What about Sicily??

 I haven't posted anything on Sicily for 6 months??!!

Lucia making pasta con il tenerumi

And so many things have happened since February!  I've watched loads and loads of YouTube videos of the Pasta Grannies and In Taverna con Lucia on my iPad, because I've been spending 30 to 60 minutes a day on the recumbent bike exercising my knee.  I don't think I've mentioned Lucia before.  She's a very energetic Sicilian cook that videos herself making lots of dishes, many of them typically Sicilian.  Sort of like a Sicilian Maangchi:  lighthearted, funny and unassuming.  Naturally she speaks very rapid Italian but I can slow the playback speed to 75% and that helps a lot.  I also use the automatically generated closed captions but they can be pretty poor sometimes.  

One of her latest videos was on using the Italian Cucuzza squash, a very long summer squash with velvety leaves and white flowers that open up at night.  I grew it once many years ago but couldn't find a way to use it.  Lucia chops up the leaves, peels the squash and cooks it with tomatoes and onions and serves it with pasta.  

I've also subscribed to the La Cucina Italiana newsletter so every single day I get an email from them linking to 5 or 6 recipes or articles on Italian cuisine.  Ashamedly I've been reading their English version instead of the Italian one.  I remember picking up copies of the Italian magazine at the swap shop in the married student housing in Albany (that's CA not NY) in the 1970s.  I carried them around with me for years and finally gave them away a few years ago (along with the Spanish Encyclopedia Salvat), keeping only one copy for nostalgia's sake.

A few days ago La Cucina Italiana's email linked to an article on Sicilian food with links to additional Sicilian recipes.  And they don't just have recipes but articles on the regions:

• Agrigento, Sicily in Two Days
• Sicilian Cuisine: East Versus West (Catania vs Palermo)
• The Bounty of Sicily's Sicani Mountains
• Harvesting the World's Best Capers on Sicily's Island of Salina
• Retro Meets Baroque: Where and What to Eat in Southeast Sicily (Ragusa)

Of course, it is all about the food.  So what's my next step?  To sign up for the Italian version of the newsletter!

Starch, Starch and More Starch

 No, this isn't about the 3 starches that come with Colombian meals (like potatoes, platano and rice) but about the refined starches that a lot of Asian recipes call for.

A week or so ago I made Maangchi's Sweet and Crunchy Tofu, which calls for Potato Starch to dust (dredge) the tofu with.  She says it makes it much more crispy than corn starch but that corn starch will do if you don't have the potato kind.  I didn't have potato starch and we don't have any Korean supermarkets nearby so I had to make do with corn starch.  However, this past weekend we went to Columbus where I bought the potato starch to complete my pantry.  If I had just checked Amazon, I could have had it with one-day free shipping!

Then yesterday I was reading Carolyn Phillips' At the Chinese Table, a memoir about her life in Taiwan in the 70s and 80s, and her first recipe is Taiwanese Fried Pork Chops.  Does she use potato starch?  No, she uses Sweet Potato Starch and she says that it is preferable to any other type of starch.  There are also two kinds of sweet potato starch, a fine and a coarse, and you need both...  So add those to my Strip District shopping list (we haven't been there since before the Pandemic).  China Sichuan Food says that sweet potato starch is more stable after cooking so it doesn't dissolve as much in water.  But not so good as a thickener.

And then of course there is tapioca starch or almidon de yuca that they mix with cheese in Colombia to make pan de yuca and pan de bono.  We also have that on hand in the deep freeze.

And what about Mochiko?  Sweet Rice Flour that looks almost like rice starch.  The one you use for making mochi.  Does that count?  Should we have that on hand?

Mt. Etna

This is a photo from a 2011 eruption

Last Tuesday, February 16th, Mt. Etna erupted in a strombolian explosion, which is one with relatively mild blasts (like the nearby Stromboli volcano off the north coast of Sicily).  On the 18th it erupted again in the southeast crater.  Go-Etna, an organization that offers excursions of Mt. Etna, describes the eruptions.  Perhaps Overseas Adventure Travel will revisit its decision to relocate our stay in eastern Sicily from Catania to Zafferana Etnea on the southeastern flank of the volcano.  The village of Pedara that was struck by the volcanic stones ejected is only 10 kilometers south of Zafferana and Zafferana was the epicenter of a recent (2/11/21) earthquake of magnitude 3, preceding the eruptions.  So which is worse?  The volcano or COVID 19?  As you might guess, I am rooting for a return to our accommodations in Catania.

The Ongoing Sicilian Food Saga

Usually I can find cookbooks in our local library system but there were two books about Sicilian cooking that I had to order as used books:  Pomp and Sustenance: Twenty-Five Centuries of Sicilian Food by Mary Taylor Simeti (an American who married a Sicilian and moved there in 1962) and Sicilian Food & Wine: The Cognoscente's Guide by Francesca Lombardo and Jacqueline Alio (two Sicilian women who claim to present "the most genuine, candid, unabashed side of Sicilian cuisine. Nothing nouvelle, just the very real thing.").  

