Totally Authentic Flavors of Sicily
By MARY TAYLOR SIMETI;
Published: September 17, 1995
Ebeddu e cavuru, e beddu davveru!" -- It's beautiful and hot, it's beautiful indeed!
The voice from the street drifts in over the snipping of the scissors and the gentle hum of a hair dryer across the room in a hairdressing establishment just on the edge of Borgo Vecchio, a popular neighborhood near the port of Palermo.
"Did you hear that? Do you know what he is saying?" Like many of his compatriots, my hairdresser, Gaetano, enjoys testing me, to discover how deeply I have absorbed Sicilian language and culture after 30 years' residence here.
"He's selling something to eat," I reply. "Sfincione, I imagine." Sfincione, a thick, spongy Sicilian pizza topped with tomato sauce, onions, salted sardines and caciocavallo cheese, is baked in large rectangular tins and sold by the piece in the streets.
"Right!" Gaetano gives top marks to me, less to the sfincione seller. "Sfincione. But his isn't so good. They make different types, you know, different grades for the street vendors. The dough is always the same, but they treat it differently, they put different things on it, more topping or less. The sfincione is made over near the Via Castro. There's a bakery there that supplies all the street vendors, the ones that go around with pushcarts, Vespa pickups, bicycles, or whatever, selling sfincione. And the quality they ask for depends on their route. The man who goes round the schools, who deals with school kids, sells the better kind, while the one who sells to construction workers has the cheaper sfincione.
"When I was a kid, there was an old man who sold sfincione. 'Nasone,' we called him, Big Nose, and when he sold it we used to say that it was 'scarsu d'ogghiu e riccu di provolazzu,' scarce in oil and rich in dust, because it wasn't like it is now, the carts didn't have little glass cases to protect the food they sold. It was just sitting there, out in the open. In his cart he had a little pan of hot coals with an iron griddle over it, and when you wanted to buy some, all he did was take a piece and put it upside down on the griddle till it was hot. Nothing fell off because there wasn't anything to fall -- nowadays they put ham and mozzarella and stuff, but then it was just brushed with a little tomato sauce and a dribble of oil."
"Scarsu d'ogghiu!" I can't resist echoing Gaetano's words: the taste of Sicily's dialect is as rich to the tongue as its cooking.
"But it sure was full of dust! It was out in the open. There was a lot that didn't seem to matter in those days; Nasone had this cloth to wipe his hands on, or at least it was supposed to be for his hands, but he used it to wipe his hands, his enormous nose, everything -- servizio completo! What can I say? We kept on growing all the same!
"I remember, when I was a kid, we used to eat trunzi de vrocculu, cauliflower stems. I used to eat them a lot. We'd get them at the fruit and vegetable stand, peel them and eat them just as they were. It's not as if they were bad for us, eh? Raw vegetables, they're good for you. And maybe these things had a different taste then, in those days. Nowadays if you were to tell your kid to eat a cauliflower stem, it would be: 'What! Are you kidding? Go eat one yourself.' They're spoiled, perhaps. . . .
"Another thing I liked when I was a kid was the grattatedda, the little shavings. Ever heard of that? There were the ice-cream vendors who rode around with a little cart attached to a bicycle. They had regular ice cream in a well in the cart, and they sold the . . . What was it called? The ciarlotta. They had this little machine, a stick with a little square box on it, and they'd put a cookie in it, and then scoop out some ice cream and spread it in the box and then put another cookie on top. Then they pushed the stick up and out it all came -- just like the industrial ice cream sandwich they make today. But back then they made it in the streets and called it the ciarlotta.
"But the grattatedda, that was shaved ice. The vendors went around with a big block of ice, and they scraped at it with a sharp scoop that collected all the shavings. They'd put them in a glass and pour syrup over them: orange, lemon, mint, whatever you wanted. That's what we used to have, it was the poor man's granita.
"Somebody told me that it's coming back into fashion, there's someone who goes by selling it again now. I think people are curious about these things, they want to try them. And as for machine-made ice cream, you can't tell what's in it. They give you what looks like an enormous cone, and if you don't hurry up and eat it, there's nothing there.
ANOTHER THING they used to sell in the streets that you don't see anymore is the cucuzza lunga, those long, long zucchinis, the pale green ones. They'd boil them in a copper caldron and then hand you a piece, no plate or anything, just wrapped up in a zucchini leaf, to bite into.
"They used to sell octopus that way, too, not set out on plates like they do today. The sellers would walk around with clay pots like amphoras tied over their shoulders with a cord, or hanging from a yoke, and they carried the boiled octopus that way. They sold anise water, too, like that, drinking water spiked with anise in clay pots to keep it cool.