By Sasha Elenko, Food Columnist
Lufthansa treats their customers well. On my connecting flight LH1964 from Munich to the Sicilian city of Catania this past summer, I remember being offered something like a pasta marinara casserole. I asked the flight attendant if it was free, and she responded by laughing at my now-apparent naïveté and saying in a German accent, “You’re cute! Of course it’s free!” I half-expected her to finish with “Did you think you were riding JetBlue?”
The casserole came hot in a tin foil-covered tin box on a tray that also had a darling little slice of orange pie or something and some questionably aged lettuce with an “Italian” dressing that was very severely lacking in both quantity and flavor. It sounds bad, but I had been expecting much worse.
I was particularly impressed when they brought me reusable metal utensils. But I quickly began to long for plastic after I took a bite of pasta and felt my whole mouth being ionized by the excess electrons from the fork I was holding.
Being the considerate airline that they are — not wanting to overstuff passengers’ stomachs and whatnot — Lufthansa gave me a rather light breakfast a few hours later. It basically consisted of an industrial omelette, a construction-grade bread roll and a “fruit salad” composed of one depressed grape, two underripe melon cubes and a few chunks of pineapple that tasted like, well, pineapple surprisingly.
Far less surprising was the first question my host family asked me when I landed in Catania: “Are you hungry?”
I wasn’t hungry at all, but as I would soon learn, in Sicily anything short of a temper tantrum about how much food you just ate is tantamount to begging for a seven-course meal.
I was driven from the airport to the Nigra residence with a bloated midsection from plane-food-induced indigestion, as well as a strange combination of fear and excitement for my first ever Italian meal.
I could describe all of the dishes that were waiting for me when we arrived, but I have a word limit, and I think it would suffice to say that there were more dishes on the table than I’d like to remember. It was at that first meal I learned through experience that the highest form of treason in Sicily is to not finish the food on your plate.
There were a few dishes that would become motifs over the course of my three weeks in Sicily.
One of them was actually not a dish at all. It was latte di mandorla, or almond milk. But don’t jump to conclusions — the Sicilian almond milk is not of the same species as its American counterpart. Latte di mandorla has the consistency of eggnog and is about as sweet, but it’s as refreshing as a cold shower. The sweetness would be borderline excessive, were it not for that divine balance of glucose and benzaldehyde that anyone who has ever had almond-flavored confections knows all too well.
When we weren’t drinking latte di mandorla, we were probably drinking latte di mandorla con pistacchio, the pistachio flavored variety of almond milk. This is because Sicilians are nuts about their nuts, specifically almonds and pistachios.
It was fascinating actually to learn all the ways one can use pistachios. Obviously there was the pistachio-flavored gelato, but there were also the pistachio-flavored chocolate bars, pistachio-flavored cannoli, pistachio pizza (consisting of a layer of cream, a layer of pistachio cream and a thin layer of cheese, with prosciutto and ground pistachios on top), pesto di pistacchio (basically pesto, just with ground pistachios instead of basil), grilled chicken cubes stuffed with pistachios and cheese and then sprinkled with ground pistachios — you get the point.
The other recurring dish from my first day was arancini. An arancino (literally “little orange”) is basically a breaded and deep-fried ball of risotto that is about the size of a softball and stuffed with a rich filling. Fillings range from ragu to “cheese and butter” to, yes, pistachio. Because of their ovoid shape, arancini have an extremely low surface area to volume ratio — not to mention extremely dense and filling ingredients in general — so they tend to be deceptively filling.
Arancini are part of a larger sub-genre of Sicilian food called tavola calda (“hot table”), which is basically their, albeit much better, version of fast food. Just like Americans might get a burger with fries, Sicilians might order an arancino with a cannolo or two.
Other tavola calda foods include: raviola, a giant donut in the shape of a calzone, filled with incomprehensible amounts of nutella; pizzetta, a 7-inch pizza that offers a lot of crust and very little cheese or tomato paste but is nonetheless heavenly; cipollina, a type of square breakfast pocket filled with ham, cheese, tomato sauce and onions, but also made with the most flawless pastry dough the world has ever seen; and granita — a half-frozen sorbet-like dessert usually made from fruit, but also available in almond flavor — with a brioche roll, something I found my Sicilian peers and myself ordering on a daily basis.
Many places serve tavola calda 24/7, so the majority of our tavola calda dining happened around 2 a.m.
The most fascinating aspect of Sicilian dining, however, was not just the universally high standard for quality, but also how insanely consistent each dish was in size, flavor and presentation from restaurant to restaurant. In fact, if you were to bring me a granita and a brioche roll from each of the seven-or-so restaurants I ordered them from, I wouldn’t be able to tell that they came from different places.
As my host brother Tommaso explained to me, this is because these dishes have been developed over the course of centuries. With regards to the “right” way to make a given Sicilian dish, that debate was categorically settled hundreds of years ago.
I must admit that these similarities between dishes might be exaggerated due to my unrefined taste. There were at least three times that Tommaso told me that what we were eating was the “best (e.g.) granita in all of Sicily,” and I was wholly unable to discern a single difference from the other ones I had tried.
Tavola calda items also had flat-rate prices, and good ones at that. None of them cost more than $2, and few cost more than $1. An Italian sandwich — you know, the $10 kind considered gourmet in the U.S. — costs about 4.5 euros ($5.31).
Lufthansa treats their customers well; Italians treat their customers better.