Truly Sicilian Macaroni with Sardines, or Maccheroni con le Sarde: John wrote, "This may be a tough one as it goes way back and depends upon a young boy's memory. My Sicilian grandmother in Brooklyn, NY was an excellent cook and I remember this dish ... 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:
- 2 1/4 pounds (1 k) wild mountain fennel (you may have to use domestic bulb fennel -- see below note)
- 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
Preparation:
Continuing from the introduction, I am familiar with it: 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, but felt obliged to filter it to make it palatable to his northern Italian contemporaries, 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. After specifying the ingredients listed above, he says:
"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 in western Sicily, from Cefalú to Agrigento. 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, leaving 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 homogeneous. 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.
Note: Wild fennel produces fronds, but not bulbs. If you cannot find wild fennel, use small cultivated fennel bulbs and their fronds, and add some ground fennel seed for added flavor.
Artusi presented it to his readers more than a century ago, but felt obliged to filter it to make it palatable to his northern Italian contemporaries, 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. After specifying the ingredients listed above, he says:
"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 in western Sicily, from Cefalú to Agrigento. 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, leaving 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 homogeneous. 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.
Note: Wild fennel produces fronds, but not bulbs. If you cannot find wild fennel, use small cultivated fennel bulbs and their fronds, and add some ground fennel seed for added flavor.
