SICILIAN BREAD DOUGH

(Pasta di Pane Rimacinato)

5 teaspoons active dry yeast granules or scant 50 g/2 oz fresh brewer’s yeast

575 ml/1 pint lukewarm water

1 kg/21/4 lb semolina or durum-wheat flour

Salt (about 2 teaspoons)

4 tablespoons olive oil

Dissolve the yeast in 225 ml/8 fl oz of the water and let it stand for 15 minutes, until a foam develops.

Put the flour in a large mixing bowl and make a well in it. Pour the dissolved yeast into the well, then stir it into the flour with your fingers, running them around the edge of the well until all the flour is gathered in. Then rub the dampened flour between the palms of your hands until you achieve a uniform consistency throughout.

Add the remaining water, little by little, rubbing and stirring until you have a dough that holds together. Turn it out onto a floured board or tabletop and knead it for 3 to 4 minutes. Punch it soundly a few times with your fists to develop the gluten, then shape it into a ball, place it in a large oiled bowl, cover the bowl, and set the dough to rise for an hour. In Sicily a woollen blanket is usually placed over the bowl in wintertime, but in centrally heated British kitchens this is probably not necessary.

When the dough has almost doubled in size and its surface has begun to crack, turn it out onto a floured board or tabletop. If you want to make criscenti with which to make more bread on another day, this is the moment to do so. Take some of the dough, roll it into little balls about the size of golf balls, oil the surface of each ball well, and place them in an airtight jar. Refrigerated, these balls will keep for about a week. Each one, when kneaded at room temperature with 75 g/3 oz of flour and a little water and left to rise overnight (here too you must oil the surface, otherwise a crust will form), will give the yeast for 900 g/2 lb of flour. If you know what you are doing you need only one ball of dough for all subsequent bread, because that in turn will provide enough yeast for the next criscenti, but the first time around it’s probably a good idea to make several, just in case.

Knead the remaining dough for a minute, then flatten it out with your fists. Sprinkle it with some salt and one-third of the olive oil. Fold the dough over upon itself, knead it until the oil is absorbed, and then punch it until it is flattened out again. Repeat twice more, tasting in between to gauge whether more salt is needed. The dough is now ready for use in the recipes beginning.

A diet based on pane rimacinato is open to as much variety as one’s resources, both in finance and in fantasy, permit. First of all, there is the question of companatico—a wonderful word that means “accompaniment to bread” and that can indicate whatever the landowner is required by contract to provide for his workers along with their loaves of bread, or whatever a mother can find to keep her children happy:

The more fortunate ones, like me, could eat, when we were children, bread and cheese, bread and apples, or jujubes with their faded purple-pink colours, olives in oil, or roasted on the coals. Or soak our bread in honeyed vino cotto, or in the juice of black mulberries, come to Sicily from the southern shores of the Caucasus, from Persia and from Greece. At other times we ate bread to which our mothers would add thin slices of more bread, telling us “You can pretend that the thinner bread is the thigh of a pheasant, a stewed hen’s ventricle or biscotti regina.”

Giuseppe Bonaviri, L’incominciamento, 1983

Bread all by itself is known as schiettu (“nubile”), whereas married to a companatico it becomes maritatu, and there is a proverb describing the Palermitani as Pani schiettu e Cassaro, loosely translated as “Plain bread and Broadway,” which pokes fun at the Palermitani’s love of conspicuous consumption, and their willingness to forgo companatico in favour of finery in which to stroll up and down the main street.

A field worker in the past would at best have onions or olives as a companatico. (My son once announced that his friend Antonio was on pane e olive; it turned out that Antonio was eating well but lacked a girlfriend.) Whatever the worker might bring from home to eat today, whether a tomato salad, a dish of caponata, or some meatballs in tomato sauce, it is still essentially a companatico, with lots of juice to be mopped up.

Sicilians have also found a great many ways to vary and embellish their bread before they put it in the oven. Just the mixing and kneading varies enough from place to place to give each town’s bread a distinctive character, and minor changes in the ingredients can radically alter the finished product. Poppy seed is used in place of sesame in some towns, and my cleaning woman says that when she was a young girl her neighbours used to knead elderberry flowers into their dough, an oddly Renaissance touch in a tiny mountain town.

On Saturday nights the bakeries in Alcamo sell muffolette, soft, flat rolls made of pane rimacinato dough that has been kneaded with more water than used for regular bread, and is flavoured with fennel seeds. The purist takes them home still hot, splits them open, toasts them lightly on the fire, and then fills them with fresh ricotta, anchovies, oregano, and olive oil. In my family we are enthusiastic purists, but we also buy a few extra for Sunday breakfast.

More variety comes from using bread dough for purposes other than making bread. Eastern Sicily in particular has a confusing abundance of such dishes—some baked and some fried, some sealed between two crusts in a pie pan, some rolled over on themselves like a strudel or folded into a half-moon like a calzone, all subject to a variety of fillings. The same name denotes different techniques from one town to another, so that the impanata of Messina differs in appearance from that of Syracuse or that of Modica. I am including three archetypal recipes with alternative fillings for each: outer form may be paired to inner grace as fancy dictates.

When I want to make one of these, I simply buy pane in pasta—unbaked bread dough—from the bakery downstairs. Those who lack this commodity can use dough prepared according to the recipe, or even experiment with whatever is available in the way of frozen pizza and bread doughs.