Pasta con le Sarde

the great dish of Palermo: bucatini turned through fresh sardines, wild mountain fennel, saffron, pine nuts, and Sicilian currants, finished with toasted breadcrumbs in place of cheese

Origin: Italy

From the journey of Currant.

Pasta con le sarde is the dish by which Palermo knows itself, and it is the clearest surviving statement of what Arab rule left in the Sicilian kitchen. Every element of it belongs to the sweet-and-savoury manner that the Islamic Mediterranean brought west: the dried currants, the toasted pine nuts, the saffron, the absence of cheese, the breadcrumbs standing in for it. Sicilians tell the story that the dish was improvised on the beach at Mazara del Vallo in 827 by the cooks of an Arab army short of provisions, who took what the shore and the hillside offered: sardines from the water, wild fennel from the slope, and the dried fruit and nuts they carried with them. It is a legend rather than a record, but it names the right kitchen. The passolina it calls for is the small, hard, black Sicilian currant, dried from the seedless Corinth grape and kept firmly distinct in the Sicilian mind from the larger uva passa and the great muscat zibibbo. The wild fennel, finocchietto selvatico, is the one irreplaceable thing: its feathery green tops, boiled and chopped, give the dish an aniseed depth that garden fennel cannot approach, and the water they were boiled in cooks the pasta.

Ingredients

Sauce

  • 400 g wild fennel tops (finocchietto selvatico), thick stalks removed
  • 500 g fresh sardines, scaled, gutted, boned, and butterflied (about 350 g prepared weight)
  • 1 whole large onion, very finely chopped
  • 6 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
  • 4 whole salted anchovy fillets, rinsed
  • 50 g dried currants (passolina)
  • 50 g pine nuts
  • 1 pinch saffron threads (about 20 threads)
  • 1 tsp fine sea salt
  • 0.5 tsp freshly ground black pepper

Pasta

  • 400 g bucatini or perciatelli

Breadcrumbs

  • 80 g coarse dry white breadcrumbs
  • 2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil (for the crumbs)

Method

  1. Bring a large pan of well-salted water to the boil and cook the wild fennel tops for 10 minutes, until quite tender. Lift them out with a slotted spoon, keeping every drop of the green cooking water in the pan, and chop them finely once cool enough to handle. Soak the currants in a little warm water and steep the saffron in 3 tbsp of the hot fennel water.
  2. Toast the pine nuts in a dry frying pan over a moderate heat for 2 to 3 minutes until golden, and tip them out. In the same pan, fry the breadcrumbs in the 2 tbsp of oil, stirring constantly, until crisp and the colour of dark sand. Set aside.
  3. Warm the 6 tbsp of oil in a wide pan and cook the onion very gently for 10 minutes without letting it colour. Add the anchovies and crush them into the oil until they dissolve, then add the drained currants, the pine nuts, the saffron and its liquid, and the chopped fennel. Cook together for 5 minutes with a ladleful of the fennel water.
  4. Lay half the butterflied sardines over the sauce, season with the salt and pepper, and cook for 5 minutes, breaking them up gently with a wooden spoon so they melt into the sauce. Fry the remaining sardines separately in a little oil for 2 minutes a side and keep them whole for the top.
  5. Return the fennel water to a rolling boil, adding more water and salt if needed, and cook the bucatini until al dente. Drain, reserving a cupful, and turn the pasta through the sauce with a splash of the cooking water. Serve at once, topped with the reserved sardines and a generous scattering of the toasted crumbs.

Notes

Wild fennel is the difficulty outside Sicily. If you cannot get it, use the feathery fronds of two large Florence fennel bulbs together with 1 tsp of crushed fennel seed and a tablespoon of chopped dill, which comes closer than fennel fronds alone; the dish will be good but not quite itself. The baked version, pasta con le sarde al forno, layers the dressed pasta in a dish, covers it with crumbs, and bakes it for 20 minutes, and is what Palermo families make for a crowd. The winter standby pasta con le sarde a mare, 'with the sardines still at sea', leaves out the fish altogether and relies on anchovy, fennel, currants, and pine nuts alone.

The Gastrographer

The Gastrographer

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Ingredient originTrade or transit route
Became a culinary stapleColonial / trade control
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