Waking up the next morning and poking my head outside the house, I saw Fabrizia Lanza of Case Vecchie, where she runs the Anna Tasca Lanza cooking school, sitting in the courtyard, offering me coffee. After breathing in the fresh air, with the warm sunshine hitting my skin, and realizing that I had escaped the stress of airport (and a whole bunch of other things, too) I almost wanted to cry because I was so happy to be in Sicily, which I sometimes think of as just a whole ‘nother planet.
I don’t know what it is about Sicily that I’m so attracted to. There’s a certain savage, forgotten beauty there. It’s Italian, but so different from anywhere else in Italy. And old traditions are still very much alive here, many unaffected by modern times. After downing three well-merited cups of excellent, strong Italian coffee, Fabrizia took us to visit some producers near her house.
Francesco Di Gèsu took us on a walk through fields of wheat, lentils, and chickpeas. It had just rained, which was probably the last rain for four months, which we slogged through, our shoes encrusted with a remarkably tenacious mixture of damp earth, grass, and hay.
Francesco grows ancient varieties of wheat, which local bread bakers use. So much of what still exists in Sicily are oldways of growing and producing, creating things, bringing products to the local bakery, or salumeria (for meats), for customers. Or locals coming by to pick up orders on their own, the connections going back for generations.
I’ve never seen lentils growing, each little pod yielded just one or two little pulses. Fabrizia told me that they used to dry the branches, hit them with sticks, toss the bundles of dried lentil sticks high in the air with pitchforks, then collect the lentils that fell off. So even though they’ve modernized the techniques a little bit since then, next time you eat lentil soup, or green lentil salad, make sure you eat each and every lentil!
And curiously, I’d only seen green chickpeas (growing, above) on food blogs, whose flavor is a bit reminiscent of peas, and they’re great eaten raw.
