The Man Who Ate Everything (47 page)

The restaurant lists every dish at five times the cost of its ingredients to cover rent, labor, and interest on bank loans and yield a profit.
This is the key.
This is why what sells for $25.00 in a New York restaurant sells for $8.00 in the suburban Midwest, if you can find it. The customer is renting an extravagantly decorated twenty square feet of Manhattan for two or three hours.

So the Skate with Brown Butter will be priced at $22.00. The cost of an appetizer, dessert, and coffee approximately equals that of the entree, say another $22.00. Half a modest $30.00 bottle of wine is $15.00; half a bottle of sparkling water is $2.50.

The total so far is $61.50. Tax adds $5.07, a 15 percent tip another $9.99. Grand total: $76.56.

And it all started with $1.31 worth of skate.

September 1990

As our plane circled Palermo, a snowcapped Mount Etna unexpectedly swam into view. “Etna of the snow and secret changing winds,” I said to my wife, pointing toward the eastern end of the island. “Not many men can really stand her without losing their
souls.”

Actually, I was reading from D. H. Lawrence. I can never understand why Lawrence got so hysterical about Mount Etna. Sure, she is the largest volcano in Europe, brooding, dark, and gloomy. Sure, her eruptions have destroyed countless human beings and entire Sicilian cities. But to me, Etna was something more. To me, she was the Mother of All Ice Cream.

Or so I thought when we landed in Palermo. Sicily’s colonizers—Greeks, Romans, Saracens, and Spanish—used to harvest Etna’s snow, pack it into grottoes along her slopes, and, in summer, retrieve their chilly treasure to concoct refreshing iced drinks and snow cones drenched with wine and sweetened fruit essences. “In these climates the lack of snow is feared as much as the lack of grain, wine, or oil,” reported a traveling Frenchman in the eighteenth century. Today Sicilians are still crazy for frozen things, which they eat four or five times a day, starting at breakfast. They are most famous for their granita.

It was granita that had lured me to Sicily—pure and penetrating half-frozen crystalline concoctions of water and sugar, flavored with rose petals or jasmine, coffee or cocoa, fresh fruit
juices and syrups. Our plan was to make a counterclockwise circuit of the island, learning the secrets of granita, and then, climbing up to Etna’s snowy peak, taste the primeval origins of every ice and ice cream that came after.

Palermo’s heyday, at least one heyday, was around
a.d.
965, when, under Arab rule, it was the second-largest city in the world—crowded with palaces, markets, and three hundred mosques—vying with Baghdad and Cordoba as the greatest Arab seat of learning, culture, and cuisine. The Arabs brought sugar-cane, mulberries, and citrus fruits (along with many things that have nothing to do with granita), and innumerable recipes for
sharbat,
their sweetened, aromatic drinks flavored with fruits, blossoms, and spices, and often chilled with mountain snow. Many writers casually declare that the Arabs in Sicily made the momentous jump from snow cones to granitas and water ices by freezing their
sharbats.
This means that the Arabs either invented artificial freezing in Sicily (or in Andalusia or Baghdad) or brought the method from China long before Marco Polo claimed the discovery. But I was becoming skeptical, particularly after dipping into two books I had brought with me—Weir and Liddell’s excellent
Ices
(Hodder & Stoughton and Grub Street, London) and Elizabeth David’s
Harvest of the Cold Months
(Michael Joseph).

Our first morning in Palermo dawned at a little
gelateria
named Cofea, among the oldest and perhaps the best in town. A crowd of Palermitans stood at the counter and spilled onto the street, taking their breakfast, which in spring and summer consists of a sweet, flat brioche sliced almost in half, filled with a wide paddleful of coffee ice cream, and trimmed with whipped cream, or a tall glass of coffee granita—in fact, any granita—with pieces of brioche to dunk into it; and, of course, an espresso or a cappuccino. Your first brioche dunked into a slushy granita is an unforgettable treat. So is every one that follows.

