Sicily Food & Traditional Cuisine

Sicily's kitchen was built by everyone who ruled it. The Greeks brought olives and wine; the Arabs brought citrus, sugar cane, rice, aubergine, saffron and the technique of drying pasta; the Spanish brought tomatoes, peppers and chocolate from the Americas. Almost nothing was discarded along the way.

Two things follow from that. The first is agrodolce — the sweet-and-sour balance that shows up in caponata, in sardines with raisins and pine nuts, in rabbit cooked with vinegar and sugar. The second is an unusually developed sweet tradition, with roots in convent kitchens and in the Arab sugar trade.

The three sections below cover the dishes, the markets and street food where most of it is eaten, and the wine regions — including one growing on an active volcano.

Sicilian food splits between street food, which is inexpensive and eaten standing, and household cooking built around long-cooked vegetables, fish and sweet-sour seasoning.

Street food

• Arancine / arancini — fried rice balls with ragù or ham and cheese. Feminine and round in Palermo, masculine and conical in Catania, and the naming is argued about seriously.
• Panelle — chickpea-flour fritters, usually in a roll; an Arab-era legacy and the standard Palermo snack.
• Pani ca meusa — a roll filled with spleen and lung simmered in lard. A genuine Palermo institution and not a soft introduction.
• Sfincione — thick, spongy Palermo focaccia with onion, anchovy, tomato and breadcrumbs rather than much cheese.

Vegetables and pasta

• Caponata — aubergine cooked with celery, olives, capers, vinegar and sugar. The clearest example of agrodolce, and eaten at room temperature.
• Pasta alla Norma — Catania's dish: tomato, fried aubergine, basil and salted ricotta, named after Bellini's opera.
• Pasta con le sarde — sardines with wild fennel, saffron, raisins and pine nuts; the single dish that best shows the Arab inheritance.
• Couscous alla trapanese — around Trapani, couscous is served with fish broth, a direct survival of North African contact.

Fish and meat

Tuna and swordfish dominate the west and the strait; involtini di pesce spada and tuna preserved in oil are both traditional. Inland, the food turns to lamb, pork and cheese — Ragusano, Pecorino Siciliano, and the Nebrodi black pig.

Sweets

The strongest sweet tradition in Italy, much of it developed in convents.

• Cannoli — fried pastry tubes filled with sheep's-milk ricotta, filled to order or they go soft.
• Cassata — sponge, ricotta, marzipan and candied fruit; an Arab-Norman construction and a Easter dish.
• Granita — semi-frozen and eaten for breakfast with a brioche, particularly in Catania and Messina. Almond, coffee, lemon and mulberry are the classics.
• Frutta martorana — marzipan modelled and painted as fruit, made for All Souls' Day.
• Modica chocolate — worked cold so the sugar never dissolves, giving it a grainy texture; the method came from the Spanish, who brought it from Mesoamerica.

Sicily's markets are noisier and more theatrical than anywhere else in Italy, and they are where the island's food culture is most visible.

Palermo's markets

Three historic markets still run, all of them with roots in the Arab period and names to match. Ballarò is the largest and most local. Vucciria has shrunk as a market and become a night-time eating and drinking quarter. Capo sits between the two. All are working food markets in the morning, and the vendors' rhythmic calling — the abbanniata — is a genuine survival rather than a performance.

Catania

The Pescheria, the fish market behind Piazza Duomo, operates every morning except Sunday and is the most intense of its kind on the island — swordfish broken down on the slab, water everywhere, and a surrounding ring of stalls selling everything else.

How eating works

• Granita and brioche for breakfast in summer, particularly on the east coast, is entirely normal.
• Lunch is the main meal in much of the island, and many kitchens close firmly between 3pm and 7.30pm.
• Dinner runs late, rarely before 8.30pm and often later in summer.
• Street food is a meal, not a snack, and the best of it is at markets and dedicated friggitorie rather than restaurants.

Producers worth going to

Several Sicilian foods are tied to one small area: pistachios from Bronte on Etna's western slope, tomatoes from Pachino, capers from Salina and Pantelleria, sea salt from the Trapani pans, chocolate from Modica. Autumn sagre celebrate most of them, and they are local events rather than tourist ones.

Sicily was long a source of bulk wine for blending elsewhere. That changed within a generation, and the island now produces some of Italy's most distinctive bottles — one of them from the slopes of an active volcano.

Etna

Etna DOC is the island's most talked-about zone and among the most unusual in Europe: vines on volcanic soil between roughly 400 and 1,000 m, some of them ungrafted and over a century old, having survived phylloxera because the sandy volcanic ground does not suit the louse. The reds come from Nerello Mascalese and Nerello Cappuccio and are pale, high in acid and mineral — closer in style to Burgundy or Barolo than to the southern reds people expect. Carricante makes the whites, which age far better than their price suggests. Individual contrade are bottled separately, in a way that maps the mountain.

The west and the classic denominations

Marsala, a fortified wine from the west, was created by English merchants in the 1770s and became internationally famous before collapsing into a cooking ingredient; serious dry versions are being made again. Cerasuolo di Vittoria DOCG, in the south-east, is Sicily's only DOCG, blending Nero d'Avola with the lighter Frappato.

Grapes to know

• Nero d'Avola — the island's main red, full-bodied and widely planted.
• Frappato — light, floral, best slightly cool.
• Grillo and Catarratto — the western whites, the first originally grown for Marsala.
• Zibibbo, the Muscat grape of Pantelleria — grown in stone hollows against the wind; the bush-vine method is UNESCO-listed intangible heritage. Passito di Pantelleria is the sweet wine made from it.

At the table

Etna Bianco with sea urchin and raw fish; Etna Rosso with mushroom and pork; Nero d'Avola with lamb and aged cheese; Frappato with caponata; Passito di Pantelleria with almond sweets.