Made in Sicily. Giorgio Locatelli
alla siciliana
Prezzemolo e aglio, oli e condimenti
Salsetta di mandorle e acciughe
A city that leaves you breathless
… soon a saucer of green olives and anchovies was sitting on the table, and some bread, and some mineral water. A small woman with dark hair and dark eyes and precise features whirled up like a woodland bird. She perched lightly at the table and rattled off a long list of antipasti, first courses and seconds, and every single one of them came out of the sea. This was Palermo in summer for you.
– Peter Robb, Midnight in Sicily
The best way to have a good meal in a restaurant in Sicily is not to ask for the menu; just let them bring you whatever the guys in the kitchen want to prepare for you, which of course will begin with the antipasti.
Everyone everywhere in Italy eats antipasti, the plates of shared food that arrive with the bread, before the pasta. They are the signal to relax, eat, discuss and enjoy, and the quality of the antipasti is a sign of what is to come. If the antipasti sets a high tone, you can be hopeful that more good things will follow with the pasta course, the fish or meat, and finally, the fruit or dessert. But what I see in Sicily, which marks it out from other regions of Italy, is that the abundance and the kinds of dishes that are put down also owe something to the influence of the Arabs who occupied the island from the ninth century. When the antipasti comes out I am reminded of a mezze: suddenly the table is full of little plates, and people hate the idea that they have not put out enough food. Whenever I have eaten out in Lebanese restaurants, if there is some food left at the end of the mezze, the waiter says nothing, but if all the plates are empty, they are anxious to know if they can bring you some more, and the same philosophy seems to apply in Sicily.
That generosity carries over into the Sicilian home. Even if you don’t have as many dishes to share when family and friends are around the table, if a little bit of food is left over you can congratulate yourself that you made enough. And nothing will be wasted. Whatever is left over will be used again, maybe in a different way, for the next meal.
The production of food, in the Sicilian mind, never seems to be a problem; I never felt that anyone was thinking, ‘I have to cook for all these people’, perhaps because there is no pretension to Sicilian food. Instead there is an understanding that you will feed people with whatever you have, which is summed up by the Sicilian word companatico, which translates as ‘what you have to go with the bread’. And since most of Sicily is a vast garden, what you have most abundantly is vegetables, and, because it is an island, there is a greater emphasis and pride in fish, rather than meat.
As someone who comes from northern Italy, where the antipasti is much more about cured hams and salami, it feels very different to sit around a table filled with bowls of caponata, the sweet and sour vegetable dish that you find made slightly differently everywhere; plates of beautiful gamberi rossi (red prawns, eaten raw with just a little olive oil and salt), sarde a beccafico (stuffed sardines), perhaps some polpettine (little balls of tuna or swordfish), deep-fried squares of maccu (the most delicious paste of broad beans and wild fennel), baked aubergines with sultanas and pine nuts, chargrilled artichokes under oil, octopus salad, parmigiana di melanzane, served at room temperature, or perhaps fried courgette flowers, stuffed with ricotta, again served cold.
Because verdure (vegetable dishes) feature so strongly in Sicilian eating, I have given them a chapter all on their own, which follows this one; however, all of them are fantastic served as part of the antipasti.
Seafood salad
This is a typical antipasto all over the island, and will reflect what has been fished at any one time, so there might be more, or less, mussels, squid and octopus. Sometimes there will also be pieces of tuna or swordfish. Any fish goes, as long as it doesn’t have any bones. I have seen people adding things like apple, or carrot, or spring onions, to add a bit of crunch, but I think the best insalata di mare is this simple one, just with celery, which is very important to the flavour, parsley, garlic, lemon and oil. If you only have one kind of fish, you can make the same salad. One day we had boxes and boxes of seppia (cuttlefish) come into the kitchen at Locanda, too much to use up in the pasta, so we made this salad, but with cuttlefish only. Serve it at room temperature, not chilled, or something of the flavour will be lost.
Ask your fishmonger to clean the octopus and squid for you, and to give you the body and the tentacles.
Serves 4
1 octopus (about 330g), fresh or frozen (and defrosted), cleaned, with tentacles
330g squid, cleaned, with tentacles
450g medium prawns
600g mussels, clams or both
80ml white wine
2 celery stalks (preferably with leaves), chopped
50ml lemon oil
sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
1