The Omnivorous Fish

Sicilian - Italian - English

Ammaru - Gamberi - Shrimp

Babaluccia - Lumache - Snail

Cumoigghiu - Copertura - Cover

Droco - Laggiu - Over there

Eccu - Ecco - Here you go

Fuinu - Forno - Oven

Gridari - Gridare - To scream (not a good example)

Iddu - Lui - Him

Jelu - Gelo - Pudding or Gel

Lagnusu - Pigro** - Lazy

Manjari - Mangiare - To eat (also pistiari, but this is usually used as “to dine” or “to eat a meal”)

Niuro - Nero - Black

Ojo - Olio - Oil

Pumuruoru - Pomodoro - Tomato

Quannu - Quando - When

Racina - Uva - Grape

Scecchu - Mulo - Mule

Travagghiari (sometimes Travajari)- Lavorare - To work

Unne - Dove - Where

Vogghieri - Volere - To want

Zainu - Zaino - Backpack (another bad example, but I didn’t know the Italian word for backpack until I looked it up)

Notice that we have “j.” Yes, we have j. Italian doesn’t generally have j, k, w, x or y. In fact, in Italian, j is “long I”, k is the greek word (kappa), w is “double-v” (why it isn’t for us, who knows), and y is “Greek I”. J pops up in dialectical words, and modernisms like “Jugoslavia.” You occasionally see K in Northeastern dialects that are German-tinged, like in Alto-Adige, and is having a surge of popularity in the under 40 crowd, in text messages and IMs, as in “ke” (che- what). Likewise X, which is, of course the mathematical symbol for “times,” which in Italian is per (times, for, per) so you might ask Perche- in a text message with “xke-”

**I got the word “pigro” from babelfish but I have never heard an Italian person say it. In my experience they say “non vuole fare niente” – “he doesn’t want to do anything”- in place of the word lazy. Sicilian people usually say lagnusu. As a topic for chop-busting (the national pastime) utility or industriousness is a common topic. Insults might include innutile (useless) or scecchu (a mule, or a horse that is mentally damaged, something that works hard, but not smart).

The Language

There are some obvious relationships that may have jumped out at you. The vowel o often becomes u. A soft g often morphs into j and becomes a /y/ sound. Clusters like li and gl will drift lazily along:

olio /OH lee oh/ to ojo /OY-yo/
tagliare /tal YAH reh/ to tagghiare /tahg-GYA-re/.

Another good example I neglected to include is a double l, which hardens into a double d:

bello /BEL-low/ to biddu /BEEHD-doo/.
capello /ka-PELL-oh/ to capiddu /gah BEEHD-doo/

There is a glottal replacement before double consonants in Sicilian that I tried to emulate with the H in the preceding examples. There is a subtle ejective consonant at the end. I admit, it’s a really strange accent, and the Agent said it sounded like I was speaking Russian. Funnily enough, a lot of those sounds come from Arabic.

Looking at these examples in isolation, you might be tempted to think “this is mostly an accent; this isn’t a language, it’s a dialect.” Well, it’s not. It has its own syntax and verb forms, and the conjugation rules are pretty different. We could draw the same parallels between Italian and French or Spanish words. We’ll get to all that… at some point.

Listening: Panic at the Disco “9 in the Afternoon” Live in studio.

How many can you guess? Or do you know?

Ammaru

Babaluccia

Cumoigghiu

Droco

Eccu

Fuinu

Gridari

Iddu

Jelu

Lagnusu

Manjari

Niuro

Ojo

Pumuruoru

Quannu

Racina

Scecchu

Travagghiare

Unne

Vogghieri

Zainu

Notice that we have “j.”

Well, last year, I fantasized about Easter dinner. This year, I’m doing it. I made 120 ravioli and did mise* for 3 easter pies plus bread tomorrow. 15 ladies and gentlemen are coming to eat all this stuff sunday, and I am psyched. If only I had had time for landscaping. Living in an apartment, you forget that there even is an outside to your home. It’s an amorphous concept, like Detroit.

