SILVERSMITH’S CHEESE

(Formaggio all’ Argentiera)

Serves 6

2 garlic cloves

2 tablespoons olive oil

6 12 mm-/½ inch-thick slices of caciocavallo cheese (about 900 g/2 lb)

1-2 tablespoons vinegar

2 tablespoons fresh oregano or 1 tablespoon dried

½ teaspoon sugar

In a heavy, non-stick frying pan, brown the cloves of garlic in the olive oil until golden, then discard. Arrange the slices of cheese in the pan and brown them lightly on each side. Remove the frying pan from the heat and sprinkle the cheese with the vinegar, oregano, and sugar. Cover and return to a very low heat for 4 to 5 minutes. Serve immediately. Although sometimes presented as a first course, I think this dish is best served, together with good bread and a salad, as the main course of a light meal.

In the 1780s the French artist Jean Houel, Peinteur du Roi, on royally subsidised travels in south-eastern Sicily, noted that a great many holes had been cut into the rock of the hillsides, and after some thought he decided that these were where the ancient Greeks had kept their bees. The further he travelled, the more pockmarked cliffs he passed (at Pantalica alone there are more than eight thousand of these chambers carved into the sides of the valley), until he finally remarked in his journal, with a note of exasperation, that those Greeks certainly did produce a lot of honey!

If Houel was wrong about the chambers, which are in fact tombs carved in the rock by the Sican and Sicel peoples who inhabited the island during the Copper and the Bronze ages, before the Greeks arrived, he was not so mistaken with regard to the scope of classical honey production. Honey was the primary sweetener of the ancient world, and therefore had far greater importance in relation to other agricultural products than it has today. And the Hyblaean Mountains behind Syracuse, where the majority of the rock-chamber tombs are located, produced a honey that the ancients rated a close second to that of Mount Hymettus.

When you make a present of Sicilian combs from amid Hybla’s hills you may say that they are Attic combs.

Martial, Epigrams, first century B.C.

The wild thyme that still covers the hillsides, a dusty grey-green scrub that hugs the ground and blends into the pale grey soil, breaks into brilliant purple bloom in June and gives an intense fragrance to the honey—“I sent cakes redolent of Hyblaean honey”—which is perhaps one first cause behind the fame for things confectionery that Sicily has enjoyed through the millennia.

As their modern compatriots reserve certain sweets for specific feasts, such as Easter’s Paschal lamb of marzipan, so the ancient Sicilians had some cakes that were liturgical. Athenaeus quotes Heracleides of Syracuse as saying that during the Thesmophoria, the annual festival in honour of Demeter and Persephone,“cakes of sesame and honey were moulded in the shape of the female pudenda, and called throughout the whole of Sicily mylloi and carried about in honour of the goddess.” Other cakes, however, were simply for pleasure.

They set before us a cake, the kind that takes its name from Gelon the Sicilian. As for me, the mere sight of it delighted my heart, and my mouth watered at the prospect of stowing it away. But there was a long delay while they were garnishing the cake with dainties—pistachio nuts and dates and shelled walnuts.

Alciphron, Letters from Parasites, second century A.D.

It is difficult, on the basis of such slight mention, to do more than guess what these classical cakes were like. But there are any number of modern Sicilian pastries that use the same ingredients as those available to the ancients and that can at least suggest the ancient flavours.

The mylloi, for example, might have been somewhat similar to the biscotti regina that are still sold in most Palermo bakeries, although these oblong biscuits coated with sesame seeds are more phallic than female in form. Sicilians see an intimate relationship among different physiological processes, and never fail to call attention to it: in the Palermo dialect these biscuits are also known as strunzi d’ancilu (“angel turds”). (People from Catania claim that the Palermitani have it all wrong: queen’s biscuits are a much more delicate biscuit dipped in a white icing, in comparison with which the sesame biscuits are mere “chicken turds”!)