Sicilian Food & Wine talks about the food (which I like) without recipes but Pomp and Sustenance also includes recipes.  I'm never sure which kind of cookbook author I prefer:  the native who grew up with the food, or the foreigner who is able to identify which dishes are unique to the region.  A healthy mix of both kinds of cookbooks is probably best.  I must admit that so far I prefer Pomp and Sustenance mainly because it includes the history of the dish and Lord knows Sicily has plenty of history!  It also includes drawings and photos and Sicilian Food & Wine is stark by contrast.  It would have been nice if I could have obtained the Italian version of the latter so at least it would give me some practice reading Italian.

In the meantime I am trying to practice my Italian with YouTube videos.  There's a British subscription called Pasta Grannies that films various older cooks (not all women) cooking special local dishes in Italy.  They offer 17 videos in their Sicily playlist and the advantage to these videos is that most are only 3 to 6 minutes long so you don't have to suffer through any very long preparations.  Today I watched Anna's fish couscous from Sicily (with wonderful tiles in the kitchen) and Nicola's Sicilian pizza called sfincione di Bagheria.   

This is so much easier than reading a cookbook and they do all the work!  Too bad we can't eat the end product.  And sometimes you might not want to eat the end product: next I'm watching Rosetta making pasta with sardines for Father's day!  I swear I will try it when we are in Sicily since it is pretty much the national dish.  The fennel should help.  Or I could opt for pasta con le sarde a mare: pasta with sardines at sea.

By Train from Palermo to Mt. Etna

 [February 28, 2021:  The BBC Great Continental Railway Journey of Sicily on YouTube has been removed and so while I search for a replacement, here is the short clip on Michael Portillo's visit to Gangi and its Mafioso history directly from the BBC.]

In this BBC Great Continental Railway Journey, Michael Portillo takes the Sicilian railway from Palermo, to Agrigento, to Siracusa and finally up to Mt. Etna.  He uses Bradshaw's Guidebook dated 1936 and so Mussolini and Fascism are highlights in this episode.  Michael will never be lost in the crowd because his clothes are so vibrant, garish in fact.  Not at all British. so it must be his Spanish heritage, although he doesn't mention the Spanish influence in Sicily at all, merely the "Bourbon".

1930 Photo

In Palermo, besides going to the Ballaro street market where he eats pasta con le sarde and actually finds it quite good, he pays a visit to the monumental post office on Via Roma next to the main train station.  It is called the Palazzo delle Poste which I don't believe I have read about.  Very very interesting as it was built under Mussolini and has gigantic Greek columns but also a futuristic interior which is quite beautiful, especially the conference room and the stairway.  

Mussolini tried to make everything efficient so he would probably be disappointed that the post office is the epitome of inefficiency, according to Off the Beaten Track in Palermo.  He also wanted the trains to run on time but that was only in Northern Italy.  Sicily was neglected, except for the Mafia, which Mussolini wanted to eradicate.  To illustrate that, Michael takes a side trip to Gangi, a previous Mafia stronghold in the interior of the island that Mussolini surrounded and kidnapped the women and children so that the mafiosi eventually surrendered.  Now Gangi is considered one of the most beautiful villages in Italy.  Perhaps you have heard of the nearby restaurant Tenuta Gangivecchio or looked at one of their cookbooks, La Cucina Siciliana di Gangivecchio.

Michael also visits the Greek temples of Agrigento and talks about Luigi Pirandello, the playwright born in Agrigento and what his relationship was to Mussolini and fascism.  

Then he visits Siracusa, a very interesting historic city which rivaled Athens in the Greek world.  Too bad we are only going to spend a morning there on our trip to Sicily.  Since Siracusa is on the coast, Michael takes a boat ride where he eats arancini (cone-shaped there as opposed to round like oranges in Palermo) and cannoli.  But it is the little pear-shaped tomatoes that caught my eye.  Such a pure deep lipstick red!

In keeping with the Mussolini theme, Michael visits the Monumento ai Caduti in Africa, commemorating the Italian invasion of Abyssinia (now Ethiopia) in 1935-6, another monument that you don't hear about too much in tour books.  It was created in 1938 by Romano Romanelli and was destined for Addis Ababa but was later (1952) erected in Siracusa which was the jumping off point for the invasion.  Although fascistic and imperialistic, it is a very imposing work of art.

Finally, Michael winds up on Mt. Etna, that famous volcano of Sicily.  Michael takes the cable car to the top of Mt. Etna but what is more interesting I think, is the Circumetnea, a railway established in 1895 that makes almost a complete circle around the volcano.  In 1937 they introduced La Littorina, a futuristic Fiat motor coach that they still use in the summer for special rides.  The website, Unusual Places, has an article about it with many photos.

So you can see that this rail journey covers places we haven't seen in other videos about Sicily and it is interesting to learn about the fascist period of the 1936 Bradshaw Guide.