MANGIARI DI CAVALERI

Tumazzo, pani e pira, è mangiari di cavaleri. 

Mellow cheese, bread and pears are food for knights.

- Sicilian proverb

My thanks go today to a student who works in the food industry and was thoughtful enough to bring me two lovely books about cheese:

  

The one on the left, about Ragusano cheese, has fascinating stories and insights about how this product was and is made, as well as beautiful black and white pictures of the cheese itself, the production process and the Ragusan countryside:  

The book on the right, which is in English, is a comprehensive study of three Sicilian cheeses - Pecorino Siciliano, Piacentinu Ennese and Provola dei Nebrodi. As well as scientific information about the cheeses, the volume contains recipes, serving suggestions, flowcharts of the production processes and a list of historical references to each cheese. I was interested to learn that both Pecorino Siciliano and Piacentinu Ennese are mentioned by Pliny the Elder, whilst the first historical reference to Provola dei Nebrodi was in 1886.

Grazie, studente mio!

DINNER WITH "LOVE SICILY"

A few weeks ago I contacted Katia of the loveSicily website and blog to ask her if I could visit her Cookery School in Modica Bassa with a view to writing an article about it for this blog. Imagine my delight when Katia not only agreed to my suggestion, but invited me to participate in one of her courses, starting later today [Monday].

Tonight I attended Katia, Ronald and Angelo's "welcome dinner" for the course participants and this is the lovely food that Katia served:

Such a simple, yet elegant and pleasing starter - ricotta flavoured with lemon:

The three stages of caciocavallo ragusano cheese - fresh, semi-matured and matured [stagionato] served with tomato, carrot and chilli sauces. Katia advised us to save the chilli sauce for the strong, stagionato cheese [centre]:

There was good local bread:

Pasta alla Norma: Katia buys these special gladiatori pasta shapes from the Pastifico Tiziano Viva in Pozzallo:

I'm in full agreement with Katia when she says you have to have cannoli when in Sicily! She buys the cannoli pastry tubes from Modica's Bonajuto for, as she explained, "When someone does something better than you do, you should show humility and buy it". First she brought in the plate with the cannoli tubes, ground pistacchi and piping bag of ricotta flavoured with ground chocolate chips and icing sugar [made by grinding ordinary sugar]:

Next, she filled the tubes with the ricotta mixture at each end:

Finally, she dipped the ends into the pistacchi:



All I could say was, "WOW!"

Katia told us that Italy's health and safety police have turned their attention to cannoli. [Perhaps they get to taste some while they inspect pastry-making premises?] Pastry-makers traditionally used a kind of bamboo to form the pastry around and, as bamboo is porous, the cannoli cooked perfectly, inside and out. The stainless steel cannoli tubes that they are supposed to use now do not produce the same result and the pastry-makers are frustrated. Is nowhere safe from these silly rules?

Thank you for your warm hospitality and for a superb dinner, Katia, Ronald and Angelo. See you later this morning!

IL GATTOPARDO - A MODERN CLASSIC

I don’t know quite why, browsing in a bookshop in Pinner, North London in 1967, I picked up a paperback entitled The Leopard, a novel written by one Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. I was studying for A levels in English Lit., French and Spanish at the time, so had no specific interest in Italy. [How that was to change!] However, the book looked interesting enough for me to buy and when I got home and started reading it I was immediately fascinated. Since then I have read it many times in Italian, “taught” it and have, of course, seen the wonderful film based upon it, in which Burt Lancaster, as the Prince of Salina, gives the performance of his life.

Set in the Risorgimento, Il Gattopardo [= "The Leopard” because there was a leopard, serval or ocelot in the coat of arms of the author's family] is the story of the last years of don Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina, who cannot come to terms with the changes in Sicilian society which the unification of Italy will bring.

We meet his nephew, Tancredi, who is expected to marry the Prince’s daughter, Concetta, but falls in love with Angelica Sedàra, the daughter of a rich but non-aristocratic politician, thus breaking poor Concetta’s heart. Tancredi’s marriage symbolises the transfer of power in Sicily from the aristocracy to a corrupt new middle class.

The novel is about all this and more and I have to warn you that I find the ending unbearably sad. Yet I believe it is a key to understanding Sicily today. Here is one of my favourite passages from the book. Regular readers of this blog will know which parts resonate with me!

Don Fabrizio explains his refusal of a seat in the new Senate: “ Be patient now, Chevally. We Sicilians have become accustomed, by a long, a very long hegemony of rulers who were not of our religion and did not speak our language,to split hairs. If we had not done so we’d never have coped with Byzantine tax gatherers, with Berber Emirs, with Spanish viceroys. Now the bent is endemic, we’re made like that…… All Sicilian self-expression, even the most violent, is really wish-fulfilment; our sensuality is a hankering for oblivian, our shooting and knifing a hankering for death; our languour, our exotic vices, a hankering for voluptuous immobility, that is for death again; our meditative air is that of a void wanting to scrutinise the enigmas of Nirvana……. I said Sicilians, I should have added Sicily, the atmosphere, the climate, the landscape of Sicily. Those are the forces which have formed our minds together and perhaps more than alien pressure and various foreign invasions: this landscape which knows no mean between sensuous sag and hellish drought; which is never pretty, never ordinary, never relaxed, as should be a country made for rational beings to live in…..Six times thirty days of sun sheer down upon our heads; this summer of ours which is as long and glum as a Russian winter and which we struggle against with less success. If a Sicilian worked hard in any of those months he would expend energy enough for three. Then water is either lacking altogether or has to be carried from so far that every drop is paid for by a drop of sweat… This violence of landscape, this cruelty of climate, this continual tension is everything…. I don’t deny that a few Sicilians may succeed in breaking the spell of the island; but they would have to leave it very young….[else] they will remain convinced that their country is basically calumniated like all other countries, that the civilised norm is here, the oddities elsewhere.”

If you are going to read Il Gattopardo, or have already read it and are interested in its author, I do recommend David Gilmour’s biography of Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Last Leopard, for this, too, is a story of an aristocrat at odds with his times.

Sadly, the Donnafugata mentioned in the novel has virtually disappeared and is not the one near here, but take a walk around Baroque Modica and especially Baroque Ragusa and you may sense, as I do, the ghost of the Prince of Salina echoing your every step. I am so grateful that I can do that every day now, if I wish!

RAGUSANO FRESCO

This is our fresh Ragusan cheese. It has a firm texture but is softer than a Cheddar. The flavour is mild with just a hint of sweetness. The matured version of this cheese is quite different and I'll show you that another day.