Well, here’s the menu, if you can’t wait to find out. It’s a mixture of Neapolitan, Sicilian and Southern Californian influences, with nods to tradition, availability and pragmatism. And no, unfortunately, I did not find a goat.

Pizza Chena Easter “Stuffed” Pie in the style of Acqua Bella, Campania: A rich yeast dough with butter and eggs, filled with basket cheese, ham, pecorino romano and herbs.

Torta di Zucchini Another Easter Pie, this time Filo filled with a custard holding together Salame Napoletano, zucchini and spring onions.

Pane Pasquali A festive yellow bread dough braided with whole eggs, covered with poppy seeds and baked.

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Ravioli of Fava Beans with tuma cheese, sauced with butter, olive oil and marjoram, with caciocavallo cheese

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Lamb Leg Cacio e Uova: Braised Lamb with onions and white wine with an enriched sauce of eggs, lemon and cheese

Braised artichokes
Roasted potatoes with rosemary

Arugula Salad with Lemon

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Pastiera Napoletana Easter grain pie

Risu Niuro Sicilian Black Easter Risotto (with cocoa, not squid ink, you knucklehead)

So, as you can see, I have to get back to work. I hope you all have a great holiday.

Listening: NPR, Fresh Air

Well, Easter is almost here, and for the first time in about ten years, I have off. And we’re getting into it.

I’m only partly Sicilian by extraction, although most of my cultural exposure was with Sicilians, but a lot of my family traditions are cilentano, that is to say from Campania, which is to say Naples, the capital of Campania. That means pastiera, or grain pie, a sweet pie made of hulled wheat berries. It also means pizza chena, or pizza piena, which means stuffed pie (the former the Neapolitan word, the latter Italian), a yeast-raisd dough stuffed with any combination of salumi, cheeses, herbs and boiled eggs. The “ham pie” of my childhod is a simple animal made of ham, hardboiled eggs, fresh ricotta (basket cheese) and parsley.

Strangely, we never had lamb on Easter, but then again we never had lamb ever because my mother doesn’t like it. In fact, the first time I had it, it was in a restaurant when I was 12 or 13, and I ordered it mainly because I knew my mother didn’t like it. And even though it wasn’t phenomenal and it came with irridescent green mint jelly, I knew that there was something to this whole lamb thing.

What we did have was ravioli. In fact, I made my first-ever ravioli for easter, when I was 9 or 10. My mom thought I was nuts (she still does).

So I’m working on the menu, but I’m trying to hit all the traditional bases: favas, cheese, eggs, peas and artichokes. We’ll see how the markets treat me.

I’ll tell you, it’s not easy to find a lot of specialty Italian products in Southern California. In New York- or even Philadelphia- imported and artisanally made products are everywhere, especially around Easter. But here, not so much. I did find tuma, a somewhat obscure sicilian cheese, in this little deli near my house. If you’re in long beach, I recommend Angelo’s highly. But it seems like I have to go back to mail order, well, internet order, which I haven’t really done since the Food Network Revolution. That and, of course, I need to start adapting recipes to available products, just like the immigrants did. But for this year, I’m sticking to the originals as much as I can.

Listening: “I Palindrome I” Apollo 18 They Might Be Giants

Sometimes you just get a taste in your head. Like a bad song from high school, no matter what you do, you know there’s only one way to get it out, which is how you came to find yourself in Best Buy at nine o’clock at night trying to decide between “Becoming X” and “Best of the Sneaker Pimps.”

Well, a couple of months ago, a very specific flavor rolled into my head: the sicilian sweet and sour flavor. An amalgamation of wine, tomatoes, sugar, vinegar and sometimes honey, it’s a singular taste that can’t really be explained. It’s richer than what Americans think of as Chinese sweet and sour, much subtler and infinitely more complex. Imagine a tomato sauce a little on the sweet side with an astringent background note that doesn’t quite make you pucker, but stays with you nonetheless. The subtlety comes from long cooking, and often one or more of the sweet and sour components disappear completely, like in polpo agrodolce, sweet and sour octopus, which has tomatoes in it, but you’d never know.

