Macaroni With Sardines, Sicilian Style

History

Pasta con le sarde is a Sicilian dish, tied most closely to Palermo but eaten across the island. Its canonical modern form pairs fresh sardines and wild fennel with pine nuts, raisins, saffron and toasted breadcrumbs.

Artusi's 1891 rendering is leaner, and he is candid about where he got it: he owes the dish, he writes, to a widowed and witty lady whose Sicilian husband amused himself making dishes from his own country. His ingredients are macaroni, an equal weight of fresh sardines, six salted anchovies, wild fennel and oil. The sardines are headed, tailed, boned, floured and fried; the anchovies are melted into oil; the fennel is boiled, chopped and simmered ten minutes with a little tomato sauce. Macaroni, sardines and the anchovy-and-fennel sauce are then layered in a dish, heaped up, and browned between two fires.

What is missing is as telling as what is there. No pine nuts, no raisins, no saffron — none of the three now considered essential. No single version is agreed to be correct, and Artusi's is a real one, recorded from a household rather than reconstructed from a canon.

The dish's earlier history — the ninth-century Arab cook usually credited with inventing it, the Arab-Sicilian reading of its sweet-savoury seasoning, and the folklorist's 1886 printing said to be the only authentic recipe — we learned from popular reference and food-writing sources, and we were unable to locate the evidence they rest on.

Ingredients

• 500 g long Neapolitan macaroni
• 500 g fresh sardines
• 6 salted anchovies
• 300 g wild fennel
• olive oil
• tomato sauce or conserva
• salt
• pepper

Instructions

1. Bone the sardines, split them, flour and fry them, salt lightly, and set aside.
2. Boil the wild fennel, squeeze dry, chop fine and set aside. Boil the macaroni whole, drain and set aside.
3. Dissolve the cleaned anchovies in abundant oil; add the fennel, season, and simmer 10 minutes with tomato sauce or conserva in water.
4. Layer the macaroni in a flameproof dish with the sardines and the fennel-anchovy sauce, mounding it up; brown between two heats and serve hot.