Panelle, Palermo, and Anna Tasca Lanza

Panelle, Palermo and Anna Tasca Lanza

Often a recipe is just an excuse, or a reason, to write about a million other things.

Sometimes it’s not a recipe, it’s a dish; a fish or a doughnut. This is the wonderful thing about food; it ties everything together, forming a fixed point in an otherwise smudged pastel landscape of varied experiences and moments. It’s like a glinting café on the long, rainy motorway of life; it’s a pause, waiting in the wings, time to ruminate, remember and restore, the making of a fixed memory.

Panelle is a reason  and an excuse to write about Sicily, but I could have chosen a million other things. The orange-sized Arancini I ate in Palermo, stuffed with thick Bechamel and chunks of salty ham and meltingScamorza cheese. Or the Iris at Casa Stagnitta, another epiphany in fried form, a sort of enormous flat doughnut breadcrumbed rather than sugar-dusted, and filled to bursting with ricotta cream and chocolate. Or the plates of perfect pasta with pesto Trapanese, or the parmigiana Leah at Anna Tasca Lanza made for us, or the home-made Mulberry jam or sheep’s milk butter and yoghurt for breakfast every day. Or the Biancomangiare or the Cassata (I didn’t even get around to eating a Cannolo). I was in Sicily a week in total, a day and a half in Palermo and five days at Anna Tasca Lanza, but I could write an entire book about everything I saw and ate.

But first, the panelle.

These are an exercise in simplicity but probably one of the most delicious things I know. I could eat them every day, at every meal. They are addictively good. Essentially they are a simple chickpea batter which is set a little like polenta and then cut and fried in strips, then served hot with a little squeeze of lemon (optional) and some extra salt on top (essential). Some people put chopped parsley inside, some people just salt and pepper. Their deliciousness derives not just from the inimitable flavour of chickpeas; earthy, nutty and sweet, but more specifically in the beguiling contrast of textures between wafer-thin, crisp outer crust, slightly bloated and flaking away like peeling plaster from the creamy, custardy interior. They need to be eaten hot and fresh from the frier, nearly burning your mouth. Preferably with a glass of cold white wine. That was how I first tried them at Anna Tasca Lanza.

I was at the school for five days, and I kept a detailed daily diary of everything I saw but mostly of what I ate. There was the Tenerumi soup the first night, so simple, so rustic, so deeply delicious and nourishing. Fabrizia Lanza, who now runs the school describes it as both ‘refreshing and soothing’. It is usually served at the end of the summer when the squash from which is made is in season. It uses both the squash itself –  a long, dangling object I saw growing in the gardens suspended from a pergola known as Cucuzza Lunga, and the tender leaves, known as tenerumi, which I also saw for sale in the markets in Palermo. It tastes at once so simple and so deep, finished with the lightest snowdrift of salty ricotta salata, made by Filippo, the local cheesemaker.

We visited Filippo to see a day in the life of cheesemaker, and helped make ricotta. He uses his own unpasteurised sheep’s milk to make wonderfully unapologetic pecorino, that tastes of wild herbs and stables and the hills, and his ricotta which was unlike any I have ever tasted, partly because Sicilian ricotta is always salted, which is something they do not do here in Sardinia. It was so deeply creamy and luscious, with the ample salt slicing the sweetness. We whipped and sweetened it with sugar and honey and used it to fill our cassate, the baroque masterpieces of the sweet Sicilian kitchen, something I have read about, tried to make, even written a recipe for but never managed to eat in situ. The cassata is composed of slices of a simple egg sponge bathed in limoncello, then topped with ricotta, enshrined in marzipan and finished with candied fruit and simple icing. It was delicious, mostly, again, because of the ricotta.

This is a posthumous post because I so busy soaking it up when I was there and then catching up with everything when I got back that it is only now I have time to write about it, which means in my poor riddled mind only a few clear images and sensations remain. There was a garden tour with Fabrizia where we admired a million ornamental sages (Russian sage! Its flowers!) and Cedro trees and the most exquisitely perfect quince and Macchia, her aged dachshund the colour of a coffee stain, who waddled beside her casting disapproving glances down her aristocratic nose at anyone who came too close. There was the little burrow-like library, stuffed full of books that I longed to get lost in, sunk into the old sofa alongside Felice, the other resident dog, who was always irrestibly felice, true to her name. This library was next to my room, and also home to a small Sicilian mouse who expertly tightrope walked down the light cable one morning as I perused the books beside him. There was the setting of the school itself, in swathes of the greenest valley, after rolling hills of pale gold, here the acres of lush green vineyard giving the impression of a hidden oasis, a sensation cemented by Fabrizia’s extraordinary garden which lay at the front of the house in the shadow of two enormous pines. There was the store room, full of jars of artichokes and mushrooms sott’olio (preserved in oil) and the barn full of sun-drying tomatoes and figs out drying in the sun and huge dried branches of Ferula with its firework flowers decorating the beams and herbs everywhere and birds squabbling noisily in the jasmine and a million other wonderful things I have already half forgotten. Lorenzo became worried I would never come home. I could have stayed forever. And I am thrilled to be going back (if you’d like to come too I will share all the details soon).

 But for now, the Panelle.

This is actually an extremely useful recipe as they can be made in advance, and then fried last minute. You cook a quick and simple chickpeas paste on the hob, and then set it on a flat plate (at this point you can cover it and keep it in the fridge) and slice it and fry it.

This is Fabrizia’s recipe from her wonderful book, The Food of Sicily. It makes lots. I halved it.

Serves 10

250g chickpea flour

750ml cold water

Salt and pepper

Oil for frying

Place the water and chickpea flour in a deep saucepan and put over a medium heat. Add salt and pepper to taste. Whisk well and continue whisking until it resembles thick polenta, about 8 minutes, reducing  the heat if it starts catching too much on the bottom. Switch to a wooden spoon and continue cooking, stirring, until it starts coming away from the sides of the pan, another 3 minutes or so.

Now pour out and spread evenly over 3 large flat dinner plates, smoothing it as best you can with a spatula. Leave to cool and then slice into triangles, and fry in hot oil (at least 2 inches deep) until crisp and golden. Drain on kitchen towel, sprinkle with salt and eat hot, with a squeeze of lemon if you like.