The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [164]
The following century, Plato came to Siracusa to teach the ruler, the tyrant Dionysius, how to be a philosopher-king. Plato was disgusted by the gastronomic excesses he found there. “One’s existence is spent in gorging food twice a day and never sleeping alone at night and all the practices which accompany this mode of living,” he wrote. Dionysius soon sold the grumpy Plato into slavery; friends back home in Greece chipped in and bought him back.
Using Siracusa as our base, we drove a half hour south through flowering orchards of lemon and orange trees to the crumbling jewel that is Noto, destroyed in 1693 by an earthquake and completely rebuilt in the Sicilian-Spanish baroque style from lovely, soft golden and pinkish stone. Near the central square stands Corrado Costanzo’s pastry shop, probably the most famous in Sicily. We tasted Costanzo’s ice creams, flavored with rose petals, jasmine blossoms, and Avola almonds, and his cheerful marzipan stars covered in dark chocolate. My mission was to learn Costanzo’s mandarin-orange granita, which has earned world renown, and for that Costanzo made us return the next morning.
First he gave us breakfast, an espresso and a bowl of fragoline—the sweet and aromatic wild strawberries for which Noto is also famous—sprinkled with sugar and the juice of a half lemon and a half blood orange. I tried to remember if I had ever tasted anything more ambrosial. Then we watched Costanzo prepare his mandarin-orange granita, juicing and zesting the mandarin oranges by hand and freezing the mixture to a smooth texture in an electric ice-cream machine. Costanzo would not let me measure any of his ingredients, but when he left to take a phone call, I cheated just a little. The ingredients are elemental (the fruit is a relative of the clementine and tangerine), but the granita’s flavor was ethereal, with transparent layers of sweet and subtle perfumes. Would I have anything more than tangerines to play with back in the United States?
A rising contender for Noto’s granita crown is the century-old Caffè Sicilia nearby and the young Assenza brothers who own it. They specialize in exceptional, briefly cooked marmalades and creams—barely sweetened and very modern—made from Sicily’s finest produce: citrons, bergamots, lemons, mandarin oranges, almonds, chestnut honey, and pink grapefruit. After tasting them all, we noticed that the blackboard over the gelati counter prematurely advertised gelso nero, “black mulberry,” one of Sicily’s favorite ices. As gelsi would not come into season until midsummer, we practiced with fragoline. It was here, too, that I discovered the secret of the elusive toasted-almond granita of Modica. The Assenzas’ father was born and raised in Modica and often returned there for the one taste that revived his fondest memories of childhood. Toasted-almond granita is no longer made in Sicily, it seems, but now it can be re-created in my kitchen and yours. Corrado Assenza’s secret is to roast shelled almonds for five hours.
A few days later we headed north from Siracusa, past Catania (the second-largest city in Sicily, totally destroyed by an eruption of Etna in 1669, and the only place in Sicily with a tradition of chocolate granita), past the Isole dei Ciclopi—rocky outcroppings in the Ionian Sea just off the coast that were long ago thrown at the fleeing Odysseus by an enraged, blinded Cyclops—past Mount Etna, and up to Messina, where Shakespeare set Much Ado about Nothing. We briefly peered out into the water to spot Scylla and Charybdis, the