(Cubaita)
Makes about 1.25 kg/2¼ lb
50 g/2 oz pistachios
50 g/2 oz toasted almonds
425 g/15 oz sesame seeds
275 g/10 oz honey
200 g/7 oz sugar
½ lemon
Chop the nuts to a very fine grain.
Wash the sesame seeds in a large bowl of water, and discard any that remain floating on the surface. Drain.
Heat the honey and the sugar in a saucepan until the sugar dissolves and the mixture reaches the boiling point. Add the sesame and cook, stirring constantly, about 10 minutes or until the seeds become fragrant. Add the chopped nuts and continue to cook and stir until the mixture is very thick. Pour it onto an oiled surface, preferably marble, and flatten it out to a sheet about 12 mm/½ inch thick, using the cut side of half a lemon to smooth it out. When partially cooled, cut into 2.5 cm-/1 inch-wide strips, then cut again diagonally so as to form diamond-shaped pieces.
It would be logical to speak now of another Arabic innovation that spread slowly north from Sicily to the rest of Europe and thence to the United Kingdom—another Arabic accumulation of eternal merit on which the Sicilians then elaborated and of which they remain the masters. But ice cream, for it is no less than ice cream of which I speak, in all its magnificent variety of flavours and forms—granita, gelato, cremolata, cassata, spumoni, and so on—is such a particular mania of the Sicilians that it deserves a separate chapter, a gran finale all its own.
If Trapani and the other cities on the western coast are the centres of Arab-derived cooking today, during the occupation itself it was Palermo that was the economic and cultural capital. Ibn Hawqal, a merchant from Baghdad who visited the city in 977, described a flourishing commercial centre crowded with palaces, markets, and more than three hundred mosques. He was somewhat less enthusiastic about local eating habits.
Despite all these [irrigation canals], in most of the neighbourhoods [of Palermo] and in the citadel itself the water is drawn from wells, and is heavy and unhealthy. They have taken to drinking it because of the lack of running water, because they are unaccustomed to thinking, and because of the great amount of onions that they eat. And in truth this food, of which they are very fond and which they eat raw, ruins their senses. There is not one man among them, of whatsoever condition, who does not eat onions every day, and does not serve them morning and evening in his house. It is this that has clouded their imagination; offended their brains; perturbed their senses; altered their intelligence; drowsed their spirits; fogged their expressions, untempered their constitutions so completely that it rarely happens that they see things straight.
Mohammed Ibn Hawqal, Book of the Routes and the Realms, tenth century
But most of the descriptions in Arabic that survive today come from a later period, from the twelfth century, after dynastic squabbles in North Africa had left Sicily relatively defenceless against the attack of Norman knights who were descending southward in search of fiefs and riches. Ibn Hamdis, the most famous of the Sicilian Arab poets, wrote in exile, having fled to Egypt after the Norman conquest of Sicily:
I yearn for my native land, in whose dust are dissolved
the bones of my forefathers,
As lost in the desert, an old and weary camel yearns,
among the shadows, for his home.
Ibn Hamdis, twelfth century
Other Saracens remained at the service of the Norman conquerors, who were not only extraordinarily tolerant of the Arabic culture that they found in Sicily, but highly appreciative as well. Palermo in the twelfth century continued under Norman rule to be one of the largest, richest, and most cosmopolitan cities in Europe. Arab dress became fashionable among the ladies of the court; an Arab chef cooked for the royal table of Roger II;Arabs administered the king’s finances, served in the king’s bodyguard, built the king’s chapels and the king’s palaces, and laid out the fabulous gardens and pavilions where the king took his leisure.
Pass the mellowed golden wine and drink from morn till evening. Drink to the sound of lutes, and to songs worthy of the poet Mabad. No life can be serene, save that in the shadow of sweet Sicily, Under a dynasty far greater than the royal dynasty of the Caesars. Here are royal palaces, in which joy has lodged; Marvellous abodes to which God has granted perfect beauty!
Abd ar-Rahman of Butera, twelfth century
In the main hall of one of these “marvellous abodes,” the palace of the Zisa, a mosaic fountain pours forth water that runs through a series of canals and pools and then out into the garden. It is said that wine was served to the banqueters in small jars, which were cooled in the waters of the fountain and carried across the hall to the banqueting table by the current. Perhaps the wine was prepared according to the following recipe.
Take one ratl (366 grams) of good mustard and twenty rub’ of juice of sweet grapes; grind the mustard into a powder; put it through a sieve and mix it with a sufficient quantity of honey. Take a new earthenware jar that has been filled with sweet water for about two days, emptied, and then left open to air for a day. Rub the inside of the jar with the paste of honey and mustard, spreading it in a very even layer, and leave it like that for a day. Then take a plentiful quantity of sweet grape juice; clarify it, and pour it very gently into the jar, filling it up to the edge of the layer of paste. The must will remain sweet, without bad taste and with neither trace nor flavour of mustard; indeed it will last at length, and will become ever more delicate and sweeter. This is prepared in Sicily.
