PLUMP PASTY

(Pasticciotto)

One 30 cm/12 inch pastry

BIANCOMANGIARE FILLING

90 g/3½ oz corn flour

1.1 litres/2 pints milk

175 g/6 oz sugar

¼ teaspoon vanilla

125 g/4 oz plain chocolate pieces

DOUGH

1 kg/2¼ lb ricotta, well drained

50 g/2 oz flour (see note)

200 g/7 oz sugar

2 whole eggs plus 1 egg yolk

½ teaspoon ground cinnamon

1 egg white

Prepare the biancomangiare filling, following the procedure given in the recipe. Remove from the heat when thickened and stir in the vanilla. Pour onto a dinner plate to cool. Before it is completely cooled, press in the chocolate bits.

To prepare the dough: Sieve the ricotta or pass it through a food mill so that it is creamy. Beat in the flour, sugar, eggs and extra yolk, and cinnamon.

Grease and flour a 30 cm/12 inch cake tin. Distribute two-thirds of the dough by spoonfuls on the bottom and sides of the tin, using a wet spoon or wet fingers to smooth it into an even layer a little less than 2.5 cm/1 inch thick. Slide the biancomangiare (it should be cooled into a fairly firm disk) onto this, and cover with more spoonfuls of the dough. Smooth this layer as well and press the two dough layers together at the edges so that no filling shows. Beat the egg white and brush it over the top of the cake. Bake in a 150C/300F/gas mark 2 oven for about an hour, or until the cake begins to come away from the sides of the tin. (The cooking time will vary considerably according to the quality of the ricotta.) Whether pasticciotto is better eaten when completely cooled or when still warm is, in Alcamo, a matter for passionate and tireless discussion.

It is always frustrating to read an irresistible recipe only to be told that it is useless to try to reproduce it outside the narrow confines of its birthplace. This might well be said, alas, of almost any Sicilian recipe: the dish will be immeasurably diminished by using ingredients that cannot claim the peculiar intensity of flavour that the island’s merciless sun induces. Having said so once, I shall say it no more. Yet, in order to appreciate the corresponding intensity of feeling that such sensations provoke in the Sicilian soul, I beg the reader to indulge me in a rather lengthy quote from Elio Vittorini’s unfinished novel Le città del mondo.

The father turned quickly to look at him.“Good boy!” he said. “Sometimes I think you are just a little slow in understanding, and instead you’re quick…. Try to be that way always, child. And when you eat cheese with your bread, remember that its taste comes from all this that you are seeing and smelling now, and that it is made of all this space and this sun as well as of milk. But now,” he continued, “see how the rush basket has been filled and carried away to drain on a stone. There is nothing white left in the pot. We have arrived at that sweet instant in which the mind, which was turning back a little sadly on its traces, discovers another direction it can start off in, one which is perhaps even more attractive. There is only a greenish liquid remaining in the pot, but the heart is moved to glimpse it through the smoke. Watch, Nardo. The boy is once more bent over his work as before, and again he breaks up twigs of heather, once, then once again, and blows on the embers, and fans the fire…. Happy youth! Did you see the sparkle in his glance as his eyes sought out the old man through the smoke and the steam? He can’t control his delight at the thought of what will soon be his. And it’s understandable. I myself, way up here, am watering at the mouth…. The old man no, poor thing. By now he feels no desire for anything. He must be without appetite. But it is with a gentle hand that he is adding the milk to the whey in the pot, despite his face, which is sour and bad-tempered. What gestures a shepherd has, how noble and careful, even when he’s a blackened old man who no longer gets much enjoyment out of life! Perforce the ricotta must be delicate, then. It gives us with sweetness all that flavour which the cheese will give us with sharpness at the end of its ageing. And it gives it to us right away, piping hot. We ourselves could have it within a quarter of an hour if we were those two. Think of it, child! To have your bread already broken up in the bowl, and to be waiting there around the pot till the first white flowers come floating up through the pale green of the whey cloudy with steam…. They’re coming, son! Did you see it too? There was a second there when the smoke cleared and I saw a spread of white at the mouth of the pot, stretching from its southern rim to its north-western.”

Elio Vittorini, Le città del mondo, c. 1955

Vittorini might be describing the work of the shepherds who live down the road from me, or he might be describing that of Polyphemus—the technique of making sheep’s cheese has not changed over the last twenty-nine centuries, and neither, I dare say, has its taste.

Since Hieron II, the tyrant who ruled Syracuse during the Punic Wars, saw fit to build an altar large enough to accommodate the simultaneous sacrifice of 450 bulls, it seems safe to infer that there were a lot of cows around too, and probably only slightly more hazardous to imagine that the Greek Sicilians were making something similar to caciocavallo, the principal cow’s milk cheese of modern Sicily. This cheese is moulded into large bricks, as much as two feet long, that have a smooth yellow rind. If eaten when fresh it is somewhat akin to a provola dolce, but with a stronger, saltier taste. When it ages it becomes hard enough to grate, and serves as a year-round accompaniment to pasta (the use of parmesan has spread beyond the very wealthy only in the last quarter century, and even now is more or less limited to the urban middle and upper classes). For grating purposes caciocavallo may be replaced by a parmesan or a romano.

Since, among other things, it is very slow to melt, caciocavallo is a prerequisite for making formaggio all’ argentiera. This classic Palermo recipe owes its name and its origin to an anonymous and perhaps mythical silversmith who invented this dish in order to hide the fact that he had fallen on hard times and could no longer afford to buy meat for his supper. The smell of its cooking is said to be indistinguishable from that of rabbit. This is an old trick in Palermo, where the poor used to beg scraps of fat from the butcher to put on the fire so as to impress their neighbours—hence the proverb “Tutto fumo e niente arrosto” (“All smoke and no roast”).

Formaggio all’ argentiera provides us with an example of that unusual combination of cheese and vinegar with which Archestratus claims the Syracusans were wont to improve poor fish and ruin good ones. I offer it, however, without making any claims as to its archaeological value.