PASTA AND SARDINES

(Pasta con le Sarde)

Serves 6

675 g/1½ lb fresh sardines

2 large bunches fresh wild fennel greens (about 675 g/1½ lb)

1 large onion, grated or finely minced

125 ml/4 fl oz olive oil

50 g/2 oz pine nuts

65 g/2½ oz currants, plumped in hot water for 5 minutes

50 g/2 oz toasted almond slivers (optional)

8 anchovy fillets

1 teaspoon olive oil

2 pinches saffron, soaked in

2 tablespoons warm water

675 g/1½ lb bucatini or maccheroni

225 g/8 oz toasted breadcrumbs

Clean the sardines in the linguetta style, in this case removing the tails as well.

Trim the fennel greens and remove any tough or dried parts. Wash, and then cook them for 10 minutes in abundant salted water. Lift out with a slotted spoon (reserving the water), drain well, and chop.

Sauté the onion in 4 tablespoons of olive oil over a very low flame until it begins to colour. Add the pine nuts, currants, almonds, the anchovies steamed in the olive oil, and the saffron and water. Stir and simmer for a few minutes.

Reserve 4 sardines. Fry the remaining sardines in 4 tablespoons oil over medium heat until they are golden, turning carefully so as not to break them. Remove from the pan, and in the same oil sauté the chopped fennel and the 4 reserved sardines, mashing the latter with a wooden spoon as you stir.

Bring to a boil the water in which you cooked the fennel, add the bucatini, and cook until they are al dente. Drain and toss together with the onion mixture and with half of the fennel mixture. Arrange the pasta in an ovenproof dish, alternating a layer of pasta with a layer of fennel and a layer of the fried sardines, until all the ingredients have been used up. Sprinkle with some of the breadcrumbs and place in a hot oven, or simply let stand, for 5 minutes before serving. Pass the rest of the breadcrumbs on the side.

Pasta con le sarde is delicious hot and possibly even better cold the next day.

This is the recipe for the classic Palermo version, but there are many variants, including even a fishless variety for the very poor, wistfully known as pasta con le sarde a mare—“pasta with the sardines at sea.”

However apocryphal the legend of its birth, pasta con le sarde is universally considered to be Arabic in origin. Yet its ingredients—the currants that first hung in the gardens of Alcinoüs, the fennel and pine nuts so popular in the kitchen of Apicius, the saffron that Sicily exported during the Imperial Age—are classical. The landscape of classical Sicily was also transformed in a similar fashion, and acquired at the hands of the Arabs a different and exotic beauty, quite unique in the Italian panorama.

The process of transformation was slow and painful: the conquest itself lasted more than fifty years, and the two hundred years that followed were punctuated by periodic revolts on the part of the Sicilians and infighting among the Saracen occupiers. Yet, despite all the consequent bloodshed and destruction, Sicily prospered.

In truth, it was not the Saracen army, chefs and all, that had the greatest impact on Sicily and its cuisine, but the colonists who came with them, hungry for land and armed with a highly developed agricultural technology. In particular the refined methods of irrigation that they had developed in their desert oases allowed the Saracens to introduce intensive cultivation on a scale hitherto unknown in Sicily. A new system of property-based taxation encouraged the extension of farming to lands that had previously lain fallow, and new villages were founded throughout the interior.

In contrast to the primitive extensive farming of the early Romans on the mainland, intensive Sicilian agriculture had a history of considerable sophistication, particularly evident in the famous Mediterranean hortus, or closed garden, which had studded the countryside around the Sicilian towns and cities since the early classical era, its fruits and vegetables protected from passing thieves and marauding flocks by neatly constructed stone walls. With the advent of irrigation and the introduction of new crops, this classical hortus was transformed by the Arab agriculturists into a garden of earthly delight:

With its rigorous enclosures, with its shining evergreen leaves, with its exquisite fruits of gold and of flame, the Mediterranean garden of oranges and lemons assumes the fascination of Paradise, and is to have an important part in the rebirth of a taste for the bel paesaggio in the agricultural landscape.

Emilio Sereni, Storia del paesaggio agrario italiano, 1982

The aesthetic pleasures of the citrus fruit are not, of course, merely visual. Sicilians, for example, love a lemon—not only in lemonade or in granita, not merely squeezed on fish or over a salad of raw sweet fennel, but lemon plain and simple, picked from a tree, peeled with a knife, and eaten straight or with a pinch of salt. They can do this without so much as a pucker, a capacity that by now must be genetically transmitted; my daughter, who takes after her father’s family, has it, whereas my son, who is a Taylor, does not.

