FIVE

Princes, Priests, and Not So Humble Friars

The rage to excel in the size of fish for their grand entertainments yet exists, and I have seen the late Prince of Butera, than whom nobody better understood good cheer, place a whole tunny, garnished round like a mullet, like a Leviathan, in the centre of his festive board.

W. O. Smyth, Memoir descriptive of the resources, inhabitants, and hydrography of Sicily and its Islands…, 1820

A whole tuna on the table is an odd form of one-upmanship, but given the inflation of aristocratic titles that took place in Sicily between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries, any means of asserting one’s rank was worth a try. At the end of the fifteenth century the feudal aristocracy in Sicily was composed of fifty-three families, each well armoured with hereditary tax exemptions. The easiest way for the Spanish kings to tap this pool of wealth was through the creation and sale of new titles: in the seventeenth century alone 102 principalities were created. By the end of the eighteenth century, within a population of 1,500,000 Sicily counted 142 princes, 95 dukes, 788 marquises, 59 counts, and a walloping 1,274 barons. In the most powerful and wealthiest families the same person often held several titles, which made rank all the more difficult to determine. It was not uncommon for the streets of Palermo to remain blocked for hours by the encounter of two carriages, their aristocratic occupants each claiming precedence over the other. In such a contest, the show of wealth was a powerful weapon.

Sicilian historical debate has been concerned for many years with finding a culprit for the island’s economic and political stagnation. In the past the Sicilians quite naturally preferred to attribute the responsibility to the avariciousness of foreign despots, while the English historian Denis Mack Smith has placed the blame squarely on the shoulders of the local aristocracy. More recent studies have done much to examine the role of the middle class. This book is not the right place, nor am I the right person, to enter into such a debate. For present purposes, it is enough to sketch very rapidly the evolution of the Sicilian aristocracy after 1500.

An influx of Spanish nobility on the one hand and proliferation of merchants, jurists, and civil administrators wealthy enough to purchase titles and estates on the other, swelled the ranks of the aristocracy in the course of the sixteenth century. At the same time increased population pressure and a consequent increase in the price of grain meant an enormous growth in feudal revenues, while urban salaries lagged, thus keeping the cost of construction and the prices of luxury goods down. It was here, in this sixteenth-century margin for expenditure, that the aristocratic tradition of lavish spending and extravagant living developed—a tradition that, once rooted, remained, even when feudal income diminished and the great patrimonies became riddled by debt.

The impression one has of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is that of an introverted and rather static court life, protected by the rigorous filtering of the Spanish Inquisition from the ferments of the North and governed in its pastimes and its expenditures by the elaborate and formal tastes of the Spanish court, with its predilection for tourneys, masques, and tableaus.

Each royal wedding or birth was the occasion for decorating the façades of the most important public buildings and private palaces, and for erecting theatres, jousting fields, and elaborate fireworks displays. Each death found the city swathed in black and silver; the local notables, when they died, were displayed on immense catafalques, distant royalty were mourned in absentia by interminable processions of black-robed aristocrats and ecclesiastics.

The diarists and chroniclers of this period are the despair of the food historian; “they dined” … “copious refreshments were served” … “pages bearing silver basins of diverse sweets and confections.” To these chroniclers, the sweets merit an inventory, but the rest of the menu is unworthy of note.

One can only postulate that the Sicilian table saw the same elaborate Renaissance cookery that reigned elsewhere in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, expressive of local tastes and ingredients but now as slow to change as it had once been quick to innovate. There were some novelties: it was in this period and through the agency of the Spanish that chocolate crept into the Sicilian cupboard, where it first found shelf space next to the “sweet spices” that were sprinkled over everything from soup to nuts. In most classic Sicilian pastries, such as cannoli or cassata, in fact, chocolate is added on in bits and shavings to the ricotta or the biancomangiare filling, a modern afterthought rather than a basic and original ingredient. Other recipes, as we have seen, call for chocolate to be grated into a meat pasty or into a sauce for pasta.

Another recipe with chocolate is for a sauce to be served with boiled potatoes or steamed artichokes. “Saint Bernard’s Sauce” is said to have originated in the monastery of that name, while one old version of the recipe specifies that the breadcrumbs required for its concoction be “toasted to a San Francesco di Paola colour”—the dark brown, that is, of a friar’s habit.

A small bowl of this sauce is sitting in the back of my refrigerator, a mournful monument to a whole afternoon of grinding almonds, sugar, breadcrumbs, and anchovies in a mortar and then steaming them in a double boiler together with bitter chocolate and vinegar. “Interesting” was the kindest comment anyone could offer, but I have yet to gather the courage to dump such an investment of energy into the garbage. However weird and unappealing this combination of tastes may seem to most of us today, it was highly prized by the baroque palate, and continued to maintain its place on the Sicilian table well into the nineteenth century, long after it had passed out of fashion elsewhere in Europe. King Ferdinand’s granddaughter Maria Carolina, Duchess of Berry, who passed much of her childhood in Sicily, remained faithful to her early love of caponata as she knew it, spread with a thick layer of Saint Bernard’s sauce, then heaped with baby octopus and slices of swordfish, and garnished with shrimp, asparagus, stuffed olives, and “uova nere”—slices of hard-boiled eggs that had been shelled and pickled in red wine vinegar until their whites turned black

The Spanish are also given credit for the Sicilian love of the frittata, which is the endlessly versatile Italian cousin of the Spanish tortilla, the French omelet, and the Arabic eggah—not to mention Apicius’s alia patina de asparagus. Sicilians today are very fond of just this same sort of frittata, preferably using very young and very tender shoots of the asparagus tenuifolius that grows wild in the hills, or the slightly less bitter shoots of an ornamental shrub with the Latin name Ruscus hypoglossum.