The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [163]
When Maria was eleven, she was put into an orphanage in Erice, the Istituto San Carlo, which housed seventeen girls and fifteen nuns and supported itself by baking pastries, some from recipes dating to the fifteenth century. It was run like a convent, and neither the nuns nor the girls were allowed much contact with the outside world. Customers would appear at an iron grate and pass their requests and money to the dim, cloistered figure within. Ices were made for visiting priests and other celebrities. The orphans were rarely allowed to taste them. For Maria’s full story and her pastry recipes, you should read Mary Taylor Simeti’s Bitter Almonds (Morrow, 1994).
Late one evening we met Maria for a glass of sweet wine made in the nearby town of Marsala and a granita lesson in her beautiful old kitchen of limestone, tile, and wood. Maria showed us how to make the famous Sicilian almond granita from almond paste, sugar, and water. Every artisanal pastry shop makes its own version of almond paste (known as pasta reale, “royal dough”) by grinding approximately equal amounts of sugar and skinned almonds (those from Avola on the eastern end of the island are the best) between chubby green marble rollers. Then the paste is diluted with about five times its weight in water and sometimes flavored with a pinch of cinnamon; this is almond milk, a popular Sicilian drink often favored over Coca-Cola. (A more refined version is made by placing a muslin bag filled with almond paste in water and squeezing it tirelessly until the water is milky white.) Maria’s almond granita is made by adding sugar to almond milk, freezing it with a technique like Piero Marzo’s, and scraping crystals from the surface the following day. The result is a refreshing mountain of tiny, discrete, icy crystals that collapse and implode on your tongue like caviar pressed and popped against the roof of your mouth. It is delicate and very delicious.
The almonds of Avola—and those from North Africa, Sardinia, and southern France—contain a small percentage of bitter almonds, which give marzipan and almond milk their characteristic bitter fragrance and taste. Bitter almonds cannot be imported into the United States because they contain the chemical amygdalin, which, when moistened, breaks down into benzaldehyde (the chief flavor in marzipan and almond extract) and prussic acid, which releases a toxin similar to cyanide. Even batches of foreign almonds that inevitably contain a few bitter almonds cannot be brought here. Europeans seem unconcerned with the problem. But without a source of bitter almond flavor, how would I replicate Maria’s almond granita back home?
From Erice we drove for two days across the island, through Segesta and Agrigento, known less for their granita than for their stupendous Greek temples. My pulse quickened as we approached the baroque city of Modica, famed for its proud tradition of toasted-almond granita. There we discovered pastry shops that still bake the exotic Modican turnover called mpanatigghi (filled with cocoa, spices, sugar, and ground meat—probably devised by the chocolate-crazed Spanish during their rule of Sicily in the later Middle Ages), and pastry shops selling the impenetrable sesame brittle known as Cobaita, from the Arabic word for sesame seed. But toasted-almond granita was nowhere in sight. We left Modica well fed but dejected.
That evening we reached the city of Siracusa on the east coast of Sicily, the gastronomic capital of