Pirandello uses lemons (his play Le Lumie di Sicilia is about a gift of lemons brought north to a famous opera singer by her childhood love) to indicate the colour, the perfumes, and the asperity of Sicily—perhaps because he comes from the southern coast of the island, which is barren, sun-baked, and poor. Orange is for opulence, the colour of the Conca d’Oro, the valley that reaches back into the mountains behind Palermo, a golden horn of orange groves nowadays overflowing with stucco-and-terracotta villas.

Orange is opulence: the ineffectual, useless opulence of the past, when the gardens around Palermo were filled with what an eighteenth-century diarist describes as “common oranges, those good only for making juice or polishing copper”; and the wasteful opulence of the present, when government bulldozers trample and crush hundreds of tons of Sicilian oranges that can find no market.

It is difficult for someone from a northern climate to become accustomed to such an overabundance of oranges. Even though they had long since lost their Victorian luxury status by the time I was a child, it was still a pleasure to know that the round bulge at the very toe of my Christmas stockings was a sweet-smelling tangerine that spoke of the sun just as the nights were longest. In my almost manic attempts to reproduce an Anglo-Saxon Christmas in Sicily, I perpetuated the tradition without a second thought, until my firstborn, at age four, decided that he was being had.

Vittorini appreciated the irony of oranges; in Conversations in Sicily, the returning immigrant first encounters Sicily on board the ferry, in the person of a man returning from Calabria with a basket of oranges that he has failed to sell.

And he, the little Sicilian, remained hopefully silent for a moment, then he glanced down at his child wife, seated immobile, dark, closed, on the sack, and he became desperate, and desperately, as on board earlier, he leaned down and untied a bit of string from the basket, pulled out an orange, and desperately offered it, still leaning over on bent legs, to his wife, and after her wordless refusal, he was desperately disheartened there with the orange in his hand, and he began to peel it for himself, to eat it himself, swallowing it as if he were swallowing curses.

“We eat them in salad,” I said, “here.”

“In America?” the Sicilian asked.

“No,” I said, “here in Sicily.”

“Here in Sicily?” the Sicilian asked. “In salad with oil?”

“Yes, with oil,” I said, “and with a clove of garlic, and salt …’

“And with bread?” said the Sicilian.

“Sure,” I answered. “With bread. I always ate them like that fifteen years ago, as a boy …”

“Ah, you did?” said the Sicilian.“You were rich then, were you?”

“More or less,” I answered.

And I added:“Have you never eaten a salad of oranges?”

“Yes, a couple of times,” said the Sicilian.“But sometimes there isn’t any oil.”

“Right,” l said. “It isn’t always a good year… Oil can be expensive.”

“And sometimes there isn’t any bread,” said the Sicilian. “If you can’t sell your oranges, then there isn’t any bread. And you have to eat oranges. Like this, see?”

And desperately he ate his orange, his fingers wet, in the cold, with the juice of the orange, as he looked at the child wife at his feet who didn’t want oranges.

Elio Vittorini, Conversazioni in Sicilia, 1941

A fancier version of this salad, served as an antipasto in some Palermo restaurants, is insalata di arance e aringhe, made of peeled and sliced oranges of the rather acid variety, which are known here as Portuguese oranges, and which my mother called simply “juice oranges” (so much more variety is available in our markets nowadays that I hesitate to use the names from my childhood). Navel and blood oranges, at any rate, are much too sweet for this salad, which combines the slices or chunks of sharp-flavoured orange with small pieces of smoked herring that has been boned and softened in olive oil, and is dressed with more oil, salt, and black pepper. (Tinned tuna, sliced spring onions, and black olives make an excellent if more pedestrian alternative to the herring.)

Sicilians are very fond of this combination of orange and fish, which they also employ in sarde a beccafico, a dish to be found on every list of traditional Palermo specialities. The beccafico is a songbird that grows fat and sweet on a diet of figs, as fat and as sweet as these filleted sardines rolled about a filling of breadcrumbs, currants, and pine nuts, and baked with orange juice and bay leaves. Although they probably originated as a tornagusto, served cold to cleanse the palate between one major course and another, nowadays sarde a beccafico are most often to be found on the antipasto table, to which they make a very pretty addition, the dark grey and silver stripes of the fish skins criss-crossed by the dark green of the bay leaves, and the tails curling jauntily upward.