No Uscita

Last Tuesday warm wafts of star jasmine and lavender welcomed me to Palermo.  Though it was 93º Farenheit, a cool breeze kept me from knowing it.  There was a beautiful level of moisture in the air.  The humidity didn’t swallow me whole and I never felt sticky.  My hair just had more bounce and body than normal.  Then again, so did I after a few good meals.

 

Our first supper in San Vito Lo Capo was outstanding.  I had busiate which is the local pasta in Trapani.  The dried noodles look like this:

I ordered them alla norma which is to say with roasted aubergine the consistency of silk and topped with salty ricotta.  Henry had his noodles with urchin or as he calls them, the truffles of the sea.  Next up was a dish called tonno saporito.  It was grilled tuna with sauteed capers, olives, onions, tomatoes, oranges, and toasted pistachios.  Of course all this had to end with cannoli and eventually a walk on the beach.  

   

In Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s The Leopard, he writes, “Tancredi, in an attempt to link gallantry with greed, tried to imagine himself tasting, in the aromatic forkfuls, the kisses of his neighbour Angelica, but he realised at once that the experiment was disgusting and suspended it, with a mental reserve about reviving this fantasy with the pudding.”  This cannoli invoked all of that for me.  As did the late afternoon post-nap cherries and peaches I consumed.

Every day we were by the sea, I made sure to eat something from it.  Fish, octopus, squid, lobster, shrimp, you name it.  Then when we travelled south to Marsala and inland for a few days at a gorgeous baglio amongst the grillo vines, I ate scaloppine di vitello al marsala or al limone.  I snacked on olives and almonds from orchards I could see from our room.  I had prosciutto, melons, and blood orange juice at breakfast followed by espresso and chocolate muffins baked with roasted peanuts on top.

I watched England lose to Uruguay whilst sipping an aperol spritz and Italy to Costa Rica with a bottle of chilled frappato so evocative of pomegrante and blueberry I could hardly tell it wasn’t juice instead of wine.

I ate gelati like a school girl.

I also wore respectable dresses when visiting churches and bared some cleavage when I wasn’t.

Sicily is full of magic.  It’s the kind of place where stray dogs and tiny street cats appear out of nowhere and lavish you with love for a few hours.  Crazy men passionate about life will let you sample their private stash of wine that tastes just as it would have when the English first discovered it centuries ago and thought we can manufacture this into something fortified and call it marsala.  Butterflies will land on your shoulder.  The sun will shine where you’re sitting.  And even when multiple road signs point in different directions but supposedly for the same place, you will find your way.  When you get there, there will probably even be a perfect scoop of coconut ice cream with your name on it.

I did lots of things in Sicily.  More than anything, I just sat in the sand or on a breezy hilltop and enjoyed my husband.  Five years and a demanding toddler later, we still like each other.  We still slow dance without any music when no one is looking.  And we still find the other fascinating and funny and still have things to say.  I know five years isn’t a long time but at home in London, a beloved spouse’s words are sometimes lost in the noise of everyday life.  It’s hard to hear over the din of a two year old.  But in Sicily the summer wind blew our distractions away.  All we could notice and revel in was each other (and the amazing food and drink, obviously).

Below is a recipe for a salad I made this evening when we needed a little Sicilian calm.  I followed it up with a chilli and crab risotto of Nigella Lawson’s I’ve come to love.  I hope you do too.

Sicilian Summer Salad    

Ingredients:

2 fennel bulbs, sliced

2 oranges, chopped

1/2 a ruby grapefruit, chopped

a handful of green Sicilian olives (I used Nocellara because they’re my favorite)

1 jar of the best tuna you can find (I like tuna in olive oil best even though I drain the oil)

a handful of fresh chopped mint

Method:  Drain the tuna and set it aside.  Chop/slice your produce and put it in a large dish.  Add the tuna.  Garnish with mint.  That’s it.  Sweet like the citrus groves and briny like the sea.  This is a salad that would be a pleasing side dish for any Phoenician queen.

