PASTA STIRRED UP WITH CAULIFLOWER

(Pasta con i Broccoli Arriminati)

Serves 6

1 medium-size cauliflower (about 900 g/2 lb)

1 medium onion, finely minced or grated

5 tablespoons olive oil

6 anchovy fillets dissolved over steam in 1 tablespoon olive oil

35 g/1⅓ oz pine nuts

50 g/2 oz currants, soaked in hot water for 5 minutes

1 pinch saffron dissolved in 2 tablespoons warm water

675 g/1½ lb bucatini

125 g/4 oz toasted breadcrumbs

Wash the cauliflower and divide into florets. Cook in a large pot of boiling salted water until just tender. Lift the cauliflower out with a slotted spoon, reserving the water.

Sauté the onion in the oil until soft. Add the anchovies, pine nuts, currants, and saffron with water. Simmer and stir for a minute or two, then add the cauliflower and simmer, stirring constantly, over a low flame for 10 minutes, or until the cauliflower is so soft that it disintegrates into a cream.

Cook the pasta in the same pot and water in which you cooked the cauliflower, adding a little more salt if necessary. When the pasta has reached the al dente stage, add a ladleful of the cooking water to the cauliflower, then drain the pasta thoroughly. Combine the pasta and the cauliflower in a large serving bowl, mixing well. Sprinkle with some of the breadcrumbs, and allow the pasta to stand for 10 minutes before serving. Pass the remaining breadcrumbs on the side.

Note: This recipe calls for the vegetable to be boiled in abundant water, enough to then cook the pasta in. Although this may sound like heresy, the fact is that Sicilian cauliflower is so intense in flavour that mere steaming tends to turn it sour, so the boiling water is a good idea.

The meal of macaroni described by French Angas is of interest not only because it introduces us to tomatoes but also inasmuch as it shows how far down the social scale pasta as a daily fare had reached. The village where he stopped to dine is near Taormina, on the road leading both to Catania and to Mount Etna, the ascent of which was an absolute must for anyone’s tour of Sicily. Little Antonino’s family, so well equipped with macaroni and fowl, was clearly making a good thing out of its location, and although their manners remained plebeian, their income and their diet were inching toward middle class. Yet, even for those who had succeeded in planting both feet firmly in the bourgeoisie, the apotheosis of good eating was still a carnivalesque mountain of pasta and ragù. That this esteem was no longer shared by the aristocracy is made clear in the memoirs of the most famous Sicilian aristocrat of them all, the novelist-prince Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa.

Wives, daughters, sisters stayed at home, both because women in the country (1905-14) did not pay visits, and also because their husbands, fathers, and brothers did not want them around. My mother and father would go and visit them once a season, and with one, famous for her gastronomic arts, they would even sometimes take luncheon; sometimes, after a complex system of signals and warnings, she would send over by a small boy, who came galloping across the piazza under the broiling sun, an immense tureen full of macaroni done with barley in the Sicilian mode with chopped meat, aubergine, and basil, which was, I remember, truly a dish fit for rustic and primigenial gods. The boy had precise orders to see this on the dining room table when we were already sitting down, and before leaving, he would say, “’A signura raccumannu: u cascavaddu” (“The Signora recommends: caciocavallo cheese”), an injunction perhaps sage but never obeyed.

Giuseppe di Lampedusa, Two Stories and a Memory, 1962

What is described here (the barley, incidentally, is a mistake: Archibald Colquhoun’s translations of Lampedusa are splendid, but he was understandably stymied by “maccheroni di zito”) belongs to the category of piatti vastasi. Vastasu is a Sicilian word meaning “vulgar,” often used with just the same undertone of affectionate disdain that the author of The Leopard employs to describe the bourgeois signora’s offering: however delicious, it was a case of gastronomic slumming.

According to what his poet cousin, the late Baron Lucio Piccolo, declared in a newspaper interview, Lampedusa “adored French cooking, above all the timbales, and when he went to Paris, together with the authors whose works we were to discover, he brought home the most elaborate recipes, and coloured envelopes containing essences with unlikely names.” Such tastes reflected the traditions of a class as well as the whims or eccentricities of an individual, and even if Lampedusa does not confer his own tastes upon the protagonist of The Leopard, what graces Prince Fabrizio’s table is a different kettle of macaroni.

The Prince was too experienced to offer Sicilian guests, in a town of the interior, a dinner beginning with soup, and he infringed the rules of haute cuisine all the more readily as he disliked it himself. But rumours of the barbaric foreign usage of serving insipid liquid as first course had reached the major citizens of Donnafugata too insistently for them not to quiver with a slight residue of alarm at the start of a solemn dinner like this. So when three lackeys in green, gold, and powder entered, each holding a great silver dish containing a towering mound of macaroni, only four of the twenty at table avoided showing their pleased surprise: the Prince and Princess from foreknowledge, Angelica from affectation, and Concetta from lack of appetite. All the others, including Tancredi, showed their relief in varying ways, from the fluty and ecstatic grunts of the notary to the sharp squeak of Francesco Paolo. But a threatening circular stare from the host soon stifled these improper demonstrations.

Good manners apart, though, the appearance of those monumental dishes of macaroni was worthy of the quivers of admiration they evoked. The burnished gold of the crusts, the fragrance of sugar and cinnamon they exuded, were but preludes to the delights released from the interior when the knife broke the crust; first came a smoke laden with aromas, then chicken livers, hard-boiled eggs, sliced ham, chicken, and truffles in masses of piping-hot, glistening macaroni, to which the meat juice gave an exquisite hue of suède.

Giuseppe di Lampedusa, The Leopard, 1960

This delightfully sensual description has provoked a good deal of discussion among Sicilian chefs. Anna Pomar’s book gives a simplified version.