We were on a ferry from Cagliari in Sardinia to Trapani in Sicily, gliding past the Egadi islands, noticing a tug towing a line of tuna cages to a new spot for fish farming. Sardinia had been fascinating and the food almost totally uncoloured by outside influences. Just what I like. But I was hoping Sicily was going to be like a special party, while Sardinia was like meeting a few close friends somewhere earlier on in the evening.
Sicily is, quite simply, everything that everybody loves about Italy, but more so. It’s beautiful, there are miles of unspoilt countryside, with wonderful food, great cities and, almost theatrically, for the tourists at least, an ever-present, but illusory, sense of danger. So many people have asked me, “Is it safe – the Mafia, pickpockets?”, and in a “well-heeled traveller” sort of way I say, “No worse than London, actually.”
Although Sicily is an island, it feels more like the mainland because there’s so much agriculture and so much coastline, with great seafood – from tuna and swordfish to an array of clams, mussels, limpets and the best anchovies anywhere. Its history is rich, and its cities big and important. In the cooking you get this sense of seriousness, from pasta alla Norma (named after the Bellini opera, apparently) to cassata, one of the most elaborate of cakes, with its flavouring of ricotta and marzipan. Then there’s seafood couscous and spaghetti con le sarde, filled with exotic flavours of nutmeg, currants and pine kernels. The cooking is sophisticated – Italian, yes, but subtly more exotic. That’s why to me it’s the big party and Sardinia, the drinks beforehand.
My trip was part of a TV series I’ve made called Mediterranean Escapes. The idea was to travel as much of the Mediterranean as possible by road, using ferries where possible, trying to answer the question, “What is so special about Mediterranean cooking?” I had already begun to formulate some ideas – local ingredients bursting with sunshine, a respect for frugality and tradition, sophistication derived from endless experience in growing and cooking a few key ingredients.
Sicily settled it. We skipped through Trapani and drove straight to Palermo for our first experience. It’s a bit of an assault on the senses and the sort of place where a nervous driver would expire. The locals all seemed to own a 12-year-old Fiat Punto or small Peugeot, normally white or off-white, but all decorated with dents and other cars’ paint. I thought it would almost be unfashionable to own anything newer unless you were a Mafia boss, the streets are so narrow and busy.
The city is stuffed with lovely 18th-century houses, palaces and churches, most of them gently falling down. At La Vucciria market in the centre of the city near the Corso Vittorio Emanuele, I ate tiny snails, gathered from wild fennel stalks, with olive oil, garlic and parsley, and marvelled at the extensive selection of poached bulls’ penises at a nearby cooked-meat counter. The early summer vegetables – artichokes, peas, the first tomatoes, aubergines, fennel, and some courgettes that were about 2ft long – were a month ahead of home.
We stayed at the seaside suburb of Mondello (where many a Mafia boss has a villa) and ate octopus, calamari and swordfish. We went sardine fishing with Toto, an enormously well-built fisherman, but caught very little. He recalled the Mediterranean in the Sixties. “Then, there were plenty of fish, but no one had any money. Now there’s plenty of money, largely through drug trafficking, but no fish.”
The hotel in Mondello is the sort of place I like. La Torre is a rather undistinguished, flat-topped, white building built in the Sixties, but it has a fabulous view of the bay, plus a big pool and large, simply furnished rooms as well as really rather good food including some Planeta wines. The house white, La Segreta Bianco, is light and floral, but go for a recent vintage: being from a hot climate, the whites from Sicily don’t retain freshness for long.
I went back to Trapani to find the perfect fish couscous at Valderice Mare, a little village on the coast just outside the city. We stayed at La Tonnara di Bonagia, a hotel converted from a 17th-century tuna factory, which is a good place to base yourself. The restaurant that serves the couscous is nearby on the water.
Ristorante Pensione Sirena is the sort of place you will love if you enjoy the atmosphere of big, bustling Italian places; the seafood couscous is a simple matter of a good stock made by slow-simmering local rock fish such as rascasse and John Dory with tomato, garlic and nutmeg, which is then ladled on to couscous that has been gently steamed for more than an hour.
The dish is served with a line of grilled gamberetti, the local deep-red prawns, on top. Customers come from all over the island, so well regarded is the dish. There is another good restaurant for it at nearby Erice called Ristorante Monte San Giuliano.
It was a food journey that took me to the rather notorious town of Corleone, too. It’s right in the centre of the island. As a long-time fan of the film The Godfather, I drove there with great excitement, passing through some spectacular rolling countryside. Like so many places on the island, it’s filled with old and slightly decrepit buildings.
In small country towns, the presence of a camera crew is something of note. A man called Bernardo Provenzano had recently been captured in a house on the outskirts of the city after 43 years on the run. Known as “the tractor”, because of his habit of mowing down his enemies, Provenzano had been the boss of bosses running the Sicilian Mafia for the past 13 of those years. How you can run a criminal organisation as a fugitive says an awful lot about what really goes on in southern Italy. We had had to explain more than once that we weren’t there for the Mafia, we were there for the pasta.
We had heard about a legendary organic pasta-maker called “La Corleonese” in the town. We filmed the pasta cascading down from an old green press, it was then picked up on runners and put into wooden drying chambers. Afterwards, we asked the owner, Elizabeth Viola, why her pasta was so sought after. She explained that it was the climate, the quality of the wheat around Corleone, and the attention to detail as it was slowly dried.
We waited in her old-fashioned shop, lined with dark wooden shelves, and watched a stream of people coming in to buy it. I remarked that she didn’t need to sell anything else in her little shop; no souvenirs, jars of pasta sauce, or pasta bowls and servers. Just pasta.
That’s what’s so nice about the Italians; their absolute loyalty to the quality of the raw materials. Someone once said: “In France food is all about the genius of cooks, in Italy it’s all about the glory of God.”
Rick Stein’s Mediterranean Escapes (BBC Books) is published on August 2 and available through Booksfirst , www.timesonline.co.uk/ booksfirst) for £18, including free p&p. The BBC Two series begins on August 8.