 

Slicily (or so I’ve called it after a few aperol spritzes) and the Sweet Life

Five years ago, I met my husband under a blood red moon while on a classic car rally in Sicily.  We were both there as guests of people who owned vintage cars.  Neither of us really fit in.  We were the strangers who came not knowing anyone other than the friends who invited us.  Still, what an adventure.

We spent a week together with 50 or so other people, toodling around hill towns and rugged beaches, meeting up only for meals and parties.  Not until the last day did we actually talk to each other.

At Catania Airport, or Aeroporto I should say, Henry and I had our first proper conversation.  The ice breaker was of a sartorial nature.  He was wearing a stripy blue jacket with white chinos as was I.  His was paired with brown suede loafers and mine with red patent leather ballet slippers that criss-crossed and buckled around my tan ankles. We were like a his and hers page in a J. Crew catalogue.

It was there at the curb while checking luggage that Henry and I realized we had a really good rapport.  Sadly, he lived in London and I in L.A. so we both quit flirting parce que what was the point and said our good-byes.  Neither of us thought we’d ever see the other again.  But life is funny and we knew nothing of what the future held.

When I got back to Los Angeles the customs officer asked if I had anything to declare.  “Boredom, vice, and poverty,” I said.  I thought I was still nursing a grand-daddy of a hangover I felt so bad.  My sickness turned out to be food poisoning from something I ate on the plane.  Once at home, I crawled into bed and stayed there for a week.

My friend who invited me on the trip forwarded me an email.  It was a humorous account of the first breakfast in Sicily that Henry had written for the London Review of Breakfasts.  I enjoyed it so much and immediately wrote to him.  He responded by telling me how pleased he was I was the first person from the rally to comment on it.

From that day forward we were in correspondence.  Daily.  I sent him parcels full of candy, Nat Sherman cigarettes, and CDs.  He sent me books with endearing inscriptions inside.  The day Geoff Dyer’s “Jeff in Venice Death in Varanasi” arrived along with some Owl and the Pussycat vanilla biscuits, I knew I had to go to him.

I flew to London for a ten day visit and there at Heathrow we had our first kiss.  I remember holding his hand the whole of our train ride to Paddington and then the entire cab ride to Bethnal Green.  I remember looking at him and hearing Lord Tanamo’s “I’m in the Mood for Love” on a loop in my head.  Life was full of magic.

Henry took me for lunch at one of his favorite restaurants, 32 Great Queen Street, where we’d later have a dinner party belatedly celebrating our marriage the following spring.  I remember potted shrimp and smoked mackerel and Bandol rosé, but what I remember most about that meal came after we left the restaurant.

As we walked outside and down the street all wrapped up in each other like new lovers do, an old man in a wheel chair outside a pub raised a tremulous arm and pointed to us.  “Love,” he said.  And it was.  So novelistically so.

At the end of those ten days, I never went home.  Instead, Henry and I survived a car crash in the South of France and he asked me to marry him on the Eurostar back to London.  A few days later he presented me with a diamond ring so I wouldn’t doubt the sincerity of his proposal.  The rest is history.

Tomorrow, we’ll be back in Sicily for the first time in five years.  Just the two of us.  No classic cars, no naughty toddler, no distractions.  Just the owl and the pussycat and a pea green boat.  Maybe a little Nino Rota on the iPod to keep us company.  And why not?  This is the sweet life.  Sweet and refreshing as any good frappato.

When I return I’ll inundate you with pictures of rugged coastlines and cannoli.  Until then, I’ll leave you with this.  My recipe for Swarthy Sicilian Chicken for Magical Realists.  Life is magical.  Sometimes it just takes a blood red moon and a distance of 5,437 miles to illuminate it for you.

