PASTA PAOLINA STYLE

(Pasta alla Paolina)

Serves 6

15 or 16 anchovy fillets

2 tablespoons olive oil

450 ml/16 fl oz tomato sauce, variation I or II

¼ teaspoon cinnamon

⅛ teaspoon ground cloves

Salt

675 g/1½ lb spaghetti

125 g/4 oz toasted breadcrumbs

Dissolve the anchovy fillets in the olive oil over steam, and then add the sauce and the spices and cook for 10 minutes. Correct for salt.

Cook the spaghetti in abundant boiling salted water until it is al dente. Drain, toss with the sauce, and serve accompanied by the toasted breadcrumbs.

The Renaissance households in which pasta was served liberally doused with expensive “sweet spices” were wealthy establishments: the poorer households weren’t serving pasta at all. In the price-control lists of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Palermo, in fact, pasta cost three times as much as bread, and was therefore a dish confined to the aristocracy and to the richest of the middle class. In 1415 a delegation of eight Palermitani representing the city government travelled to Catania, where the viceroy was holding court. To the joy of scholars in later ages, they were on an expense account. Their careful records show that, in the course of a month’s journey, they purchased macaroni only once (and since their travels lasted from January 15 to February 14, it is possible that they bought their macaroni to celebrate the last day of Carnival).

The idea that pasta is an expensive dish, one that you would serve to an honoured guest, renders all the more appealing a lovely story about a Sicilian hermit, the Blessed William of Scicli. Sometime toward the end of the fourteenth century the local seigneur invited the Blessed William to dine, ostensibly to do him honour, but in fact to do him wrong: the maccarones that he ordered his servants to prepare were filled with mud. But lo! the miracle, offered in evidence at William’s beatification trial two centuries later: when the Blessed William sat down at the table and blessed the food, the filling of mud was transformed into fresh ricotta.

Be it miraculous or be it more mundane, pasta remained a very special dish throughout the seventeenth century, a dish to dream about. The possibility of eating endless amounts of pasta was synonymous with utopia for the Italian peasant, a utopia known as Cuccagna, a miraculous land of plenty that started as a popular myth and entered into courtly literature as early as the fourteenth century (and in its English form, “Cockaigne,” into a twentieth-century cookbook–to designate the authors’ favourite recipes in The Joy of Cooking!).

[There is] a district called Bengodi where vines are fastened to the stakes with sausages, and a goose can be had for a penny, with a duckling thrown in for good measure. A wonderful mountain was also to be found in that country, he told him, all made of Parmesan cheese, and inhabited by folk who spent all their time making macaroni and ravioli, which they boiled in capon broth and then spilled out pell-mell, so that whoever was the nimblest obtained the largest share.

Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, 1353

Italian scholars such as Piero Camporesi and Vito Teti have traced the evolution of the Cuccagna myth from its earliest form, in which the mountains of macaroni heaped up for the taking are a culinary symbol of more far-reaching aspirations, a dream of equality that is social and economic as well as dietary. With the famines and the economic crises that struck the whole of the Italian peninsula during the seventeenth century, the social implications were lost in the desperate scramble for mere survival, and the word cuccagna came to mean, in Sicily at least, a distribution of food to the poor on the occasion of some particular feast, a part of the governing policy of the “three F’s”–feste, forche e farina–festivals, gallows, and bread flour–with which the masses were kept under control. There are some rather appalling descriptions of such cuccagne in the diaries of the Marchese of Villabianca. One of these took place

for the happy occasion of the royal festivities celebrated in Naples in May of 1768 for the marriage of the King our Lord Ferdinand with the Majesty of Maria Carolina of Lorraine….

The cuccagna was sacked by the people on the day of the 13th of June, at the twenty-third hour, in the piazza of the Royal Palace, and was formed in the guise of a flowering garden with obelisks of cypress–that is, pyramids to the number of sixteen, three ship masts, encircled, and two great fountains of wine in front of them. And all of this was enriched with comestibles, such as veal, beef and mutton, live pigs and even live sheep, live goats, castrated kids and he-goats, numerous suckling pigs, hams, caciocavallo and other cheeses, salt cod, bread, turkeys, fowl, game, and ordinary roosters, hens and capons; and above the crest of each mast were placed prizes, albeit small ones, of silver coins, silk handkerchiefs, shoes, stockings, and others that I was unable to identify.

It is to be noted that the sheep and the greater part of the other animals hanging on the pyramids died before the hour 23 because they were unable to survive hanging there in the rays of the sun.

The wine was three barrels’ worth, mixed with six barrels of water, and it was distributed in the fountains from the hour 23 on. And at this hour, the troops of infantry and cavalry which had guarded the cuccagna moved away from it, allowing the plebs to assault it, as in fact it did from all sides, with such a fury that it was entirely sacked and nothing remained that had not been torn to pieces. Three columns of half-naked porters were the festive contestants, who in the action raised such horrendous cries to the heavens, in chorus with those of the spectators, that they led one to believe that a question of arms was in course rather than a celebration. And this in itself was a motive for rejoicing, that in the midst of the shouting Long live the King! should ring out. The pillaging troops included porters, sailors, charcoal makers, and rustics, especially from the surrounding towns…. Numerous troops could be seen in front of the Royal Palace, standing at attention, in order to prevent any sinister incidents, which by the grace of God did not come to pass, since everything took place felicitously and without the least mishap.

In half an hour the entire cuccagna had disappeared from sight, and all the goods had been taken away by the people. The woodwork, the cypresses, the vases, and all that was there was carried off; and had it been possible they would have carried off the very ground itself.

Marchese di Villabianca, Diario palermitano, 1768

Shortly after this the locus of the Land of Cuccagna began to shift, as rumours started filtering down to Sicily about a country where the streets were paved with gold. A century later the southern peasant’s dream of utopia centred on the price of a steamship ticket that would carry him across the ocean to the New World.

Even in the late nineteenth century, after the Land of Cuccagna had taken concrete though distant form, pasta every day remained something to dream about when all one had to fill an empty stomach was bread and onions. For the ne’er-do-well son of the Malavoglia family, in Verga’s I Malavoglia, it was the hallmark of the idle rich:

We’ll do what the others do…. We won’t do anything, that’s what we’ll do!… We’ll go to live in the city, and not do anything, and eat pasta and meat every day.

Giovanni Verga, I Malavoglia, 1881

For the majority of Sicilians, such culinary dreams came true only on very special occasions. One of these was New Year’s Day.

Cu mancia a Capa d’annu maccarruni,

Tuttu l’annu a ruzzuluni.

He who eats macaroni on New Year’s Day

For the whole of the year keeps trouble away.

In many parts of the island, tradition required that the New Year’s Day pasta be store-bought, not made at home (perhaps in the hope that to start the year by spending money would augur an influx of cash in the following months), and that it be of the ruffled variety known as lasagne ricce. In Palermo these are still served with a dark red ragù and lots of fresh ricotta, and the Palermitani are very graphic about the appearance that this bestows.