightly bitter, tomatoes that exploded in your mouth like flavour grenades, and fruit – the sweet, perfumed trickle of peach juice down the chin, the apricots, the melons. By the time I returned in 2006, I wondered if it was just the honey of memory that made those recollections so dazzling.

As I rode my Vespa across the island, I realised that Sicily was more fascinating, delicious and paradoxical than even memory allowed. It has greater architectural and artistic riches than any area of comparable size, reflecting the march and counter-march of all the great Mediterranean cultures – Phoenician, Greek, Roman, Moorish, Spanish – and some non-Mediterranean ones – Normans, and Swabians from Germany. All have left their mark; in that sense it is a museum of Mediterranean cultures.

It’s easy to trace their influence through physical remains: the temples, cathedrals, palaces and mosaics. But they are there, too, in place names, language, social attitudes and, above all, food. If ever there was a country whose history is written in its food, it is Sicily, in methods, ingredients, even agricultural techniques.

Just as history has been a continual assault on Sicily, so Sicilian cooking is an assault on the taste buds. Some dishes owe their origins to the Greeks; others to the Moors, to Rome or Byzantium. You could spy out the Spanish love of embellishment and theatrical gesture, the French insistence on structure and technique, and even trace shades of England and Germany here and there.

I explored Sicily’s history on the plate rather than studying its artistic forms: from the epically sweet cannoli of Corleone to grilled mackerel with bitter chicory in Palermo; from sublime pastries in Enna to the eloquent, seductive s oftness and intensity of almond ice cream in Noto. Not forgetting the breakfast of coffee granita with cream and brioche at the famous Irrera cafe in Messina, sweet honeys of the Nebrodi, bitter lemons of the Conca d’Oro valley, lessons in bread- and pasta-making followed by another Lucullan lunch with the delicious Cesarina Perrone and her family, and on and on…

I feel sorry, really, for those who go to the island only to pass from Greek temple to Roman theatre, from baroque cathedral to opulent palace, who never explore the great sweep of central Sicily, the lesser-sung glories such as Modica Bassa and, above all, its gastronomic byways. Eating history is at least as much fun as looking at it – and rather more digestible.