Nobody in Calavetra measures anything. These amounts are my best guesses from standing at the cousins' elbows with a notebook, then making each one twice at home in Providence until Mama said it tasted right. Caponata · Pasta with Sardines · Arancini · Almond Cookies · Lemon Granita

Concetta's Caponata

Sweet and sour eggplant. Concetta makes it on Sunday to eat all week, and it's better on Wednesday than on Sunday.

• 2 medium eggplants, in 1-inch cubes
• olive oil, plenty
• 3 ribs celery, sliced
• 1 large onion, chopped
• 1 cup tomato puree
• 1/2 cup green olives, pitted and cut in half
• 2 tablespoons capers, rinsed
• 1/3 cup red wine vinegar
• 2 tablespoons sugar
• salt, and a few leaves of basil

Salt the eggplant cubes and let them sit in a colander for half an hour, then pat them dry. Fry them in olive oil in batches until they're golden on all sides, and drain them on paper. In the same pan, cook the celery and onion until soft. Add the tomato puree, olives and capers and simmer ten minutes. Stir in the vinegar and sugar and let it bubble a minute or two, until the sharp smell of the vinegar cooks off. Put the eggplant back in, stir gently, take it off the heat and tear in the basil. Let it cool. Serve at room temperature, never cold from the refrigerator, with bread.

Mama says: Concetta puts in the celery raw at the end. I blanch it first. We are both right, but I am more right.

Pasta with Sardines

Pasta con le sarde, the most Sicilian dish there is: fish, wild fennel, raisins and pine nuts, sweet and salty together. In the village the wild fennel grows along every road. Here I use the fronds from fennel bulbs, and a big handful of them.

• 1 pound fresh sardines, cleaned, boned and opened flat (ask the fish man)
• a big bunch of wild fennel, or the fronds from 2 or 3 fennel bulbs
• 1 onion, chopped fine
• 4 anchovy fillets
• 1/4 cup raisins, soaked in warm water
• 1/4 cup pine nuts
• a pinch of saffron, soaked in 2 tablespoons warm water
• olive oil
• 1 pound bucatini
• 1 cup dry breadcrumbs, toasted in a pan with a little olive oil until brown

Boil the fennel in a big pot of salted water for about ten minutes. Lift it out, squeeze it and chop it, and keep the water: you cook the pasta in it. In a wide pan, cook the onion in olive oil until soft, then add the anchovies and stir until they melt away. Add the sardines, the chopped fennel, the drained raisins, the pine nuts and the saffron with its water, and cook gently about ten minutes, breaking up the sardines. Meanwhile cook the bucatini in the fennel water. Drain, toss with the sauce, and serve with the toasted breadcrumbs on top. No cheese. The breadcrumbs are the cheese.

Mama says: My mother put a few pieces of sardine aside and laid them on top at the end. Do that, it looks nice.

Carmela's Arancini

Carmela's hands, and a row of finished ones waiting for the oil.

Little oranges, that's what the name means: fried rice balls, golden outside, with meat sauce and peas in the middle. Carmela made forty of them the morning I watched, and they were gone by supper.

• 2 cups short-grain rice (arborio works)
• a pinch of saffron
• 2 tablespoons butter and 1/2 cup grated pecorino
• 2 eggs, beaten, plus 2 more beaten in a bowl for rolling
• 1 1/2 cups thick meat sauce made with ground beef and a little pork, cooked down with 1/2 cup peas
• a few ounces of caciocavallo or mozzarella in little cubes
• 2 cups dry breadcrumbs
• oil for frying

Cook the rice in salted water with the saffron until it's tender and the water is gone. Stir in the butter and pecorino, spread it on a platter and let it cool completely; then mix in two beaten eggs. Flour your hands. Take a handful of rice, flatten it in your palm into a cup, put in a spoonful of meat sauce and a cube of cheese, and close the rice around it into a ball about the size of a small orange. Roll each ball in beaten egg, then in breadcrumbs, and let them rest while the oil heats to about 350 degrees. Fry a few at a time until deep golden all over, and drain on paper. Eat them warm.

Mama says: Wet your hands, don't flour them. Carmela floured hers, I saw. Fine, flour them.

The Cousins' Almond Cookies

Soft almond cookies, crackly on the outside and chewy inside. Every house in Calavetra has a tin of these, and every house thinks its own are best. These are Concetta's, the ones that came home with us on the plane.

• 2 cups finely ground blanched almonds (or 8 ounces almond flour)
• 1 cup sugar
• 2 egg whites
• grated peel of 1 lemon
• a drop of almond extract (Concetta doesn't, I do)
• whole almonds for the tops, and powdered sugar

Mix the ground almonds, sugar and lemon peel. Beat the egg whites just until foamy and work them in with your hands until you have a sticky paste. Roll into balls the size of a walnut, roll them in powdered sugar, set them on a baking sheet lined with paper, and press a whole almond into the top of each one. Bake at 325 degrees about 15 minutes, until they are just barely golden at the bottom edges. They will be soft when they come out. Let them cool on the pan. They keep for a week in a tin, if you hide the tin.

Mama says: These are better than mine. Don't tell Concetta I said so.

Lemon Granita

In Sicily granita is breakfast in summer, eaten from a glass with a soft roll for dipping. Even in May it was warm enough for it every afternoon in the piazza. You don't need a machine, just a freezer and a fork.

• 1 cup fresh lemon juice (5 or 6 lemons)
• 2 cups water
• 3/4 cup sugar
• grated peel of 1 lemon

Heat the water and sugar just until the sugar dissolves, then let it cool. Stir in the lemon juice and peel. Pour it into a shallow metal pan and put it in the freezer. Every half hour, take it out and scrape it all over with a fork, breaking up the ice crystals as they form, for about three hours, until it's all soft, fluffy flakes. Scrape it once more right before you serve it.

Mama says: My father said that when he was a boy, before anybody had ice, they made it with snow brought down from the mountains and kept all summer. That's how old this is.

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Last updated Sunday, August 29, 1999