Ibn al-Awwam, Book of Agriculture, twelfth century
Unfortunately we have no corresponding descriptions of what the feasting kings may have eaten. Of Roger’s coronation banquet we know only that it was served on “plates and goblets of gold and silver… with a very great and varied quantity of food and drinks,” and that “everyone marvelled and was amazed, and even those who came from afar were moved to no little awe, because they saw so much more than that which had been rumoured.”
To fill the plates of gold and silver we must look in several directions: first to our invaluable allies the visiting foreigners, whose opinions quite naturally differ according to their loyalties. The French scholar Peter of Blois, a victim of power struggles within the royal palace, had nothing good to say about Norman Sicily, diet included: “Your people err in the meagreness of their diets; for they live on so much celery and fennel that it constitutes almost all their sustenance; and this generates a humour which putrefies the body and brings it to the extremes of sickness and even death.”
Hugo Falcandus, on the other hand, gives a lyric description of Palermo, to which he came in his youth and where he remained for the rest of his life, an Odysseus who never left the gardens of Alcinoüs.
There shall you admire vineyards as fecund in abundant foliage as they are magnificent in generous and joyful fruit. There shall you see gardens to be commended for the admirable variety of their fruits, and towers constructed to guard the gardens and to serve their patron’s pleasure; where with the movement of a turning wheel, with which the buckets descend and rise again, you shall see the wells dry out as the nearby cisterns fill, whence the waters flow in rivulets to every place, to irrigate the gardens, to restore and nourish the cucumbers, small and short, the longer squashes, the melons which grow almost to a sphere, the pumpkins which trained on woven canes spread over a vast area.
Hugo Falcandus, Praefatio ad Petrum, circa 1290
Hugo goes on to describe all the different fruits growing in the gardens of the city: the pomegranates, the lemons and citrons and oranges—“this tree rich in signs of eternal youth which in winter neither becomes ugly and deformed from sterile age nor, assaulted by the harshness of the cold, derobes itself of its leaves, but wreathed in greenest foliage is ever a reminder of sweet spring”—and then the nuts, almonds, figs, olives, dates, and sugarcane.
Both Peter and Hugo testify to the importance of vegetables in the Sicilian diet, in contrast to continental Europe, where the Norman knights had come from and where the diet was monotonous and meat-heavy, and varied little from country to country and from class to class, at least in terms of quality, for the rich ate more or less the same things as the poor, only a great deal more of them. Although population pressures were beginning to make themselves felt, vast tracts of twelfth-century Europe were still untouched by the plough, providing plentiful pasturage and easy hunting. If the peasant could count on a rabbit for his pot, the nobleman would put away course after course of roasted meat: fowl, game, venison, mutton, and beef. A capacious stomach was in fact considered a sign of nobility and character, so much so that three centuries earlier, in 888, Guido of Spoleto lost a crown for lack of appetite. As soon as the Archbishop of Metz, preparing to host a splendid coronation banquet, learned that Guido was of parsimonious eating habits, he gave the crown to someone else, claiming that anyone who could be satisfied by a cheap and meagre meal was unfit to reign over the Franks.
The medieval nobleman liked his meat heavily dowsed with spices, but the actual preparation of it was still quite crude. According to Fernand Braudel, “sophisticated cuisine, typical of all advanced civilisations, and found in China in the fifth century and in the Muslim world from the eleventh or twelfth centuries, did not appear in the West until the fifteenth century, and then in the rich city-states of Italy.”
We must look then to this same Muslim tradition to which Braudel alludes, a tradition in which qualitative as well as quantitative differences in the way the various classes ate emerged very early: for the rich the exotic ingredients skilfully prepared according to the cookbooks of Damascus and Baghdad, for the poor a humble dish of lentils. This Middle Eastern tradition, which developed under the Abbassid dynasty and drew heavily on Persian cooking (in which Greek and Roman influences are also discernible), was carried by the Arabs to their states in the West, to Spain and to Sicily. Unlike the poets, the geographers, the carpenters, and the weavers from the Muslim world who served the Norman kings, the Arab cooks practised a more ephemeral art of which no trace remains. But their presence in Palermo is a matter of record, and the tradition in which they were schooled was surely that of the East.
Finally it must be remembered that, regardless of their antecedents, these cooks and kings held court on an island that had spoken Greek for fifteen hundred years, a period in which both the agriculture and the diet had been dominated by wheat.
As early as the twelfth century, therefore, Sicilian cooking once again was drawing its ingredients and its techniques from the entire Mediterranean basin, and could boast a degree of sophistication as yet unknown on the continent. After the brief era of Norman glory, the courts of power moved north. Politically, Sicily was relegated to the margin of European history after the thirteenth century, but gastronomically it continued to export luxury to the north and at the same time to elaborate its own unique and varied culinary traditions. Developing and embroidering upon the materials and methods bequeathed by a succession of foreign conquerors, the members of each class—the feudal nobility established by the Normans, the middle-class merchants and lawyers who inherited an Arab legacy and aspired to the aristocracy, the peasants who sowed and reaped the wheat regardless of who ruled them—created the culinary tradition best suited to the requirements of their pride, their pocketbooks, and their prayers.