Maccheroni con le Sarde -- Macaroni with Sardines

From Cosa Bolle in Pentola, my free newsletter:
Finally, another person asks about friselle. These are a Puglian type of bread that's ring shaped; then they're half baked they're removed from the oven and divided into two halves, which are returned to the oven and allowed to bake until done, then dried completely. The result is something that one could crack a tooth on. So what do you do with them?

Moving towards food, John recently wrote, "This may be a tough one as it goes way back and depends upon a young boy's memory. My Sicilian grandmother (paternal) in Brooklyn, NY was an excellent cook and I remember this dish. As best I remember, she mostly made it from scratch, but also bought it in a yellow (somewhat large, rectangular or oval) flat, can, from Progresso. I best remember that it had 'Milanese' in the title on the yellow can, and some major ingredients were, SARDINES AND FENNEL. I believe it also had pine nuts in the somewhat 'tomato based' mixture that was served over pasta. Ever heard of it? Any ideas?"

Actually, yes. It's one of the classic Sicilian pasta sauces, and was also one of the first to reach across the Straights of Messina and become known on the mainland; Artusi presented it to his readers more than a century ago, and here it is in English, from The Art of Eating Well (Random House), my translation of his book:

Maccheroni Con Le Sarde Alla Siciliana -- Maccheroni with Sardines, Sicilian Style

For this recipe I am indebted to a spry, spirited widow whose husband, a Sicilian, liked to cook the dishes of his native land.

• 1 pound (450 g) Neapolitan style long pasta (bucatini or perciatelli)
• 1 1/4 pounds (500 g) fresh sardines
• 6 salted anchovies (the whole variety you'll find at a deli counter)
• 2/3 pound (300 g) bulb fennel
• Oil
• 2 tablespoons tomato paste diluted in water, or 1/2 cup tomato sauce

Remove the heads and tails from the sardines, split and bone them, flour them, and fry them. Salt them well and set them aside.

Boil the fennel until it's fork tender in lightly salted water, drain it, and mince it.

Cook the pasta, drain it, and set it aside.

Clean and bone the anchovies, then set a frying pan with a quarter cup of oil on the fire and cook them, stirring them with a spoon to break them up. Add the fennel, lightly season the mixture with salt and pepper, stir in a half cup of tomato sauce or two tablespoons of tomato paste diluted with water, and simmer the resulting sauce for 10 minutes. Now that everything is ready, mix the sardines and the anchovy sauce into the pasta in a heat proof dish, heat the mixture through in the oven, and serve it hot.

This will serve 6 or 7.

TIME FOR AN ASIDE:
Artusi was from Emilia, north of the Apennines, and did filter his dishes to make them palatable to other northern Italians of a century ago, who would likely have wondered at pine nuts and raisins in a pasta dish, assuming they didn't flat-out refuse to try it. Ada Boni, who was Roman, didn't filter this particular recipe in presenting it in Il Talismano della Felicità in 1928. She does, however, say: "those unfamiliar with the secrets of this dish might think, upon reading the recipe, that a combination of such disparate ingredients would lead to a culinary dissonance; to the contrary, these dissonances combine to form a first-rate harmony." Pino Correnti, who is Sicilian, feels no need to apologize and doesn't tone things down at all. He calls for:

• 2 1/4 pounds (1 k) wild mountain fennel (you may have to use domestic bulb fennel)
• 1 1/4 pounds (500 g) fresh sardines
• 1 1/2 pounds (600 g) bucatini or perciatelli
• 2 onions, minced
• 6 salted anchovies, rinsed and boned
• 2 ounces (50 g) pine nuts
• 2 ounces (50 g) raisins, soaked in hot water
• 2 ounces (50 g) toasted almonds
• A knife-tip's worth of saffron
• Olive oil
• Salt and pepper

And he has quite a bit to say:

This recipe gathers the most exciting elements of Sicilian cuisine; its unmistakable flavor is equal to the fame it has garnered amongst lovers of fine foods the world over. We must defend this recipe from the Tomato Rain: to obtain the necessary color, there's already saffron. I have nothing against tomatoes, quite the contrary, but when they arrived from the Americas Sicily already had 2000 years of culinary history... To lay to rest any doubts, one need only turn to the recipe published by the great Pitré (one of the greatest Sicilian cultural historians) in 1886; on page 352 he says, "Pasta cu li sardi, maccheroni cooked and seasoned with saffron, and seasoned with a sauce made from onion, wild fennel (foenicum dulce gusto acuto, L.), fresh anchovies, raisins, toasted almonds and pine nuts. One pours the sauce over the maccheroni in a terracotta pot, covers the pot with a lid, and puts it in the oven with coals on the lid to brown the top as well. Many add other anchovies, split and laid out like tongues, over the pasta. This tasty pasta cu li sardi is the ideal of the Sicilian People, so much that when a person expects to eat well or earn some money, one hears, "Ammuccamu! Pasta cu li sardi!"

Now the dish is common throughout Sicily, especially Palermo, and is extremely popular to the west, from Cefalú to Agrigento. As we have seen, at the base of it all is wild fennel, which should be boiled in three quarts of lightly salted water; fish the boiled fennel out of the pot with a slotted spoon and use the water to cook the pasta as well. Wash the sardines, remove and discard their heads, and bone them, leafing a thin strip of flesh to keep the halves together like the spine of a book. Mince the fennel, which will then go into a sauté pan with a little oil, and the onion, anchovies, pepper, pine nuts, saffron (diluted in a little warm water), raisins, and half of the sardines.

Mix the resulting sauce well to make it homogenous. Now, boil the bucatini in the water you cooked the fennel in, drain them when they reach the al dente stage, and mix them with 2/3 of the sauce, in an oven-proof dish. Heat the remaining third of the sauce in a second pan, with a little olive oil and cook the opened sardines. Pour the sauce and sardine mixture over the pasta, and sprinkle the almonds over it all. Slip the pasta into a hot oven for 10 minutes to brown the top and meld the flavors.

Mr. Correnti notes that there are innumerable variations on the dish, but would rather not list any.

And finally, Ann writes:

You comment that the recipe for fennel, sardines and pasta, "might" sound weird, but hey! I am Italian-American and live in Texas. I grew up eating "pasta with finocchio". The difference is, we didn't have fresh sardines here, so we used the canned. We would cook the fennel, (not the bulbs or seeds, although, now I put the seed in everything for digestion and drink the tea also) in the "gravy", then put the sardines in to heat and simmer. The layers would be of pasta(with gravy, i.e. sardine, fennel) another layer of toasted breadcrumbs, pasta, gravy, etc... as many layers as you can desire! Most of my family usually only did it twice, then with a small topping of my namesake cheese... Pecorino.

About Saffron

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