Sometimes the sauce is left slightly out of balance, and ingredients are added at the end to shift it one way or the other, like currants or raisins for sweet, or fresh vinegar or capers for sour. You could cook just about anything agrodolce, probably, and get away with it; though squashes (summer and winter), sprouting vegetables and shellfish seem to have an especial affinity for the treatment.

Last night, I finally scratched the itch with an old-school pasta al cavolofiore: pasta with cauliflower. It’s a typical agrodolce dish, garnished with toasted breadcrumbs rather than cheese, which would be at odds with the complex and poignant flavor of the sauce. I took some poetic license this time and used panko breadcrumbs, mainly because I didn’t have any dry bread lying around, and the panko seem to keep their flavor better in packaging than regular breadcrumbs and their larger size mimics fresh.

It’s a big recipe; it will sauce at least two or three pounds of pasta, but it is fantastic spooned over polenta and would be equally at home stirred into or poured onto rice or plain risotto. You can pretty much substitute winter squash, broccoli or brussels sprouts directly into this recipe. For zucchini or yellow squash skip the initial blanching, and for eggplant a quick saute in peanut oil should replace the blanching altogether.

I’ve only made this with white cauliflower, but I’d imagine that other colors or romanesco would be equally good, though for romanesco I would only blanch it very briefly.

The pictures of this didn’t come out terribly well, but I included one anyway so you could see the texture of the finished sauce. Don’t let the look of that pic fool you: this sauce is boss.

Pasta al Cavolofiore Agrodolce
Pasta with Sweet and Sour Cauliflower

1 head very fresh cauliflower, about 1-1/2 pounds

3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
2 medium onions, thinly sliced
5 or 6 cloves of garlic, peeled
2 28 oz cans of whole peeled plum tomatoes, san marzano or bel roma if available
1 to 2 teaspoons sugar, to tase and depending on the tomatoes
2 tablespoons red or white wine vinegar, plus more to taste
1 tablespoon kosher salt, plus more to taste
1/2 teaspoon black pepper, plus more to taste
1/2 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes, or to taste
1 teaspoon dried oregano, with the blossoms if using branch oregano
2/3 cup dried black currants or golden raisins (or plain raisins)
1/2 cup pine nuts

2 cups homemade (or packaged Panko) breadcrumbs
salt and pepper to taste
1/2 cup or so extra virgin olive oil
2 teaspoons minced fresh rosemary or other herb

Set a large pot of salted water to boil. If cooking pasta, do NOT use the same water to cook the pasta and the cauliflower. The pasta will end up tasting like funky old cabbage.

Heat the oil in a deep pot (at least 4 quarts) and add the onion. Cook over medium heat until softened, about 5 minutes. Season with salt and pepper and add the garlic. When the garlic just begins to turn golden (NOT brown) add the tomatoes and all their juice. Rinse out the cans with some water, but don’t add more than 3/4 of a cup or so to the sauce. Add the sugar, vinegar, salt, pepper, red pepper flakes and oregano. Bring to a gentle boil and cook for ten minutes, stirring occasionally.

After ten minutes, lower the heat to medium and start breaking up the tomatoes with a spoon. Don’t worry about the texture at this point, just pop each tomato so they’re not keeping their seeds and juice separate from the rest of the sauce. Cover partially and cook for thirty minutes or so, somewhere between a lively simmer and a gentle boil. Stir it regularly, as the tomatoes will want to stick to the bottom. If you’re not using a very heavy pan for this, you might want to use a flame tamer (or my ghetto flame tamer, the lid from the tomato can). If it seems that the sauce is too liquid, remove the cover.