 

Swarthy Sicilian Chicken for Magical Realists

I look better with a tan.  I don’t care how gauche you think I am to say it.  My best friend is a dermatologist.  I know about the dangers of sun exposure.  My healthy fear of melanoma aside, I am also a Vanity Smurf.  I realize too much sun is bad and can render you a blotchy, freckly, ginger hag who has been living in the Canary Islands sans SPF for twenty plus years (I have given this alter ego the name of Mrs. Rathbone).  No woman wants a face like a moccasin.  Nor do I believe does any man.  This is why I always slather myself with sunscreen.  Still, the fact remains.  I look better with a tan.  For me, a tawny complexion is tantamount to instantly losing five pounds.  It also makes one’s teeth look whiter.  Who in Britain wouldn’t want that?

The first time I met the man I had no idea would be my husband, I was so swarthy he thought I was Brazilian.  I wasn’t.  I’m not.  Though I had just spent two weeks in the Caribbean drinking caipirinhas with my family, building sandcastles with my baby sister, and soaking up the sun.

Ah, the sun.  The glorious sun.

Under the Sicilian sun, my husband and I had our beginnings.  For me, this heat will always be romanticized.  When life in London gets too cold and dreary or I‘ve gone as sallow as a Dickensian orphan, this Sicilian ideal is where I go in my mind.  One of the things that helps me get there is a dish we’ve dubbed Swarthy Chicken.  For us, it’s evocative of that glowing tan I had the first time I noticed how much I loved my future husband’s nose in profile.  It reminds us of the day we sat reading next to each other poolside, ignorant to what was written in the stars, under a sea of bougainvillea on the grounds of a 17^th century mansion overlooking the Mediterranean.  Swarthy Chicken is for magical realists because one serving of this dish can transport you to our sultry jasmine-scented Sicily.  But only if you believe.

The recipe is as follows:

Preheat your oven to 225 Celsius.  You want it to have all the heat of Mount Etna when she roars.

Next, slice a large yellow onion into thin rounds.  Lay these rounds at the bottom of an earthenware casserole.  Be sure to use some sort of enameled ceramic dish.  Only philistines use glass or tin.  My favorites are either a Le Creuset lasagne dish or a pretty Italian Majolica piece.  Both are built in fire and can handle fire.  Add two thinly sliced red, yellow or orange bell peppers.  Make them thin, but do not julienne.  Now smash four garlic cloves and scatter them amongst the other vegetable ruins.

Take 8-10 chicken thighs.  Thighs are inexpensive, moist, full of flavor and most importantly, they can withstand long cooking at high heat.  Rub the chicken pieces with butter.  Be generous.  Use the butter as if it were the chicken’s sunscreen.  Add a light drizzle of olive oil then liberally salt, pepper, and sprinkle with spicy smoked paprika.  This will add a fiery oaky flavor to the dish that will hearken back to the Aragonese invasion of Sicily.

Bake for 20-30 minutes.  The skin should be crisp and brown.  The onions should be caramelized with a few charred bits as if seared to seal in deliciousness by Etna herself.  Roll the chicken pieces in the savory drippings to keep moist.

Turn down the oven to 175 Celsius and bake for another 15 minutes.

Roll the chicken thighs in their juices and add a splash of good Marsala wine.  Bake for another 15 minutes so the alcohol cooks off but the flavor remains.  Terre Arse is the brand we use in our house.  My husband swears it tastes of Sicily’s past.  Perhaps he fought against the French during the War of Vespers in another life?  I have no idea.  But I take most of what he says, especially about wine, to heart. The oranges, cinnamon and pistachios that the Arabs brought to Sicily 1,000 years ago are very present in this fortified wine’s flavor notes and you will definitely be able to taste them in your gravy.  Let us not forget Marsala is Arabic for Port of Allah.  And it is from Allah (or at least his port) that Marsala must come as it really is the most otherworldly emulsifier.  It pulls together all the elements of this dish—the smoke and the spice of the paprika, the oak of the casks that aged the wine, the sweetness of the caramelized onions and peppers—to create the richest, most fragrant gravy.

Before serving, throw in a handful of roughly chopped green Sicilian olives.  My favorite are the giant meaty ones from Puglia that are so sweet and fruity, one could mistake them for cherries.

Serve atop basmati rice, turn on the Nino Rota and you’re there.  Swarthy in Sicily that is.