(The Sicilian brioche, which Mary Simeti—who writes so memorably about Sicilian food and history—believes was introduced in the nineteenth century by Swiss pastry chefs who had come to Catania, is a flat, round, sweet, yeasted roll with a little ball of dough on top, resembling a French brioche flattened to a third of its height, or a gigantic hamburger roll. The recipe varies from city to city around the island, from the recognizable golden combination of sugar, flour, eggs, and butter or lard to an uninteresting, white, and doughy specimen made with margarine and without eggs.)

The granitas at Cofea were wonderful and the ingredients utterly simple, or so it seemed. Piero Marzo, the ice-cream maker, demonstrated his recipe for lemon granita in a neat little white building behind the shop, squeezing lemons and adding their juice to a solution of sugar and water. Back in the bustling shop, he poured the mixture into one of two dozen cylindrical metal tubs set into the long, refrigerated stainless-steel ice-cream counter; as the liquid begins to freeze, he will stir it every so often, and then, after it has solidified overnight, he will defrost it slightly for ten minutes and scrape the surface with a wide, flat, triangular ice-cream paddle and scoop the crystals into a footed glass. All this seemed simple enough.

But as I would soon discover, Sicilian lemons taste different from ours—sweeter, more complex, less acidic, more perfumed. One Sicilian pastry chef told us that the second time he came to New York to give some classes, he brought a suitcase full of lemons picked in the groves near his hometown. The lesson Sicilian granitas teach you is simplicity. Their aim is to celebrate the essential flavor, at the perfect time of year, of
one
fruit or flower— not to prove the cleverness of the cook and his ability to combine and transform flavors. How would I be able to duplicate even this simplest of granitas back home? Using lemons with less perfume, I would increase the proportion of lemon juice. But then the acidity would climb so high that I would need more sugar. And the higher the sugar content, the less icily the mixture will freeze— more than about 22 percent sugar by weight and granita will stay mushy no matter how long you freeze it. (Fruits with lots of
pectin, such as strawberries, make things even worse.) Zesting the lemon for more flavor can add bitterness. And after all these adjustments, the pure, transparent, ethereal flavor will be lost.

Worried about what the future would bring, we left Palermo and headed westward along the northern coast of the island. It was midspring, and we saw nothing of the dusty roads and parched fields of popular imagery. Now Sicily was a cool and abundant garden, and we drove through fields of wildflowers and almond groves. Erice was our first granita destination, a perfectly preserved medieval stone village on the peak of a solitary mountain at the western end of Sicily. On a clear day you can see Tunisia, in North Africa, eighty miles away. The Greek goddess Aphrodite, whom the Romans called Venus, rose from the sea foam down below. And near the central square, on the Via Vittorio Emanuele, is the shop of Maria Grammatico, one of the best-loved pastry chefs in Sicily.

When Maria was eleven, she was put into an orphanage in Erice, the Istituto San Carlo, which housed seventeen girls and fifteen nuns and supported itself by baking pastries, some from recipes dating to the fifteenth century. It was run like a convent, and neither the nuns nor the girls were allowed much contact with the outside world. Customers would appear at an iron grate and pass their requests and money to the dim, cloistered figure within. Ices were made for visiting priests and other celebrities. The orphans were rarely allowed to taste them. For Maria’s full story and her pastry recipes, you should read Mary Tayloj Simeti’s
Bitter Almonds
(Morrow, 1994).

Late one evening we met Maria for a glass of sweet wine made in the nearby town of Marsala and a granita lesson in her beautiful old kitchen of limestone, tile, and wood. Maria showed us how to make the famous Sicilian almond granita from almond paste, sugar, and water. Every artisanal pastry shop makes its own version of almond paste (known as
pasta reale,
“royal dough”) by grinding approximately equal amounts of sugar and skinned almonds (those from Avola on the eastern end of the island are the best) between chubby green marble rollers. Then the paste is
fluted with about five times its weight in water and sometimes flavored with a pinch of cinnamon; this is almond milk, a popular Sicilian drink often favored over Coca-Cola. (A more refined version is made by placing a muslin bag filled with almond paste in water and squeezing it tirelessly until the water is milky white.) Maria’s almond granita is made by adding sugar to almond milk, freezing it with a technique like Piero Marzo’s, and scraping crystals from the surface the following day. The result is a refreshing mountain of tiny, discrete, icy crystals that collapse and implode on your tongue like caviar pressed and popped against the roof of your mouth. It is delicate and very delicious.

