SETTE CANNOLI’S LIVER

(Fegato ai Sette Cannoli)

Serves 6

900 g/2 lb piece of Hubbard or other large winter squash

5 tablespoons olive oil

3 garlic cloves, thinly sliced

Small bunch fresh mint, leaves finely chopped

125 ml/4 fl oz white wine vinegar

125 g/4 oz sugar

Salt and freshly ground pepper

⅛ teaspoon ground cinnamon

Peel the squash, remove seeds and strings, and cut the pulp into slices. The shape and size of the slices will vary according to the piece of squash you have, but they should be no more than 12 mm/½ inch thick. Sauté the slices in the oil until tender and browned on both sides. Arrange the slices on a serving plate and sprinkle with the garlic and the mint leaves.

To the same pan and oil in which you fried the squash add the vinegar, sugar, salt and pepper, and cinnamon. Cook and stir over a medium heat until the sugar melts and the sauce thickens. Pour over the squash. Serve cold.

Sette Cannoli is a poor neighbourhood in Palermo, where most people could not afford in the past to buy meat: pumpkin got up to look like liver was the best they could hope for. Apicius had no such problems: the elaborate disguises in which food was often served at Roman banquets were the product of extravagant whim rather than bleak necessity. Yet even his recipes reflect care taken to waste no part of whatever was butchered. This preoccupation with meat—its abundance or, more often, its scarcity and the consequent prestige it confers—is a recurrent theme in Sicilian history. The banquet table groaning with bread and roast meat that greeted Odysseus in the palace of Alcinoüs stretches to accommodate many in some eras, but in others it shrinks to exclude all but the most privileged. In later chapters I offer some meat recipes as they fit into the narrative, but I think it can safely be said that with few exceptions meat is a fare that stimulates the culinary genius of the Sicilians much less than it satisfies their sense of status.

Meat loses its primacy very early on in Sicilian history. In The Odyssey fish is mentioned only as a desperate alternative to starvation for shipwrecked sailors. But in later centuries the amount of cultivated land expanded at the expense of pasturage and woodlands, and by the time of Archestratus fish had taken precedence over meat in the Greek diet. Most of the fragments of Archestratus’s writings that have survived are concerned with fish, a fact that is neither solely fortuitous nor solely economic, but owes something as well to persistent preference. According to Athenaeus, Sicilians six centuries after Archestratus would still “say the very sea on their coasts is sweet, so much do they enjoy the foods that come out of it.” They haven’t changed their minds much in the intervening millennia either, and today it is still fish rather than meat that provides the basis of the most interesting and unusual dishes on the Sicilian table.

Archestratus divided fish into two categories: tough-fleshed fish, such as sarg or sea bream, which needed to be softened and rendered palatable by fancy treatment, and fish of finer quality, which deserved a simple grilling.

Whensoe’er Orion is setting in the heavens, and the mother of the winebearing cluster begins to cast away her tresses, then have a baked sarg, overspread with cheese, large, hot, and rent with pungent vinegar. For its flesh is by nature tough. And so be mindful and dress every tough fish in the same way. But the good fish, with naturally tender, fat flesh, sprinkle with a little salt only, and baste with oil. For it contains within itself alone the reward of joy.

Archestratus of Gela, fourth century B.C.

The advice of Archestratus demonstrates how very early the Sicilians acquired their taste for vinegar, although by the first century A.D. they preferred it with mint rather than cheese. Apicius gives a recipe for a mint-and-vinegar sauce for sardines that differs little from a sauce that Syracusans use today just as both Archestratus and Apicius intended, to elevate fish of inferior quality. It is most often used with a rather insignificant local fish—nice but very full of bones—known as a vope. (According to one source, the Latin name of this species is Boops boops and its English name is “brogue,” information which I personally do not find very enlightening.) The recipe would adapt itself happily to almost any fish of modest size and flavour.