Sicily has always been an obligatory crossroads for the people of the Mediterranean, a point of encounter and exchange for tens of centuries, a center of commercial and cultural coming together of people who traveled by the sea. Sicilian cuisine too is a vast cultural repository, the original fruit of a mixture of peoples, events and influences which makes it appear like a mosaic: its component parts are of different origins but they achieve not only solidity and compactness on the island but a unity of flavors and colors. The table becomes a place of introspection of the various civilizations that have succeeded one another on the island and to revisit Sicilian cuisine can be an amusing and intriguing way of reading the societies that used it as a system of communication.

Claude Levy-Strauss, the well-known French anthropologist, wrote that eating habits are the most abiding characteristic traits of a culture. The linguistic codes are more easily forgotten than those dealing with food. Italian emigrants frequently forget the Italian language, but not the use of spaghetti and pizza.
Few countries can boast about the variety and richness of the Sicilian cuisine. There are actually three cuisines the Baroque or Patrician, the popular cuisine or the lively reinvented cuisine and the street cuisine of the Buffittieri, as it came to be known from the French word buffet. But each city, town, area of town, and family, because of the strong individualism on the island, always has its own interpretation of a dish.

1. "Calia e simenza" (roasted chickpeas and seeds) lllustration by Rodo Santoro.

This is a cuisine in any case, that has roots far back in time. What the Sicel and the Sikans - the first inhabitants of the island - ate we will never know.

It's natural that they would eat, as in other basins of the Mediterranean, what nature offered them: healthy and unadulterated foods. In those days people lived with one purpose in mind: to find something to eat. The burdensome task of looking for herbs, roots, shoots, beets, honey, and sweet fruits fell to women. The gathering of these items eventually gave way to planting seed around the huts or caverns. There were herbs that could be eaten raw, seeds to chew on or to break with a rock, shells collected by the seashore, meat from small animals hunted by men.
Agriculture was born about ten thousand years before the birth of Christ.
Raising animals came later: the first pig was domesticated in 7000 BC and cows came only a thousand years after that. A great leap forward was made when fire was discovered and meat could be cooked. They cooked in the open air to avoid setting their huts on fire and to keep the burning smell outside the caverns. Meat was placed on skewers or on top of preheated stones which were the precursors of pans and barbecue grills.

Perhaps a fire near the stores of grain revealed how good toasted wheat and barley were. Who knows whether the typically Sicilian custom of toasting seeds as a pastime began then? According to scholars barley was the first cereal to be cultivated. The barley grain had a thick skin that made it necessary to toast them and then to dry them in heat before milling. Its flour boiled in salted water was the first nutritious food of Mediterranean peoples. Wheat arrived later: it was a great discovery because it was more nutritious and satisfying than barley. The laws of nutrition were discovered at the same time.

Using that ancient clothed hard grain (clothed because it did not lose the maturation skin) farro (corn meal) was born, that mixture sweetened with a drop of olive oil that was to be so successful among the Romans.
This continued to be consumed in Sicily until 1945. It was the food of the lucky people who lived in the country during the last world war. Another gastronomic delight that is still used today is maccu, a fragrant and delicate veloutè of cooked fava beans, strained through a colander. A delicate puree scented by our forefathers with toasted and milled coriander seeds sprinkled with olive oil.

A dish made for strong people with strong stomachs. Aristofanes tells us that Hercules was raised on fava beans maccu. Nino Valerio, a well-known food scholar, also reminds us that the Roman Empire was more the product of bowls of farro than the iron of swords.

Pythagoras hated fava beans that he considered "food for the dead" and a way of contacting the beyond. In fact "favismo" a hereditary hemolytic anemia is still widespread among the inhabitants of the Magna Graecia territory.
They were lucky to have the gods around. It was in fact wise Athena, according to mythology, who invented the olive tree. In truth the question was born as a matter of precedence with Poseidon, god of the sea: an extremely touchy matter because it was meant to decide who should have priority for a new temple to be built on the Athenian acropolis. Zeus had decided that the temple would be dedicated to the god who invented the most useful thing for man. Poseidon had made the sea appear at the foot of the Acropolis, thus giving that great city dominion over the oceans. But Athena won because she made an olive tree sprout upon that soil: the ancient and time-gnarled tree was shown to visitors to Athens until the II century AD. It did not burn even when the Persians burned Athens.

