SEVEN

Street Fare

The quantity of fruit-stalls is innumerable, and the women and boys walking up and down with pomegranates, olives, medlars, oranges, pistaccionuts, figs, and other fruits are equally so; all of them have such potent voices that they never cease one minute to extol their merchandise with an intolerable, and almost deafening bawl. To these you may add droves of country people with asses and mules, laden with all kinds of potherbs, crying out likewise in a manner which must affect the strongest nerves. At this time the sailors flock from the port to purchase provisions. The police officers, secretaries, clerks, and apprentices, hasten to their daily occupations, taking their breakfast on the road, which consists in some bread or biscuit, and a little fresh fruit just gathered in the neighbouring gardens and covered with a luxuriant bloom.

T. Bingham Richards, Letters from Sicily Written in the Year 1798

There was a remarkable contrast between the streets of Palermo and Catania, so alive with vendors and cookshops and stalls selling every type of edible ware, and what the foreign traveller found once he ventured beyond the walls of the big cities. Well into the nineteenth century Sicily lacked roads suitable for wheeled traffic, and the tourist was obliged to proceed by mule—either astride or in a litter—accompanied by a hired guide and a pack mule loaded with provisions for the journey. It was often impossible to procure food en route, and the only bed available in many small towns was at the monastery.

During the early nineteenth century the number of hotels and inns operating in Sicily increased, thanks in part to the presence of the British navy and to an ever greater flow of foreign visitors. A few of these hotels, such as the Albergo del Sole in Syracuse, met with constant approval on the part of the travellers, usually because the innkeeper had served as cook or manservant with the British forces, and know how to win the hearts of his guests by presenting them with their beloved beefsteak. But these were rarities; elsewhere accommodations were rustic.

Four hours and a half… brought me to Fiume Nisi, eighteen miles from Messina; where the muleteer informed me there was an excellent inn. It consists of an immense range of open stalls for the mules, and wretched lofts above, they call rooms. The supper room you are shewn into, is a division of the stable; with a fire on the ground, or rather, bare earth—a bed for the family—some casks full of wine—a pig lately killed, swinging from the rafters—and a table and bench. Upon the ashes they toast you a slice from the pig; with two or three eggs, and a bottle of wine: and that forms your supper; while the muleteer stalks in with a satisfied air from having told you the truth. The chamber for sleeping is a wretched-looking garret, with a mattress, en suite; shutters, for windows; and a door that won’t shut. Were an English lady’s maid shewn into such a place, at the worst inn on the road, she would immediately SWOON. And take this for a picture of every locanda in Sicily, except in great towns, or the immediate beaten tract from one English post to another.

Thomas Wright Vaughan, A View to the Present State of Sicily, 1811

And in still other establishments, the supper was truly self-service:

The poor wretch [of an innkeeper] was without means of buying us provisions, and we had to go ourselves the evening before in quest of them, returning at last in triumph, the master with a beefsteak upon a skewer, and the man with an enormous bunch of broccoli under his arm.

W. O. Bartlett, Pictures from Sicily, 1853

Nor could the foreign traveller be sure of getting a decent meal in a private house. Those who had letters of introduction to the local nobility would in most cases be received with sophisticated ease and lavish hospitality, but those whose only hope lay in a middle-class host soon discovered that in Sicily dining was a private affair.

Castelvetrano.

After dinner I called upon Don J. B. Genaro Consiglio, a well-known merchant; he was at table. Every Sicilian of good rank must sit down at noon precisely, and does not receive anyone while he dines; the house itself is closed and shuttered as if it were midnight.…

Don Consiglio covered me with honour; he obtained a lodging for me at the [Monastery of the] Recollects, to which he had one of his sons guide me, and he sent to my room some wine, some fish, and a pyramid of macaroni for my first meal…. Sicilians do not willingly have people to dine in their houses; but they will send you much more food than they would have offered you at a meal.

Jean Houel, Voyage pittoresque en Sicile, 1784

When Houel did get invited inside a middle-class household, that of a French vice-consul who obviously could not avoid making the gesture, he found that the women of the house were not present since, he claims, “a husband would seem to be lacking in self-respect were he to expose his wife to the glances of strangers.”

Such provincial attitudes were much rarer in Palermo, of course, but they were part of that Saracen imprint on the organisation of public and private life which was to survive until the middle of the twentieth century. Sicily remained Levantine in her eating establishments: hundreds of cookshops selling Sicilian-to-go but no restaurants except those connected to hotels that served the tourists and travellers. It was only in the years following World War I that the first restaurants catering to a local trade were opened in Palermo, and these, with exotic names like The Phoenix or The Gardens of Armidda, were patronised by the gay blades of Palermo society and their mistresses. No respectable Sicilian woman, maiden or matron, would have cared to be seen in one of those ambiguous establishments.

The restaurant scene has changed totally in the last sixty years, yet there is still nothing startling about seeing a kettle of macaroni being trundled through the streets. The street markets and the cookshops still flourish, though work clothes and army-navy surplus are now on sale in Via dei Lattarini, once the Suk-el-Attarine, the market of perfumes, where attar of roses and essence of jasmine were sold. The markets of the Capo, the Vucciria and Ballarò, are still a motley jumble of dry goods, household goods, and foodstuffs—heaps of green and black olives; sacks of dried beans and chickpeas; sides of pork and milk lambs still in their wool; entrails and whole beef livers hanging from hooks; yellow nets filled with mussels and clams; pink shrimp and rosy mullets arranged on beds of dark-green seaweed; mackerel and sardines glinting turquoise and silver; whole swordfish pointing skyward; vegetables in stalls glowing red and yellow and green.

Abundance of vegetables—piles of white and green fennel, like celery, and great sheaves of young purplish, sea-dust-coloured artichokes, nodding their buds, piles of big radishes, scarlet and blue-purple, carrots, long strings of dried figs, mountains of big oranges, scarlet large peppers, a last slice of pumpkin, a great mass of colours and vegetable freshnesses. A mountain of black purple cauliflowers, like niggers’ heads, and a mountain of snow-white ones next to them. How the dark, greasy, night-stricken street seems to beam with these vegetables, all this fresh delicate flesh of luminous vegetables piled there in the air, and in the recesses of the windowless little caverns of the shops, and gleaming forth on the dark air, under the lamps.

D. O. Lawrence, Sea and Sardinia, 1921

In addition to the raw vegetables, the greengrocer’s stall usually has a couple of copper cauldrons, one in which new potatoes have been cooked in their skins, another in which, in wintertime, boiled artichokes float among slices of lemon. Spring brings steamed string beans and large pans of roasted onions and sweet peppers, ready for a summery salad.