(Nucatoli)
Makes 4 dozen
FILLING (MUST BE PREPARED 3 DAYS AHEAD)
200 g/7 oz honey
75 g/3 oz finely chopped walnuts
125 g/4 oz, more or less, durum-wheat flour (see note)
PASTRY
1 batch cuddureddi dough
Heat the honey in a small saucepan. Stir in the nuts and bring to the boiling point. Remove from the heat and allow to cool.
When the honey mixture has reached room temperature, add the flour little by little, stirring it in well, until you have a firm paste. Refrigerate for 3 days.
Prepare the dough and roll it out as thin as you possibly can (at least to 2 mm/⅙ inch). Cut into 5 × 7.5 cm/2 × 3 inch rectangles. Using your fingers, shape a narrow roll of honey paste, about 7.5 cm/3 inches long and no more than 6 mm/¼ inch thick. Place it lengthways along one edge of a rectangle of pastry, and roll the dough up around it as if you were rolling a cigarette (the end result should be just about the same size as a cigarette, or perhaps a little thicker). Moisten the outside edge so as to seal it. Roll the resulting “cigarette” back and forth a few times under the palm of your hand to make sure it is sealed well, otherwise it will come apart in the oven. Continue with the rest of the dough and honey paste. Twist the “cigarettes” into slight S-shapes and put on a greased baking tray. Bake in a preheated 180C/350F/gas mark 4 oven for about 10 minutes or until the biscuits begin to brown around the edges.
Honey meant more to the Greeks than simple pleasure to the palate: the cult of Aphrodite at Erice on Sicily’s western coast was rich in apiary symbolism, and when Daedalus arrived safely on Sicily after his flight from Crete he is said to have wrought a marvellous honeycomb of gold to offer to the goddess.
For the Syracusans, honey may have represented some sort of vital lymph of their homeland. In speaking about the Athenaion, the great temple to Athena whose massive columns are still standing, supported by the walls of the cathedral that has been built around them, Henry Swinburne mentions the giant gold shield that decorated the frontal of the temple and caught the sunlight, its metallic gleam the first and the last glimpse that seafaring Syracusans would have of their native city. He adds:
Every Syracusan that sailed out of the port was bound by his religion to carry honey, flowers, and ashes, which he threw into the sea, the instant he lost sight of the holy buckler: this was to insure a safe return.
Henry Swinburne, Travels in the Two Sicilies, 1790
The golden age of Syracuse came to an end with the close of the fifth century B.C. The following centuries were marked by internal warfare and tyranny until, with the First Punic War, all of Sicily except Syracuse became a Roman province. For the next few decades Syracuse maintained both its independence and the profitable position of loyal ally to Rome, supplying grain and other foodstuffs to the Roman troops on the island. Then it foolishly switched camps and in 211 B.C. the Romans captured this last outpost as well.
Despite this long period of strife and unrest, in which the countryside was pillaged and burned and entire populations were forcibly resettled, the fertile abundance of the island continued. Agricultural production was maintained and in some periods increased notably. The Roman conquests in the eastern Mediterranean during the second century B.C. provided a steady supply of cheap slave labour. This in turn motivated the wealthy to enlarge their holdings in the interior, creating the great latifundia, which were to last until they were broken up during the land-reform movement a mere forty years ago.
These interminable fields of wheat, which prompted Cato to call Sicily “the Republic’s granary, the nurse at whose breast the Roman people is fed,” were tithed by the Senate: one-tenth of the entire wheat and barley crop (an estimated 825,000 bushels) was sent to Rome each year; a second tithe was purchased at a price set by the Senate. A tax was paid in kind on wine, olives, fruit, and vegetables; and a pasturage tax was paid in cash.
Nonetheless the Sicilians, or at least the wealthier among them, prospered under Roman rule. This was the first of the Roman provinces, and there was no pre-existing bureaucracy ready to govern it, so the administration and the taxation were left in the hands of the upper-class Greek-speaking Sicilians, and the private sphere continued to be governed by Greek law. We can assume that the lifestyle also continued in the Greek manner, or at least in the local variant thereof. We are told that Damophilus of Enna, on whose estates the first of the great slave uprisings that swept the Roman provinces broke out in 139 B.C., “surpassed the Persians in the sumptuousness and costliness of his feasts.”
The Sicilians continued to be Greek even after the Roman Republic became, in the first century B.C., the Roman Empire: the local administration, carried out in Latin, was entrusted to the wealthier classes, who were bilingual. The Romans who owned the latifundia belonged for the most part to the senatorial class and did not live on the island. When they did take up residence, however, they lived well: the magnificent imperial villa at Piazza Armerina, with splendid mosaic floors in its baths and palestras and banqueting halls, suggests a style of life that could hardly be termed provincial.
With the conquest of the wheat-producing provinces in Spain and North Africa during the early years of the Empire, Sicily lost much of its pre-eminence as food supplier to the empire but gained a long period of relative peace and prosperity, in which the island remained on the margin of history, little affected by the barbarian invasions that tormented other parts of Europe.
Even the transition from pagan to Christian appears to have been less bloody than it was elsewhere. Christianity was slow to arrive on the island but quick to spread. The first Christian communities date from the early third century, and in the hundred years before the Edict of Constantine rendered the new religion legal, they began to build what were to become the biggest catacombs in the Christian world and produced several martyrs, including two, Saint Lucy and Saint Agatha, who became famous beyond Sicilian shores.
Christianity was easily absorbed by an island with a long tradition of religious syncretism, and many of the old pagan rites and customs entered, either by their own persistence or by design of the clergy, into the calendar of the new church. New saints and martyrs took the place of the old gods to whom these rites had been dedicated, but the shrines, the processions, the feast days, and the ritual foods of classical Sicily remained. We have already seen a perfect example of this in cuccìa.
In 535 Sicily passed into the hands of the Eastern Empire of Byzantium, and the predominance of Greek tradition was once more reaffirmed in the language, in the church and monastic practices, and in the style of living. Free from the physical and cultural disruption of barbarian invasions from the north which had so drastically altered the rest of Western Europe, the island maintained a remarkable continuity with the ancient world. Invasion and change eventually did come to Sicily as well, but they came much later, and they came from the south, brought by a people who were anything but barbarian.