(Quaglie)
Serves 6
6 small aubergines
Salt
Vegetable oil for frying
Wash the aubergines, trim off the stems, and then make a series of parallel lengthways cuts, about 12 mm/½ inch apart, from the bottom toward the stem end, taking care to stop at 2.5 cm/1 inch from the stem end.
Turn 90 degrees and repeat the operation, so that the aubergine is cut into sticks for about three-quarters of its length, but remains in one piece, held together at the stem end.
Put the aubergines into heavily salted water with a weight on them to keep them submerged, and soak for several hours. Rinse well, drain, and dry as well as possible with paper towels.
Fry the aubergines in hot (190C/375F) oil deep enough to cover them until they are a golden brown.
Sfincione is usually on sale as well, cooked in long black tins in the oven of the neighbourhood bakery and delivered to the fry-shop by a young boy who balances them precariously on his head as he pushes his way through the crowds.
All of these when eaten in the street are served in a large roll, and they fill much the same function that hotdogs or fish and chips do elsewhere. But it has recently become popular among Palermo restaurateurs to serve a few panelle and a few crocchè di patate, together with a little caponata, as an antipasto. While they are no doubt less ruinous to the health when prepared in the home or in a fancy restaurant, they inevitably lack the special flavour of the friggitoria, which is said to depend on frying oil that is often replenished but never replaced.
A big friggitoria would offer all of these plus the pituni described in Chapter Three, and other forms of fried bread dough. Still other odds and ends, both animal and vegetable, would be presented, unrecognisable beneath a crust of crumbs or batter, in a glorious spread of fritto misto, a mixed fry, more appropriately translated, by a young American girl touring at the turn of the century, as “fried mysteries.”
A smaller enterprise might be itinerant, specialising in one or two different items, such as the panellari who sell panalle and cazzilli, which they fry up over bottled gas on the back of their Vespa pickups, parked in strategic locations near high schools or construction sites. There is still at least one panellaro to be seen in Palermo who does his cooking on a donkey-drawn cart that is black with years of accumulated grease but beautifully planned and constructed like a ship’s galley, with lurch-proof compartments for each ingredient and implement.
The common denominator of most of this street food is the low cost of its ingredients, and this is certainly true of the meat dishes. One such delicacy is quaruma, which is tripe and all the parts of calf or cow you thought no one would ever want to eat—mainly gristle and callus and other pale and translucent bits—boiled up together and served with a squirt of lemon. The quarumaru’s stall has large pans heaped with these bits and pieces, and then a row of heavy white crockery plates, each with a knife and fork crossed upon it, awaiting the customer’s pleasure. I have yet to succumb to quaruma, but I do like stigghiole, the fatty intestines from lambs and kids, which are carefully washed, soaked in wine, then wrapped around a few stalks of parsley and grilled by the roadside on portable barbecues that fill the air with greasy and pungent smoke.
Better still is pani cu’ la meuza, soft buns known as guasteddi filled with sautéed beef spleen, either schiettu (nubile) if all by itself, or maritatu when wedded to fresh ricotta and grated caciocavallo cheese. That is how Garibaldi ate it at the Antica Focacceria di San Francesco after his triumphal entry into Palermo. The Antica Focacceria still operates in the piazza of that name, still makes excellent and dependable pani cu’ la meuza, and is a good place to see how a cookshop has inched itself toward being a restaurant by the addition of a few marble-topped tables and cast-iron chairs.
As might well be expected, fish also have an important place on the street. The stalls of the fishmongers are among the most colourful and most fascinating, both for the wares and—in the past at least—for the stalls themselves.
Strange fish can be sometimes seen in the old market in the Piazza Nuova. But the best place to see them is at the fish sales on the Borgo, where the salesmen have queer booths shaped like Greek temples and with curious devices and religious mottoes. One is inscribed “Dio solo è grande” (Only God is great), and another, with a sort of mermaid for its device, has Viva Maris SS della Providenza.”
Douglas Sladen, Sicily, the New Winter Resort, 1910
There are separate booths selling seafood to eat on the spot: dark purple sea urchins cut in half to expose the vivid orange roe, which is eaten raw with lemon; raw mussels, although these have fallen from favour since the cholera outbreak in Naples some years ago; and above all purpu—octopus boiled to a dark pink and sitting on the counter with its tentacles curled up about it. Along the waterfront at Mondello, the summer resort just outside Palermo, there is a long row of booths selling octopus. The Palermitani out to catch the cool breezes off the sea love to break their stroll here for a plateful of purpu. Current Palermo mythology relates that at least one of these purpari sells so much octopus each summer that come winter he treats his whole family to a month of skiing in Switzerland.
In the past the figure who most intrigued the foreigners wandering through the Sicilian streets was the water seller. Visitors to the island marvelled at the Sicilians’ inordinate passion for drinking ice water, although their surprise usually melted as soon as the scirocco, the hot, dry wind from off the Sahara, began to blow. For a Sicilian, cold water is the only truly effective thirst quencher.
From then on until my school days, I spent all my afternoons in my grandparents’ apartments at Via Lampedusa, reading behind a screen. At five o’clock my grandfather would call me into his study to give me my afternoon refreshment—a hunk of bread and a large glass of cold water. It has remained my favourite drink ever since.
Giuseppe di Lampedusa, Two Stories and a Memory, 1962
I have seen a desperate look come over the faces of my own thirsty children when they have opened an American refrigerator, filled with Coca-Cola and grape juice and lemonade, only to discover that there was no bottle of plain tap water placed there to cool.
