SOUR CHERRY SYRUP

(Amarena ‘Ncilippati)

Makes approximately 1 litre/2 pints

900 g/2 lb sour cherries

900 g/2 lb sugar

Juice of 1 lemon

Pit the cherries and put them in a glass or ceramic bowl. Add the sugar and the lemon juice, mix well, and let stand for 12 hours.

Transfer to a heavy non-reactive saucepan, bring to a boil, reduce the heat, and cook over a gentle heat for 30 to 40 minutes, stirring frequently. Remove the scum that forms on the surface by skimming with a slotted spoon. The syrup is ready when it has become slightly thick (about 110C/220F on a sugar thermometer) and the cherries are a dark translucent red, no different in colour from the syrup around them.

Pour the boiling fruit and syrup into sterilised jars and seal immediately. To serve, put a tablespoon of fruit and a tablespoon of syrup in the bottom of each glass, add ice and cold water and, if you wish, a slice of lemon or a sprig of mint.

The Monastery of the Martorana, a convent that has long since disappeared but was once attached to the church of Santa Maria dell’Ammiraglio, one of Palermo’s lovely, mosaic-lined Arab-Norman churches, was so closely linked to the production of marzipan fruit that the Palermitani call it frutta di Martorana, although elsewhere in Sicily marzipan is known as pasta reale. Indeed, they claim that it was invented here: a Mother Superior once planned a little affectionate leg pulling for the Archbishop’s Easter visit, and ordered her nuns to fashion the almond paste that they were so skilled in making into different kinds of fruit, which were then hung upon the trees in the cloister garden.

After the convent was torn down the commercial pastry shops took over, and at the end of each October, in preparation for All Souls’ Day, when the dead bring marzipan fruit and sugar statues to the children who have prayed for their souls, the pastry shops in Palermo fill their windows with martorana.

Most marvellous of all is the fruit that they exhibit, such as figs just opened from which a crystalline drop is oozing, little strawberries, pears, bananas, walnuts with the shell broken so that the inside is visible, roast chestnuts sprinkled with a faint trace of ashes; nor do they forget the legumes. There are entire collections of peas, of fava beans, of artichokes, of asparagus; I saw even some snails! And all this in almond paste: the shell of the snails and that of the walnuts are sugar and melt in your mouth, true sweets. The imitation is of an amazing exactness.

Gastone Vuillier, La Sicilia, 1897

There is a store in Palermo in Via Paternoster, just off the Corso Vittorio Emmanuele, where they make and sell decorative little plaster moulds in which the fruit can be shaped before it is painted with food colouring, but the dexterous could do it with their fingers.