Sicilian Food

"I’ve lived in Italy for nearly 40 years. But I don’t like English-language books on Italian food. I don’t really enjoy Italian cookbooks either. Most of the time, I learn from people in food markets and restaurants and other places I visit on my travels. But this particular book is fascinating. Mary Taylor Simeti, who I’ve met, went to Sicily as a young graduate to work as a social activist. She met and married a Sicilian and brought up a family there. She got interested in food as everyone does who raises a family. Sicilian Food is not just a book of recipes. Simeti writes about food in a very interesting way, explaining the origins of some dishes and the different versions. This is my kind of cookery book. The American version originally had a lovely title: Pomp and Sustenance: Twenty-Five Centuries of Sicilian Food . The title points to the book’s rich details of Sicily itself. Writing about food is, after all, social history. And that’s what I find most interesting. When the south of Italy was known as the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, the Spanish king brought over lots of aristocrats as back-up. This was in case the local people got fed up with him. And these nouveaux riches decided they should have French chefs, who each insisted on being called ‘Monsieur’. The local people couldn’t get their tongues around it so they called them ‘Monzu’ instead. The locals wanted their pasta: their great love. The chefs thought they should start with a French soup. But they then invented festive dishes of pasta and rice that could be made in advance, moulded and cooked at the last minute. There’s a lovely scene in Il Gattopardo by Giuseppe Di Lampedusa where they are all sitting down expecting to be served a French soup. They are on tenterhooks. A wonderful timballo of pasta comes in and they relax. As in Spain, there is great ceremony attached to everything in life in Sicily and Naples, including food. I was doing a cooking school in Sicily recently and I discovered a different version of these moulded dishes, done with rice. It’s great for dinner parties. You cook risotto beforehand and, while it’s still hot, you stir in fresh tomato sauce and some parmesan. You line a mould at the bottom and the sides and fill the middle with anything you like: meat or crumbled Italian sausage. Top that with slices of cheese. In Sicily they use hard-boiled egg, which doesn’t really appeal to me. Then you cover it with rice again and pop it in the oven for 20 minutes. When you turn it out of the mould it looks spectacular."