Sicily. part 3: The food

When we arrived in Palermo last May, one of the first things we did was go out for cannoli. Notwithstanding the hype about these delicacies in The Godfather and The Sopranos, I wasn't a cannoli enthusiast, since the versions I'd had in the Little Italies of New York and San Francisco were usually soggy, stale-tasting fried shells filled with gummy icing whose painful sweetness wasn't alleviated by the occasional nugget of candied citrus peel. But our friend Dana, who'd been in Palermo a few months earlier and always knows what she's talking about, told us we couldn't miss the cannoli at the church of Santa Caterina, which happened to be only a few blocks from our Airbnb apartment. So thither we hied. 

In The Leopard, Lampedusa describes Palermo as "weighed down by the huge edifices of convents and monasteries. There were dozens of these, all vast, often grouped in twos or threes, for women and for men, for rich and poor, nobles and plebeians, for Jesuits, Benedictines, Franciscans, Capuchins, Carmelites, Liguorians, Augustinians..." Santa Caterina was one such. A Dominican convent for high-born ladies, its church is suitably grand, in the baroque-and-beyond Sicilian style.

Santa Caterina from the ground.

Santa Caterina: A nun's-eye view.

Although the sisters were the daughters of aristocrats, their lives were circumscribed by schedules of devotions and strict rules against contact with the outside world. They watched the church services hidden behind metal grates surrounding their enclosures far above the congregation. (You can also see their hideaways in the first photo, above the tall arches.) 

Another way they spent their time was to help support the convent by producing expensive pastries for wealthy Palermans. Although there are no longer any nuns at Santa Caterina, it now has a pastry shop that offers sweets based on historic recipes from Santa Caterina and other local convents. 

Sicily's famous marzipan fruits and vegetables are on offer, along with cakes as over-decorated as the churches.

There are also lots of simpler sweets, little pastries filled with candied fruit, jam, nuts, cheese, and liqueurs. 

But that day we were there for the cannoli, which are made to order.

The young lady above, looking rather nun-like all in black, filled the freshly fried cannoli shells with sweetened ricotta, then added whatever each customer wanted--candied cherries, chocolate chips, chopped pistachios, candied orange peel.

Next to the pastry shop is the convent's beautiful garden. Reportedly rose petals grown there are used to make the rose water that flavors some of the pastries. There we sat down under a lemon tree with our cannolo (Danny and I shared one, in hopes of saving some room for dinner) and a couple of other things (because how could we not?).

The cannolo was indeed wonderful, in my opinion, and the star of the show that day. The tangy, fresh-tasting ricotta was nothing like the icing-from-a-can filling you too often encounter, and the shell had great flavor and crunch. (Danny, true to form, says he thinks cannoli are "disgusting." He really didn't have such a good time on this trip.) 

The other pastries were tasty, but a little heavier and more sedate. Being an American, I couldn't help thinking they would have benefited from being eaten alongside a glass of cold milk. (But being an American, I also can't help thinking that no dessert, anywhere, is quite as delicious as a homemade layer cake with buttercream frosting. I recognize that this is perhaps a character flaw.)

Another very popular Sicilian pastry is known as "virgin's breasts," for obvious reasons.

Now Sant'Agata is extremely popular on the island, as well as elsewhere in Italy. (She is the patron saint of my Italian family's home province of Molise, for instance.) Agata was born in Catania, Sicily's second biggest city, during the early Christian era, and was imprisoned and tortured for preferring a life devoted to Jesus rather than marriage to the local Roman governor. Her torments included, most famously, having her breasts torn off with pincers. 

Sant'Agata honored in a church in Catania.

The saint and her martyrdom are symbolized by two breasts on a platter, raising the question: which came first, the iconography or the dessert? 

Minni di vergine dissection.

We had to try one, of course. Inside was a rich cookie base, jam made with zucchini (the green layer), and pastry cream, surrounded by a sugar shell. It's delicious, if you like things that are creamy, crunchy, and very sweet, but it's also a bit overwhelming.

The same shape is used for a variety of other pastries. These two, which we had for breakfast one morning (something I don't recommend if you're planning to do anything but collapse into an insulin coma for the rest of the day), were flavored with pistachios and raspberries, respectively.  

Francesca, our guide, is a Palermo native who loves the dolce of her homeland, the sweeter and richer the better. She'd traveled to the Emilia, the part of Italy where our place is, and was unpleasantly surprised by how austere the desserts there are. To her the Emilians' simple jam crostatas and nut cookies barely qualified as desserts. "I'd lose 10 kilos if I lived there," she said dismissively. 

While Sicilian pastries are a big tourist draw, another is the island's street food, or as they say in Italian, "street food." (Apparently this culinary concept didn't exist in Italy until very recently, although food eaten elsewhere than at the table presumably has always been as common in Sicily as everywhere else.) 