Meanwhile, break off the leaves from the cauliflower stalk and cut around it to separate the florets. Trim them into inch or so pieces, then pare away the outer layers of the stalk and slice what’s left (do not throw this part away on any vegetable, including heads of lettuce). Blanch the cauliflower for about 5 minutes, until it is barely softened, but still retains some crunch in the middle. Drain the cauliflower in a colander. Don’t use this water for anything else; it tastes kind of funky.

Put the breadcrumbs into a skillet and season them with salt and pepper. Pour in some of the olive oil, just enough to moisten them. Don’t put so much that there is oil pooling in the bottom. Put this over medium low heat and stir it often, so that the breadcrumbs turn a toasty mahogany color, but don’t let them burn. If they burn, start over: there’s no saving them. When you think they’re getting close, add the rosemary so it perfumes the crumbs. Transfer to a plate when they’re ready.

Cover the raisins with boiling water. Toast the pine nuts in a small, heavy skillet over medium heat, tossing regularly, then transfer to a plate to cool.

After thirty minutes, the sauce should taste more or less like a marinara sauce: bright and fresh, but a little bit sour and a little bit oniony-sweet. The tomatoes should be pretty coarse by this point, but break them up with a spoon to a chunky but regular consistency. Add the cauliflower and lower the heat so the sauce simmers gently. Cook the sauce and cauliflower together for about ten minutes, stirring occaisionally.

Drain the raisins.

After ten minutes, add the raisins and pine nuts to the sauce, adjust the seasoning with salt and pepper and maybe some fresh vinegar if it’s needed or desired. Cook the sauce for five minutes more.

Serve over pasta or polenta, sprinkled with the toasted breadcrumbs.

Finished Sauce

Zucchini alla Sara

The word Siciliy, in Italian, is pronounced see-CHEEL-ya. The way people actually say it in Sicily is more like see-JEE-ya. The “L” is annunciated, but rolled, sort of like Latinate “R”s. It’s almost aspirative, but the breath doesn’t really resonate the way it does with, say “pit.” Long story short, things that are Sicilian are often referred to as “SEE-jee” by Italians and “SIH-jee” by Italian Americans. (Sometimes Sicilians will also refers to things as al isola or isolata, meaning more or less “from the island.” I think this is archaic now, however.)

By ethnic extraction, I am half Sicilian, but most of my family of that side had either died or become completely Americanized by the time I was old enough to be cognizant of such things. My real immersion in the culture happened when I got into the pizza business, and worked with three different owners and their families who were direct-from-the-mountain Sicilian, two of whom were from the same town. I worked literally thousands of hours with these families, and learned a lot about Sicily past and present from them.

Two things that I took away from cooking with them (cooking for ourselves, not for the christiani, or customers) were freedom from tomatoes (although I love them) and a deep and meaningful respect for and admiration of vegetables. I once watched my first boss’s wife, Sara, slice an enormous zucchini, the likes of which I had never seen before, and had come from her garden, salt it in a colander and weight it with cans of tomatoes, a treatment I had only ever seen for eggplant (by my mother for her absolutely ethereal eggplant parmigiana). After a few hours (the lunch rush), Sara unceremoniously dropped these limp, wet slices of squash into the deep fryer, creating a cacophony of gurgling and splattering that was the antithesis of everything I had learned to want from safe deep frying. It was magical. Once they emerged, she sauteed some garlic in olive oil and we ate the whole mess on pasta. Specifically dry spaghetti, only occasionally did we eat short pasta, and fresh pasta was infrequently seen and reserved for more refined sauces.

The zucchini slices were tranformed into mahogany-bubbled crispy-mushy pieces of heaven. They were sweet and savory and salty and greasy, in a good way. That meal has stuck with me the way few have. The way it was “Italian food,” which I had been eating all my life, but was completely alien to me, the care Sara took preparing it and the warmth with which she included me in her family’s meal.

We have kitchens in the hotel here in Greenville, SC, and I went to the “Bi-Lo” with my boss when we got here. It’s pretty unremarkable as chain supermarkets go, and it was actually kind of bizarre to be in one. The only supermarkets I ever go in in are Whole Foods or Fairway, which are by and large unlike most supermarkets (at least the Whole Foods on 24th and 7th in Manhattan). So I bought all these groceries, including the aforementioned eight-ball squash and was stranded at the hotel this morning, so I decided to cook. As a point of information, the recipe below will require about 40 packets of salt and about 5 of pepper, if you’re making it in a hotel room.