The water sold in the streets and the markets usually had a splash of zammù added to it, anise extract, which sweetened it and hid, I imagine, whatever odd flavours it had acquired on its travels. Originally the water seller’s equipment was very elementary: slung about his neck was a small barrel or an amphora of terra cotta, so porous that some water would seep through and evaporate, thus cooling what remained inside, while in one hand he carried a glass, in the other a bottle of zammù. In the late nineteenth century some inspired craftsman designed a small table with a handle to carry it by, brightly painted and decorated with silver and brass and, in some cases, with ships’ lanterns. On the top of the table there was a rack to hold the glasses and the zammù bottle. The fancier of these tables were much admired and occasionally purchased by foreign tourists, and even today the souvenir shops sell dollhouse-sized models.
Perhaps it was the good fortune of selling one’s table to a tourist that allowed upward mobility in the water trade.
The aristocracy of water-sellers are the people who have second-hand church canopies painted in the brightest colours. The most fascinating thing about these stalls are the sinks with the jet of water always running. The padrone positively provokes the thirst of passers by with the ostentatious way in which he rinses out his glasses. You hear the cool splash and look up. You see a canopy as bowed and picturesque as a Japanese temple. Its brass counter glitters like gold. All round hang festoons of lemon boughs, so cool with their dark green foliage and pale yellow fruit. To show how familiar he is with water, he has a big bowl of goldfish; and to show how rich he is in it, he plays with his sink—a pleasant sight in a thirsty land.
Douglas Sladen, Queer Things About Sicily, 1913
Some of these kiosks exist today, although the branches hung with oranges and lemons that decorate their facades are usually made of plastic. The sound of running water is still an attraction in a land that is still thirsty, and the young boys in white aprons who work in them are proud of their art. They halve the lemons and flip them into the juicer with an economy of motion so studied that it becomes ostentatious flourish.
One type of itinerant vendor has not survived the twentieth century:
Another particularly Palermitan type was the candy man. This vendor, always surrounded by a group of greedy youths, stood with a stopwatch in his left hand, while from his right hand dangled a string about a foot and a half long, with a large oval piece of hard candy on the end. This allowed the client who had paid an infinitesimal fee to suck the candy for exactly one minute, after which, as soon as the stopwatch sounded, the sticky sweet was torn from his mouth and immediately inserted into that of his neighbour. Naturally there were always scenes and discussions which ended in fights. The slogan of this hygienic industry was “a penny a lick.”
Fulco, Eltati felici, 1977
The candy man was not the only one to have a slogan. The street markets were and still are as colourful to the ear as they are to the eye, each vendor trying to drown out the competition and employing all his poetic powers of persuasion to convince the clientele of the freshness and the inimitable delicacy or his wares.
Haju pipi e mulinciani!
Vo friitivi i cucuzzi;
haju cucuzzi longhi comu sciabulmazzi!
I’ve got peppers and aubergines!
Go fry yourselves some squash;
I’ve got squashes long as sabres!
La zzà munachiedda mi li scippàu,
ccu li manuzzi fatti di cira,
’sti catalaneddi veri!
The holy sister grabbed them from me,
with her little waxy-white hands,
these real Catalonian figs!
Alivi cunzàti belli,
’u cala-pani, sbrogghia pitittu!
Beautiful dressed olives,
they slide the bread down, unleash the appetite!
Catanian street cries, twentieth century
Industry and ingenuity are constantly challenged by the changing of the seasons—figs give way to oranges, slices of watermelon to roasted chestnuts—and by the requirements of the church calendar, since each saint’s day or other religious feast is accompanied by special foods and special demands upon the market.
For the street vendors of old Palermo the heyday came in July with the Festino, the festival dedicated to Saint Rosalia, the city’s patroness. For five days the city was (and still is) given over to processions, fireworks, concerts, horse races, and other celebrations, and with all this going on whoever would want to stay at home cooking?! Moreover, the city was filled with people from the provinces—the regnicoli, as the Palermitani disdainfully called those who lived in the rest of the Regno—who flocked wide-eyed and open-mouthed to see the goings-on in the big city. A visit to the Festino was an event so tantalising that it was often written into marriage contracts.
Those whose chefs had to cook willy-nilly ate sarde a beccafico for Saint Rosalia’s feast day, but the special street food of the Festino has always been babbaluci d’u festinu, snails much smaller than escargots, sautéed in oil with lots of parsley and garlic. Sucking the babbaluci out of their shells is very laborious and time-consuming, so it seems you are getting a good deal of eating for your money.
The sweet sellers did great business too, not only the ones with the stopwatches but the booths where torrone and cubaita were sold, together with crystallised almonds and a kind of nougat that is made in large loaves and cut into slices. Striped in bilious pink, white, and chartreuse, this colourful addition to the street scene resembles a serving of multi-flavoured ice cream, but since it doesn’t need to be refrigerated, it is known as gelato di campagna (“country ice cream”).
The siminzari, or seed sellers, did such good business for Saint Rosalia that they had special carts used only for the Festino, shaped like sailing ships and decorated with multicoloured paper flags. The decks were spread with semenza e càlia—pumpkin seeds and toasted chickpeas—and with peanuts, hazelnuts, and dried chestnuts, which the vendors weighed out on a brass scale and poured into brown paper cones. Even today a Sicilian does not feel that he has taken a proper walk or watched a proper procession unless he has done so clutching a cone of semenza e càlia in one hand and leaving a trail of shells behind him.
But he who came to the Festino with only one penny in his pocket would neither spend it on babbaluci nor squander it on semenza. Shoving his way through the heat and the dust of the crowded streets, he would save it until he arrived at a booth belonging to one of those vendors who had elected Saint Rosalia as their patroness, the vendors who did more business than anyone else during the Festino, the vendors who satisfied the inordinate Sicilian craving for ice cream.