A fabled, even perhaps iconic Sicilian street food is a spleen sandwich. So when we came across a vendor in Palermo's Ballaro street market selling spleen sandwiches alongside another well-known specialty, rolls stuffed with panelle (chickpea fritters) and fried balls of mashed potato, we were eager to try them both, not least because the bill for two big sandwiches totaled about three dollars.

Perhaps we should have shopped around a bit more. The potato-and-garbanzo sandwich was merely stodgy, the taste of poverty, but the spleen one was kind of icky. I later read that the classic preparation involves not just boiling the spleen into edibility but then frying it till crispy. This version either skipped that second step or the spleen had been sitting around long enough to lose any vestige of crunch. The flavor was vaguely organ-ish and the texture not so great, either. After a few bites we were happy to slide all of it into a waiting garbage can. Months later Danny is still complaining about that spleen sandwich. It was a culinary low point for all of us.

 

Valerie, who accompanied us on our Palermo adventure, and I were far happier with the fare at a busy little place in Piazza Marina. The street-food delicacies they offered included a "Sicilian salad" of tomatoes, olives, and mackerel, another of sliced oranges and onions, eggplant caponata, and an array of arrancini--fried rice balls stuffed with meat sauce (round) and cheese (tubular). 

Unfortunately, I didn't think about taking a photo until long after I'd started eating.

Emboldened by that experience, we decided to do a street-food lunch at the Capo street market a few days later. 

After admiring the beautiful arrays of fruits and vegetables, we zeroed in on a busy stall selling all kinds of good-looking snacks.

There's eggplant parm and arancini or are they meatballs?) stuffed with red onions and peppers baked with cheese, and I'm pretty sure those are panelle and arancini with cheese in the back.

There were also eggplant rollatini, tomato bruschetta, meatballs on skewers, and herb pies. We tried about a half-dozen things, squeezed around a little table amid the market hustle-bustle, but we had to admit that none of it was very exciting. Maybe we hadn't chosen well, or perhaps this place was better at attracting tourists and their cameras than making really great food. We probably should have enlisted Francesca's guidance, but this was one adventure we'd decided to have on our own. Ah well, part of the adventure of travel is being reminded that only in travel writing is every meal a life-changing experience and every snack a revelation.    

As those street food photos indicate, Sicilian cuisine uses a lot of vegetables. Indeed, it hews much closer to the American fantasy of Italian cooking as an amazingly delicious form of health food than does the food of northern Italy. Because of the island's history its classic dishes combine good things from many cultures, and because its residents were mostly poor its cuisine uses a lot of seafood and a wealth of vegetables and fruits. 

This list of the day's specials at the little Bissot Bistro gives you the flavor. The dishes include rabbit with fava beans, sweet-and-sour pumpkin, pasta with tuna, green beans, tomatoes, and basil, and plenty of other seafood dishes. We had the pumpkin, some eggplant polpette (meatballs, but made with eggplant, if you can imagine that), fish cousous, and a salad. It was a delightful dinner. 

As I've noted elsewhere, in our part of northern Italy vegetables, like desserts, aren't the focus. The pastas are terrific, and so are the various cured meats, but to my palate at least the disinterest in vegetables can make many dishes seem a little bland. Meat courses in most restaurants are often (too often) plainly grilled or roasted.The vegetable contorni offered are usually either grilled or boiled, and salad means lettuce with some tomato slices and slivered carrots (and canned corn, if you're unlucky). 

Compare the usual northern antipasto--a big plate of ham, sausage, and other salumi, with perhaps a little giardiniera for color--with the antipasto platter we were served in Piazza Armerina, the town in central Sicily we visited after Palermo.

At the aplty named Trattoria del Goloso (Glutton's Restaurant).

There's eggplant parmigiana and caponata, tomato bruschetta, fresh mozzarella, grilled zucchini, dried tomatoes, and lots more besides. The main course that followed was rabbit stewed with carrots, celery, and olives. It's not spa cuisine, but it was wonderfully tasty and the vegetable ingredients get much of the credit.

Here's another antipasto, this one from Buatta Cucina in Palermo. Not as vegetable-intense, but still a lot more varied than the antipasti I'm used to in Fidenza. Apologies for the photo; it was so enticing I once again inhaled a lot of it before I remembered to take a picture.

Clockwise from the lower left, there's the remains of sardines in mint and tomato sauce, marinated tuna, two pieces of sfincione (a Sicilian pizza variant), a panella (chickpea fritter), and caponata in the center. I followed up with a Sicilian pasta classic, annelli in ragu. 

Like Spaghetti-Os, only delicious.

Other dishes I enjoyed during our time in Sicily (but neglected to photograph) included spaghetti alla Norma (with eggplant), linguine with sardines and fennel, spaghetti with clams and bottarga (fish roe), spicy green beans, a salad of tomatoes, sweet onions, and ricotta, baked stuffed clams, and a sensational sfincione-inspired pizza with lots of onions and black olives. 

Some of these dishes were pretty average, some outstanding, but overall the food on our Sicilian trip was as exciting as their crazy churches. And that's saying something.