Pasta Con Le Sarde (Sicilian Pasta with Sardines)

*Updated cooking method (again) 3/30/2020

Sicily, where my family is from, is a land of conquests. The Moors, the Romans, Berbers, Arabs, Persians, Byzantines - pretty much everybody has tromped through Sicily at some point in time, and has left some kind of mark on the people and the food. I believe that pasta con le sarde, a traditional Sicilian dish featuring sardines and pasta tossed with unheard-of flavor combinations, is one such example of what happens when you get such a diverse international palate influencing a cuisine. In this case, it's a Mediterranean cuisine, meaning you get to take fish and try to mix a bunch of flavors together. If you've ever experimented with cooking fish, you know that random flavors can often ruin a fish dish. I couldn't name any other dish that would combine raisins, saffron, fennel, and two kinds of salty preserved fish, but somehow this mix creates an incredible burst of salty and sweet, lightly perfumed, slightly floral, bizarrely colorful, and both crunchy and velvety from the mix of fried bread crumbs and silky pasta that's tossed quickly with its own cooking liquid. The closest thing I can think of to this dish would be a massaman curry, drawing again from influences of the Muslim / western world to work this into the existing (Thai) culture. But in many ways, this dish stands completely alone, and for that I have deep respect in a sea of pasta dishes that is Italian food.

Drawing from a rich supply of fresh fish, this recipe is probably spectacular with fresh sardines caught that day. But since most of us can't get that, I recommend that you invest in a couple of tins of very high quality sardines packed in olive oil. Tonight we used some from Portugal, and at $4-5 per box, it was totally worth it. Even if you don't splurge, at least be sure to get fish in pure olive oil, not a tomato sauce or water.

The dish traditionally calls for bucatini - a thin tube-like pasta - but we've done it both with this and with pappardelle. Both versions are shown in the photographs. I would strongly recommend a bronze die-cut bucatini as the pasta of choice, though, which will hold the sauce best.

Pasta alla Norma

Many years ago I traveled with my family to our homeland of Sicily to see where the family was from.  We toured around the island, tracking down birth certificates and marriage licenses.  It was an amazing trip, punctuated with unforgettable meals.

Sicilian food isn't the same heavy cuisine as the northern parts of the country; instead, the food of the island represents a melting pot of influences and a culture that has thrived on meager existences.  This classical dish, pasta alla norma, took us by surprise at how much flavor was packed into such few ingredients, cooked just barely enough to bring out the essence of each one.  I think that this dish could represent the humble beginnings of tomato use in Italy, coming over from the Americas and passed by the Spaniards to the Italian islanders.  In the beginning, tomatoes were often barely cooked rather than being pureed into sauces, and were often tossed with some form of grain and maybe a couple of other vegetables.  So this dish is essentially a trip backwards in time through the history of the Italy's "golden apple".

I present a very classical recipe, not unlike ones I found by Mark Bittman and Mario Batali.  You can plate this however you like, but I relish the crudeness of the ingredients and prefer to serve this as large bites of everything, an homage to the basic vegetables that would go on to form the much more eloquent language of an entire cuisine over the centuries.