(Tabacchiere di Melanzane)
Serves 6
3 smallish aubergines
Salt
1 medium onion
125 ml/4 fl oz olive oil
10 anchovy fillets
1 teaspoon olive oil
Small bunch parsley
3 garlic cloves
125 g/4 oz capers
125 g/4 oz toasted breadcrumbs
125 g/4 oz finely diced salami (optional)
2 or 3 egg whites, beaten until foamy
225 g/8 oz dried breadcrumbs
Vegetable oil for frying
Wash the aubergines, remove the stems, cut in half vertically, and hollow each half, leaving 12 mm/½ inch shells. Put both the shells and the pulp to soak in salted water for 2 hours. Rinse and drain.
Blanch shells in boiling water for about 5 minutes and drain. Mince or grate the onion, then sauté it in 125 ml/4 fl oz olive oil until soft. Roughly chop the pulp of the aubergine and add it to the onion. Sauté for about 10 minutes or until soft, stirring frequently to prevent sticking.
Cook the anchovies in 1 teaspoon oil over steam until creamy. Mince the parsley, the garlic, and the capers, then add along with the anchovies to the aubergine-and-onion mixture. Stir in the toasted breadcrumbs and salami if using it. Blend thoroughly, adding a little oil if necessary to make a fairly compact filling.
Fill the aubergine shells with the pulp-and-crumb mixture, pressing down to make it as compact as possible. Bind the stuffed shells by dipping both sides in the beaten egg whites and then in the dried breadcrumbs. Make sure they are well coated.
Fry the aubergines in 6 mm/¼ inch hot oil until well browned on each side. Be sure to begin frying with the filling side down, even though this takes careful handling; otherwise escaping air bubbles will crack the crust. Turn and fry the skin side. Drain on paper towels and serve at room temperature.
Almost all Sicilian recipes require that the aubergine be fried in olive oil and, given the sponge-like nature of this vegetable, quite a bit of it. Since few inhabitants of the English-speaking world can afford an unlimited supply of olive oil, and since frying has lost prestige of late, it is not a bad idea to try substituting the grill for the frying pan.
Charcoal-grilled aubergine is a great favourite with Sicilians anyway: the aubergines should be cut into slices about 12 mm/½ inch thick and sprinkled with abundant olive oil, salt, pepper, chopped garlic, and oregano, a couple of hours before being grilled over a medium fire. A variation is to grill the aubergine slices plain and spoon ammogghiu sauce over them.
Grilled aubergine slices also work well in the most famous of all aubergine dishes, melanzane alla parmigiana. Accustomed to thinking of this as one of the great classics of mainland cooking, most Italians would be surprised to hear the Sicilian claim that aubergine parmesan originally had nothing to do with either the city of Parma or its famous cheese, but was first made in Sicily and with caciocavallo cheese.
Sicilians have a word, palmigiana, that means “shutter” and that stems from the resemblance between the overlapping louvers of a shutter and the overlapping palm fronds in a thatched roof. Someone was reminded of a shutter as he covered a pan of overlapping aubergine slices with tomato sauce and caciocavallo, hence melanzane alla palmigiana. Since Sicilians have a “probrem” pronouncing the l, confusion was sure to follow.
It is pointless for me to give the recipe for such a ubiquitous dish, but I do want to mention what for me was the ultimate experience in aubergine parmesan, eaten fifteen years ago in a restaurant near Marsala, not far from where Admiral Euphemius landed with his troops and his chefs and his taste for currants and pine nuts. It was the latter that made the difference: the tomato sauce on each layer of aubergine (it was baked in a deep dish and had about four layers) was sprinkled with currants and pine nuts, adding a sweet, distinctly Sicilian twist to a familiar flavour.
The restaurant in question lay in the very heartland of Arabic cooking in Sicily, which stretches along the Trapanese coast roughly from the big fishing port of Mazara del Vallo north to Capo San Vito at the westernmost tip of the island. This area abounds in recipes that claim Arabic antecedents, most of them dealing with fish. (There used to be a small trattoria in Mazara where one could order simply tutto pesce—“all fish”—then sit back and let it roll in: first a small crab salad served in the shell, then a couple of raw sea urchins with lemon, then a red mullet in umido, then a few rings of fried squid, then a paper-thin slice of grilled swordfish, then a croquette of fried whitebait, etc., etc., until one begged for mercy. The last time my husband and I were in Mazara, we searched and searched to no avail, so I fear that this fish lovers’ paradise no longer exists.)
The Arabic influence is beyond dispute in the most famous dish from the Trapani coast, cuscus, a Sicilian version of couscous from the Maghreb. It is served with a zuppa di pesce instead of the mutton stew that is most common in North Africa, and bay leaves rather than red pepper predominate.
Cuscus has long been considered a pièce de résistance in the Sicilian cook’s repertory, at least in the western half of the island; great expertise is required to prepare the raw couscous for cooking. The initiation into this technique—known in Sicilian as ’ncocciatura—in which two different grades of ground semolina are combined by manipulating the grains with dampened fingers so that they cling together in tiny clusters of uniform size, is difficult enough to have acquired considerable mystique. Nowadays, however, ready-to-cook (and even pre-cooked) couscous is available in the supermarkets, and the ’ncocciatura no longer separates the sheep from the goats.
The best cuscus I have ever eaten was served to me in a private house, the handiwork of a friend who was once a professional cook. Her daughter-in-law has kindly given me the recipe, and, thanks to ready-to-cook couscous, even a goat such as I can produce an excellent cuscus.