Now it was time for a woman who could be the best home cook on the island....
except it would be hard to judge in a place with so many excellent home cooks.
Her name is Rosalba Lo Greco and she cooks for Barone Pietro Beneventano at his agriturismo,
or Farmhouse Inn, Case del Feudo, outside Siracusa.
Each of these is fried separately in extra-virgin olive oil,
seasoned with nothing but salt and pepper.
The eggplant is cubed, salted and left to drain for at least 30 minutes,
then dried very well before being dropped in boiling oil.
“Things to be fried have to be dried very well. This is a secret,” she says.
Steve notes that she’s using a lot of olive oil for frying,
but Signora Rosalba reassures him....
She learned to cook, Rosalba says, from watching her grandmother.
"My mother was a terrible cook," she told us,
"but every summer she sent me to spend three months with my grandmother
in Piazza Armerina and she was a great cook.
I’m passionate about good food. I love to cook, I love to feed people.
To cook just for the sake of cooking, no.
They say what I cook is pretty good, for me it’s just normal.
And the smallest secrets make the difference.
For instance, the eggplant in a caponata,
it should be a little crunchy, it should have character."
The eggplant, golden brown, gets drained of its oil.
With all the vegetables prepared and cooked down thoroughly,
she makes a tomato sauce, beginning with a a few slivers of garlic
which she sweats in oil, then adds a good quantity of tomato purée
to which — another secret — she adds a little sugar.
And a lot of fresh basil from the garden.
Now, each of the ingredients that was cooked separately
gets combined with the other, so their separate flavors meld together and, in a way,
support each other without losing their individual character.
And finally, the tomato sauce is spooned over the top and mixed in.
Signora Rosalba has never heard of putting chocolate in or on the caponata—
“it’s nouvelle cuisine,” says her boss the Barone.
We’re an hour’s drive south of Catania where the addition of chocolate is customary and traditional....
Another look at how Sicily divides itself into culinary niches or slices.
“Caponata,” the Barone says, “is an extremely poor dish.
It’s unimaginable that people who were making caponata could afford to add lobster or chocolate to it."
Nuts, though, that’s another story....
Toasted almonds, broken in pieces and scattered over the top.
Then....more sugar, white wine vinegar,
and she turns up the flame underneath to boil the mixture vigorously.
As a final touch, and it’s a very refined one,
in what’s essentially a country kitchen,
Signora Rosalba drains the caponata
so that only the small amount of sauce clinging to the vegetables ends up in the dish.
To make it lighter, she says, less oily, and easier to digest.
And when it’s time to serve it, the Barone’s suggestion of broken toasted almonds goes on top.
To go with the caponata, Signora Rosalba makes another favorite dish at the farmhouse,
pesce al maloverso or "tonno a carpione,"
which starts with a massive quantity of sliced onions,
dressed with a magnitude of black pepper
and slowly, slowly, cooked down in an enormous amount of olive oil,
until they are a molten mass of gold — but without a speck of brown.
Then thin medallions of tuna,
browned in oil and splashed with vinegar and white wine,
are added to the onions, buried almost literally in the golden mass.
Then it’s left to cook down until most of the liquid has evaporated
and what’s left is a rich brown fragrant stew of tuna and onions.
To serve the fish, Rosalba makes tuna sandwiches,
nestling a spoonful of the rich onion sauce
inbetween two tuna medallions.