Macaroni with Sardines, Maccheroni con le Sarde: John writes, "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 ... 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?"
Prep Time: 60 minutes
Cook Time: 60 minutes
Ingredients:
- 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
- Olive oil
- 2 tablespoons tomato paste diluted in water, or 1/2 cup tomato sauce
Preparation:
Continuing with the introduction, 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.
Assemble the ingredients listed above.
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.
A couple asides:
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."
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.
