Macaroni With Sardines, Sicilian Style

History

Pasta con le sarde is a Sicilian dish, most closely tied 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. That sweet-savoury pairing, especially the saffron and raisins, is usually read as a trace of the Arab-Sicilian culinary layer laid down during the island's medieval Muslim period. A popular origin story credits an Arab cook in the service of Euphemius of Messina, improvising near Syracuse in the ninth century; the sources that repeat it flag it as legend rather than record, hedged as "according to some experts" and "food legends tell us." The earliest firm documentation is textual: the folklorist Giuseppe Pitre published a tomato-less version in 1886, which the cookbook author Pino Correnti later called the only authentic recipe. Artusi's 1891 rendering, learned from a Sicilian emigre's household and set down for a mainland readership, is leaner: it binds macaroni, fried fresh sardines, salted anchovies, and boiled wild fennel with a little tomato, omitting the pine nuts, raisins, and saffron now considered essential. No single version is agreed to be "correct."

Ingredients

• g long Neapolitan macaroni
• g fresh sardines
• salted anchovies
• 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.