The almonds of Avola—and those from North Africa, Sardinia, and southern France—contain a small percentage of bitter almonds, which give marzipan and almond milk their characteristic bitter fragrance and taste. Bitter almonds cannot be imported into the United States because they contain the chemical amygdalin, which, when moistened, breaks down into benzaldehyde (the chief flavor in marzipan and almond extract) and prussic acid, which releases a toxin similar to cyanide. Even batches of foreign almonds that inevitably contain a few bitter almonds cannot be brought here. Europeans seem unconcerned with the problem. But without a source of bitter almond flavor, how would I replicate Maria’s almond granita back home?

From Erice we drove for two days across the island, through Segesta and Agrigento, known less for their granita than for their stupendous Greek temples. My pulse quickened as we approached the baroque city of Modica, famed for its proud tradition of
toasted-almond
granita. There we discovered pastry shops that still bake the exotic Modican turnover called
mpanatigghi
(filled with cocoa, spices, sugar, and ground meat—probably devised by the chocolate-crazed Spanish during their rule of Sicily in the later Middle Ages), and pastry shops selling the impenetrable sesame brittle known as Cobaita, from the Arabic word for sesame seed. But toasted-almond granita was nowhere in sight. We left Modica well fed but dejected.

That evening we reached the city of Siracusa on the east coast
of Sicily, the gastronomic capital of the Western world and the greatest city in Europe, rivaling Athens in power and prestige—in the fifth century
b.c.
The great mathematician Archimedes was born in Siracusa and worked there all his life, Aeschylus held the world premiere of
The Persians
(he also played the lead) and
The Women of Etna
in the great amphitheater, and Sappho and Pindar visited the city. Most important, the first cookbook written in the Western world (the lost
Art of Cooking
by Mithaecus) was composed here, and the first professional cooking school established.

The following century, Plato came to Siracusa to teach the ruler, the tyrant Dionysius, how to be a philosopher-king. Plato was disgusted by the gastronomic excesses he found there. “One’s existence is spent in gorging food twice a day and never sleeping alone at night and all the practices which accompany this mode of living,” he wrote. Dionysius soon sold the grumpy Plato into slavery; friends back home in Greece chipped in and bought him back.

Using Siracusa as our base, we drove a half hour south through flowering orchards of lemon and orange trees to the crumbling jewel that is Noto, destroyed in 1693 by an earthquake and completely rebuilt in the Sicilian-Spanish baroque style from lovely, soft golden and pinkish stone. Near the central square stands Corrado Costanzo’s pastry shop, probably the most famous in Sicily. We tasted Costanzo’s ice creams, flavored with rose petals, jasmine blossoms, and Avola almonds, and his cheerful marzipan stars covered in dark chocolate. My mission was to learn Costanzo’s mandarin-orange granita, which has earned world renown, and for that Costanzo made us return the next morning.

First he gave us breakfast, an espresso and a bowl of
frago-line—
the sweet and aromatic wild strawberries for which Noto is also famous—sprinkled with sugar and the juice of a half lemon and a half blood orange. I tried to remember if I had ever tasted anything more ambrosial. Then we watched Costanzo prepare his mandarin-orange granita, juicing and zesting the mandarin
oranges by hand and freezing the mixture to a smooth texture in an electric ice-cream machine. Costanzo would not let me measure any of his ingredients, but when he left to take a phone call, I cheated just a little. The ingredients are elemental (the fruit is a relative of the Clementine and tangerine), but the granita’s flavor was ethereal, with transparent layers of sweet and subtle perfumes. Would I have anything more than tangerines to play with back in the United States?