FISH IN STEMPERATA SAUCE

(Vope alla Stemperata)

Serves 6

1.25 kg/2½ lb small whole fish, gutted and scaled

50 g/2 oz flour (preferably durum-wheat flour)

5 tablespoons olive oil

2 garlic cloves

125 ml/4 fl oz white wine vinegar

Small bunch fresh mint leaves, roughly chopped

Salt and freshly ground pepper

Roll the fish in the flour until they are well coated, then shake to remove any excess flour. Fry them in the olive oil together with the garlic cloves, which you will remove as soon as they begin to colour. Turn the fish until they are browned on all sides. Add the vinegar, the mint, and salt and pepper. Increase the heat to evaporate some of the vinegar, then simmer covered for about 5 minutes.

Boops boops exemplifies a recurrent problem in fish cookery: how to identify the beast. Remembering my first encounter with Southern Italian fish on a trip to Puglia in 1961, when almost every fish on the menu turned out to be, as far as my pocket dictionary was concerned, mullet of one hue or another, I am staggered by the ease and certitude with which contemporary British classicists identify the Mediterranean fish of twenty-five centuries ago.

One fish that presents no problems in identification is the tuna, which has played a major role in the Sicilian diet ever since Archestratus waxed enthusiastic. It has had a significant part in the economy as well, since barrels of salted tuna were an important export for centuries. We owe tuna as we find it in our contemporary salads and sandwiches to Ignazio Florio, the head of the enormously rich mercantile family who dominated Palermo’s social and economic life at the turn of this century. Florio was the first to preserve tuna in olive oil and put it in a tin.

Shoals of tuna run off the Sicilian coasts each spring and are captured in an elaborate system of anchored nets, then harpooned in a bloody but spectacular rite known as the mattanza. Although the classical dramatist Aeschylus describes something similar, the mattanza as it is still performed today is Arabic in origin, rather than Greek. (An ominous headline in the papers in the spring of 1986 announced changes in the mattanza at the Favignana tonnara, the famous tuna fishery that once belonged to the Florios. The article revealed that it was some fifteenth-century Spanish “innovations” that were being eliminated, in order to return to the original ninth-century Arabic pattern of setting out the nets—a delightful example of the Sicilian sense of time.) Little has changed in how tuna is sold since classical times: at the Museo Mandralisca in Cefalù there is a Sicilian Greek vase on which a fishmonger is depicted cutting slices from an enormous tuna lying on his barrow. If this ancient Greek were to exchange his tunic for an apron, he could step right off the vase and into a present-day Palermo street market without attracting anyone’s attention.

Archestratus puts tuna firmly in the category of fish to be grilled, although he fudges on its cousin, amia, which is probably what is now called alalunga or bonito:

Wrap it up in fig leaves with a very little marjoram. No cheese, no nonsense! Just place it tenderly in fig leaves and tie them on top with a string: then push it under hot ashes, bethinking thee wisely of the time when it is done, and burn it not up.

Archestratus of Gela, fourth century B.C.

Most modern Sicilians, although they would not disdain a slice of grilled ventresca (the best cut from the tuna’s underbelly), would nonetheless disagree with Archestratus. Tuna is prepared here according to a remarkable variety of recipes, yet nearly all of them call for some sort of sauce, and vinegar is often a predominant ingredient. One delicious example has the same name as the recipe for vope but is somewhat more elaborate.