It was a sacred tree even for the Sicilian Greeks: to uproot one carried the penalty of banishment and exile for life. Oil was used as oral medicine, as a balm for wounds, as fuel for lanterns, in addition to food. But it was a symbol: the dove Noah sent out after the deluge returned with an olive branch in its beak, symbolizing the emergence of fertile lands after God's forgiveness.

Historically, it was the Phoenicians and the Greeks who brought the olive to Sicily and there, together with the fig tree, it became the very image of the island.

Today the tree is still given attentive care.
Its fruit is favored with very sweet feminine names: nuciddara, carbucia, bianculidda which can be used to produce oil or to preserve in jars. Olive oil was for tens of centuries the only food product exported by the Greeks following a precise law enacted by Solon in the VI century BC. The preservation of olives in salamoia is a ritual typical only of Sicily: they were preserved whole or without the pits, and they were served flavored with vinegar.
In his De Re Rustica, Lucius Junius Moderatus Columella, a Latin writer of the I century AD, recalls how Sicilians used to make a dish-preserve which consisted of olive paste called sampsa, which was in essence a flavored and salted pesto of olives. Its name corrupted by the passage of centuries ended up by being associated with the solid residues produced by the pressing of olives, that is the sansa.

2. "Bacchus and the three stages of drunkenness". Illustration by Rodo Santoro

Pliny wrote that "the two liquids most appreciated by the human body are: wine, internally, and oil, externally."
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To identify civilized and advanced people and to distinguish them from the barbarians, Homer used to say "Those who eat bread". In Athens, they used to bake twenty-two types of bread, in Selinunte, fourteen. A slice of bread hot from the oven dressed with a trickle of olive oil is an ancient food, the sign of ancient well being. Its invention will remain a mystery, together with the invention of yeast. All we have left is the legend that relates the story of a servant who wanting to spite her mistress threw leftover beer over the mixture of flour and water, thus starting the first fermentation process. Is it an Egyptian or Phoenician legend? Or is it even more ancient: Bethlehem in Aramaic means house of bread.
In Sicily, bread has preserved its ancient sacrality: people still make the Breads of St. Joseph to honor that saint with small altars adorned with tiny breads, mini sculptures, works of art baked by women and young girls. It became a basket for Easter eggs and also ex voto for pilgrims. The Eucharist was born with bread: "Take and eat of this my body" said Jesus. Wars and revolutions have broken out because of bread, governments have been overturned and kings chased out.

"Bread is order, hunger, disorder," people used to say.
Today we travel miles to find a wood burning oven; you don't buy by the kilos, but by the piece, the portion. Whereas Athenians used to bake seventy-two varieties of bread, today there are at least two hundred different types.
Pliny used to eat it with oysters, Pascoli with olive oil, my grandfather with mandarins, Veltroni with chocolate: evidently men change and tastes change.
In an era of crackers, with special balanced diets, we still say "as good like bread." Bread still maintains a nobility of its own on the dinner table.
Do you know where the English Lord comes from? From loaf-ward, that is the bread guardian. The Lady will turn her nose a bit, but it comes from Loaf-Doyng which once was written Loaf Dyghe which meant she who bakes the bread. This is after all a just and noble recognition to those who gave us bread.

Dear Reader, If you have read this far, it means you are interested in this book. You can have a copy of it by becoming a member of Arba Sicula. Just mention that you read part of it in the Arba Sicula web page when you send in your check for membership. Dues are $ 20.00 for senior citizens and students and $25.00 for all others. Make check payable to Arba Sicula and send it to Prof. Gaetano Cipolla, St. John's University, Jamaica, NY 11439.

Supplements to Arba Sicula

1. Jerre Mangione, Customs and Habits of the Sicilian Peasants, an article review, 1983.
2. Giovanni Meli, The Origin of the World, translated into English Verse by Gaetano Cipolla, 1985. Out of print.
3. La Barunissa di Carini: Poem of the Sicilian Renaissance, Introduced and Translated by Anthony Cinquemani, 1986. Available $ 6.00
4. Justin Vitiello, Sicily Within, 1992. Out of print.
5. Gaetano Cipolla, La Lupa, dramma sicilianu, an opera libretto 1992. Available $6.00.
6. Gaetano Basile, Sicilian Cuisine through History and Legend, translated into English by Gaetano Cipolla, Available as part of subscription while copies last.
7. Antonino da Castellammare del Golfo, The Venerable Andrea of Burgio, translated into English by Florence Russo-Cipolla, 2001. A few copies left. $6.00