Pasta con Zucchini alla Sara
amply serves 2 for lunch, 3 if one of them is an anorexic actor

1/2 pound dry pasta, short or long (I used Barilla rotini)
1 large eight-ball squash (8-10 oz)
1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil, approximately

3 or 4 cloves garlic, chopped (about 1.5 tbsn)
1/2 small serrano chile, chopped finely (about 1 tsp)
1 small tomato, diced (about 2/3 cup)

salt and pepper
grated (or chopped) hard cheese, such as sharp provolone or romano (this is an instance where the richness of parmesan cheese would be inappropriate), for sprinkling on pasta

Slice the squash in half through the stem and trim it away. If the squash is very seedy, you can scrape some of the seeds away, but try not to lose any/much flesh. Slice the squash into half-moons (or crescent moons, if you’ve seeded) and layer into a colander set over a sheet pan or plate, salting every layer thoroughly. Invert a plate over the zucchini (one of small enough diameter not to be impeded by the colander as the zucchini level lowers) and place weights on the plate, such as cans of tomatoes or gold bricks. If your arrangement is such that there is any chance of the zucchini or its juice contacting the weights, wrap them in plastic wrap just to be safe. Let this sit for at least an hour, until the zucchini are softened and the drip of moisture into the sheet pan is no longer noticeable. This will vary a lot on your squash.

Bring a large pot of water to a rolling boil and add 1 tbsn salt for every 2 quarts. (I once heard someone say that it mattered whether you salted the water before or after the water boiled. That’s ludicrous. [My mother claims that the salt makes the water boil faster. There’s no scientific basis for this that I’m aware of, and informal kitchen experiments tell me this is not, in fact, true.])

Meanwhile, lay the zucchini out on paper or clean cloth towels to drain. Heat a saute pan over medium-high heat and add extra virgin olive oil until it is about 1 cm (3/8”) deep in the pan. Test the oil by dipping the corner of one zucchini slice in the oil. If it sizzles violently, it’s ready. Add the zucchini slices in a single layer, working in batches if necessary. If you end up between batches without a full pan, adjust the heat so that the oil doesn’t darken and smoke. Fry the zucchini until darkened and blistered all over its surface, about 2 minutes per side. When turning the zucchini, turn it away from you, so if the oil splatters it splatters away from you.

As you take the zucchini out of the oil, put it on a plate and grind black pepper over it (or shake your packet). Do not drain on paper towels, this zucchini-olive oil will become the sauce.

Add the pasta to the boiling water, stirring occasionally. If your stove sucks, like the one at my hotel and can’t keep the water at a vigorous boil, cover the pot about half-way. DO NOT cover it completely. Dump out the oil you’ve cooked the zucchini in (unless it is really clear and flawless) and add 2 tbsn fresh oil to the pan. Add the garlic and the chili and saute until the garlic barely begins to brown around the edges. Add the zucchini and heat through. Add the tomato, stir and take off the heat.

Cook the pasta until just barely al dente, or “to the tooth,” meaning when it has softened, but still needs to be bitten through. It should be neither crunchy nor mushy. Keep in mind the pasta will continue to cook after it has been drained.
Take some of the pasta water out of the pot with a pyrex or metal cup and reserve. Drain the pasta. With some water still clinging, add the pasta to the zucchini and toss thoroughly. If the sauce seems a little “tight” or if you like it liquid, add some pasta water. Keep in mind, however, this does not make a sauce like you might me used to. There are three autonomous components to the dish: pasta, vegetables and lingering juices.

Put the pasta in bowls and sprinkle with grated cheese. Serve immediately.

Listening: Dogs Among the Bushes by the Chieftans from the The Best of the Chieftans