FOUR

… And the Stuff of Dreams

In a month’s time (if the winds are not against you) you will arrive on the affluent island of Sicily, where you will eat some of those macaroni that have taken their name from the [Greek word] “beatify”: they are usually cooked together with fat capons and fresh cheeses dripping butter and milk on all sides, and then, using a wide and liberal hand, sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon of the finest that can be found. Oh dear, how my mouth waters just remembering them.

Ortensio Landi, Secretary to Lucrezia Gonzaga, sixteenth century

However grateful we may be for our daily bread, it is only human to desire something more: a Sunday roast, a birthday cake, or a Christmas pudding to satisfy a particular hunger or to celebrate a special occasion. The higher our income, the more frequently such occasions occur, so much so that the ability to transform the extraordinary into the ordinary—to eat meat every day, for instance—becomes a symbol of newly augmented economic and social status.

Sicilians are no exception to this rule. If now they seem to make much of the possibility or even the appearance of eating meat, it is because for centuries meat was so rare and limited to so few. In fact, it has had comparatively little hold upon the popular imagination. To celebrate his feast day, to confirm his status, and to satisfy his soul, what the Sicilian really craved was a nice big plate of pasta!

Historians have as yet been unable to pinpoint the moment in Italian history when pasta asciutta as we think of it—the heaped dish of spaghetti or fettuccine crowned with sauce and cheese—was born. There is good reason to believe, however, that it all began in Arab Sicily. Noodles known as rishta were eaten in ancient Persia and are mentioned in the cookbooks of medieval Islam. In Italy, the earliest mention of pasta’s being produced on a commercial scale comes from a survey of Sicily written by an Arabic geographer at the request of the Norman King Roger II.

To the west of Termini lies the town of Trabia, a most pleasing site, rich in perennial waters and in mills, with a fertile plain and vast farms, where they manufacture vermicelli in such great quantity as to supply both the towns of Calabria and those of the Muslim and the Christian territories as well, to where large shipments are sent.

Al-ldrisi, The Book of Roger, 1150

The geographer called the vermicelli itriya, an Arabic word that has survived as tria in Sicilian dialect until the present and which was exported north along with the pasta by twelfth-century Genoese merchants. A cookbook from thirteenth-century Bologna gives instructions on how to prepare tria genovese for invalids (cook them in salted almond milk).

As pasta took hold in the kitchens of Italy, the cooks continued to acknowledge its southern origins: a famous cookbook from Renaissance Florence gives a recipe for “Sicilian Soup.”

Knead well sifted white flour together with egg whites and rosewater, or plain water. Then roll into a sheet and cut into strips as thin as straws, which you will cut crosswise into short pieces. With a light hand run them through with a wire, so that when you draw the wire out, the single pieces will remain hollow on the inside. Dry them in the sun and they will last even for two or three years, especially if they have been made during the August moon. Cook them in a fat broth, pour them into the plates and add grated cheese, fresh butter and sweet spices. This dish requires two hours’ cooking.

Bartolomeo Platina, Il piacere onesto e la buona salute, 1474

Platina was translating into fine humanist Latin a series of recipes that had been collected and published in Italian a few years earlier by a professional chef known as Maestro Martino da Como. I wonder how much macaroni either of them ever made in the manner they describe: the thought of trying to push a wire up a damp noodle is daunting, no matter how “light” one’s hand. In Sicily today home-made macaroni (which in most households are made only on special occasions) are shaped with the help of special straws called busi: a small piece of dough is placed on the straw and then rolled out on the table under the palms of both hands, as children roll out long snakes of clay, so that as it thins out the dough wraps itself about the straw. When the straw is drawn out from one end, it leaves a more or less tubular length of pasta, somewhat like a very wide bucatino, which is commonly known as maccarruna di zitu.

There are, of course, many other forms of pasta made in Sicilian homes, or at least there used to be. A partial list compiled in the nineteenth century includes:

ciazzìsi

ciazzisuotti

maccarruna a lu ’usu

maccarrunedda ri zita

scivulietti

cavatieddi

gnucchitti

lasagni

taccuna

pizzulatieddi

ncucciatieddi

melinfanti

filatieddi

gnuòcculi

pastarattedda

virmicieddi

alica, etc.

Serafino Amabile Guastella, L’antica carnevale nella Contea di Modica, 1887

The sound of these names intrigues me, and I wish I had some idea of which one might correspond to Goethe’s description—much more persuasive than Platina’s—of domestic macaroni making.

Since there are no inns in Girgenti, a family kindly made room for us in their own house and gave us a raised alcove in a large chamber. A green curtain separated us and our baggage from the members of the household, who were manufacturing macaroni of the finest, whitest and smallest kind, which fetches the highest price. The dough is first moulded into the shape of a pencil as long as a finger; the girls then twist this once with their fingertips into a spiral shape like a snail’s. We sat down beside the pretty children and got them to explain the whole process to us. The flour is made from the best and hardest wheat, known as grano forte. The work calls for much greater manual dexterity than macaroni made by machinery or in forms. The macaroni they served us was excellent, but they apologised for it, saying that there was a much superior kind, but they hadn’t enough in the house for even a single dish. This kind, they told us, was only made in Girgenti and, what is more, only by their own family. No other macaroni, in their opinion, can compare with it in whiteness and softness.

J.W. von Goethe, Italian Journey (1786-88)

To return to Platina and the Renaissance, it is important to note that his recipe calls for “sweet spices.” In his next recipe, entitled simply “Vermicelli,” he is more specific: in addition to spices, he orders, “when they are cooked, remember to sprinkle them with sugar.”

In the medieval and Renaissance periods, in fact, sugar was sold by the speziale, the seller of spices, who was also a herbalist and apothecary, with one foot in the kitchen and the other in the sickroom. It was very expensive, to be used sparingly like other imported spices, but it appears in almost every dish, from the beginning of the meal to the end, just as honey or vino cotto appears in so many of Apicius’s recipes.

This antique taste for sweet spices in pasta has survived to the present in a few Sicilian preparations. One of these is sciabbò, which is eaten at Christmastime in Enna, at the very heart or, as Cicero called it, the umbilicus of Sicily. This is a pasta dish made with lasagne ricce, wide flat noodles with a ruffled edge. According to Pino Correnti the name sciabbò alludes to the ruffles, being a Sicilianization of the French jabot. In any case, the sweet spices here are cinnamon and sugar, with a later Spanish addition of bitter chocolate.