Four minutes to read.
When on holiday, I collect cuisines the way other people collect souvenirs. Where I teach high school, I like to show them to the other faculty and my students. On my waistline.
My students—their entire lives spent in a classroom—are skeptical when I say lifelong learning is the way I know I am alive. Learning means trying new things. Taste life, I tell them.
After my stomach tour of Sicily, I am fat with a juicy lesson plan. The island of Sicily is existentially a combination delicatessen, pasta factory, pastry shop and fish market. If you’re not raising food, harvesting food, cooking food, serving food, then you are a food tourist. In Sicily—closer to Tunisia than Rome—medina-to-mouth recipes are on every menu.
As I will explain to my students, in Palermo pani ca meusa is cow spleen mixed with bits of lung. Slow-simmered, then reheated in hot lard and folded into a crunchy sesame roll with white Caciocavallo cheese and a lemon wedge. The texture is soft and smooth, floppy and sloppy, like a thick, unwieldy slice of bologna. The taste, not unlike a mild pot roast, compares favorably with venison, wild boar, warthog or crocodile.
The Belaro street market is on the city’s southside. Dilapidated buildings loom over narrow alleys. Electrical wiring entangles rusted balconies. Laundry hangs helter-skelter like triumphant soccer flags after a game win. People are elbow-to-elbow carrying vegetables, fresh fish, household items in straining string bags. A motorcycle repair shop invades part of a sidewalk. Hawkers shout out invitations to sample their wares. My eyes and nose can’t escape the eat-me-now sights and smells.
On large grills billowing with bluish-black smoke, stigghiola sizzles. Grilled lamb guts, tightly wrapped in a leek, form a tube that looks like a large earthworm. I devour them doused with olive oil and lemon juice, poking at the one-inch, cylindrical morsels with a small wood skewer. My first thought is of mopane worms, but the taste is subtler, more refined, delicate and richer—and much juicer.
Arancini are rice balls stuffed with ragu meat sauce, cheese and green peas, then coated with breadcrumbs and deep fat fried. One fist-sized arancini is a meal, prefect for eating while I gesture with my hands, Italian-style.
Under the guise of introducing my students to other cultures, I enjoy grossing them out with my uncommon fast-food cravings. The crescendo of groans of disgust, feigned and otherwise, are my secret guilty pleasure.
For a sweeter memory of my course, I’ll wrap up my lecture at Saint Catherine church. For 700 years, nuns here have supported their convent by keeping alive a historic confectionary and bakery. In a cloister shaded by lemon trees and converted into a courtyard, a cannolo and I share a bench beside a gurgling fountain.
Not a minute ago, right in front of me, a nun stuffed a fried pastry shell with sweetened ricotta made from sheep's milk, then topped it off with candied fruit, chopped pistachios and chocolate bits. The first bite is a religious revelation. Swooning, supplicating, I commit my life to the Great Cannoli.