Sicilia Ricotta e Caffe

This is Sicily. Food comes not in prissy quarter-platefuls, but in heaps appropriate for mountain men. To finish a meal of chick pea soup, followed by two types of pasta, roast lamb with rosemary-flavoured potatoes, and a ricotta cassata for dessert, requires removal from the table by winch. You could of course cut some corners by living solely on ricotta and an espresso, seemingly the staple food of Sicily, but why miss out on local anchovies, capers, gelati, and those delicious marzipan cakes made by the good Benedictine nuns from La Matorana?

Sixteen of us are walking with ATG Oxford from the centre to the sea. Led by the
amazing Antonio who knows absolutely everything about wild-life, about
history and about the Sicilian landscape. His back-pack is bursting with extra
water for us wimps, dried fruit and nuts in case we faint with pangs of hunger
between our gargantuan meals, Compede for our blisters, hefty shears to cut
through brambles that might scratch our delicate, white English legs, possibly even a can of oil for rusty hinges, a length of rope, and inflatable swimming aids - who knows?

Spring was in our step and summer in our sights as we set off from historic Enna
with its impressive fortress, heading up, and up, and up, to the dramatically
situated town of Gangi. Seldom visited by travellers, this striking Sicilian village has
a regular bus service to Dusseldorf, due to a mass exodus after the war, where
many of its inhabitants now live. The contrast between narrow, cobbled medieval streets and a gleaming German coach is surreal. We stay in a converted baronial farmhouse, now an Agriturismo, deep in the countryside beyond Gangi. Our luggage, transported as if by magic, is already in our rooms.

Walking across the Sicilian hills where visitors rarely venture we arrive at Geraci
Siculo with its ruined Saracen castle where everyone smiles at us and offers a
friendly ‘Buon giorno!’ often asking us where have we have come from and where are we walking to. We tell them we will get there in another twelve miles or so, and they keep smiling, but you know they are thinking that we must be
completely pazzo. Why not go by car?

Here, there and everywhere, gnarled old men sit outside the Bars reading newspapers, drinking espresso or chatting, raising a friendly arm in greeting. Their wives turn them out of the house at 8.30am and they are not allowed back in until 1pm for lunch. And they are back in the Bar by 4.30pm.

Sicily is a carpet of wild flowers in the Spring and early Summer. As we cross high grassy uplands, rolling hills with rocky outcrops and the dramatic Madonie Mountains, we walk through rare white and yellow asphodals, mountain anenomes, banks of sweet peas, meadows of dark crimson clover, peonies, fragrant broom, cistus, and - best of all - the amateur botanists amongst us spot twenty-one different sorts of orchids. Antonio points to a golden eagle circling overhead, and we stand transfixed while a family of wild boar and their babies scatter at our approach.

Liz, the manager with ATG Oxford, provides our daily picnic lunch. Half way
through our walk, there on a red checked tablecloth, a feast is spread out before us. One day it might be herb-roasted chicken; a salad of three sorts of tomatoes with capers and anchovies; a pear, lettuce and walnut salad; a hunk of pecorino; a round of ricotta with the impression of the wicker basket it was made in; speck, Parma ham and olive bread. And for dessert almond and cinnamon cookies, and vanilla-flavoured ricotta stuffed into what looks like brandy snaps called cannoli. Another day she gives us green beans, chick peas and anchovy salad, local goats cheese wrapped in chopped mint; a cheese coated in saffron called piacentino; gorgonzola piccante; raw baby broad beans in their pods, and wafer-thin foccacia. This was followed by a tart with a layer of sweet ricotta and luscious strawberries. ‘Doubtless God could have made a better berry’ said Dr William Butler, the 17th century writer, ‘but doubtless God never did’. Sicilian strawberries with their intense sunny flavour are a distinct improvement on our modern British commercial crop.

We try not to drink too much wine in case it impedes our ascent up the steep hills that we can see before our eyes, but we sip greedily at the Nerello Mascalese because, after all, we are on holiday and we deserve it. The local white can be good too, Inzolia or Grillo are refreshing and perfect with the cheeses. But we keep the Marsala for after dinner in the evening otherwise we would never make it to our next destination high up in the Piano Torre. In the meadows we walk through mint, thyme and fennel, the scent wafting towards us. In the woods we find clumps of wild garlic which look like white bluebells but with wider leaves and pretty little florets. Two big bunches inspire wild garlic soup with a blob of whipped ricotta and a scattering of flat leaf parsley. Liz also brings us arancini - great orange balls of rice with a tasty ragu in the middle. In our modern, highly processed age it is good to be confronted with such fresh, local ingredients. The simple yet delicious food that we eat - capers, which we saw growing straight out of dry walls, white mulberries, wild strawberries, salted anchovies and the local delicacy - ventresca (the best bit from the stomach of the tuna) tempt us as we wander through the markets.

Up in the hills where flocks of sheep with bells round their necks roam freely we
came across shepherds milking their ewes by hand. Sheep are kept not for their
wool, like in the Cotswolds back home, but for their milk to make cheese. Ricotta
is a by-product of cheese-making; in this case pecorino which sells in the markets
for a good price. Shepherds milk their sheep twice a day. They keep the evening
milk overnight and then add the morning milk to it, heating it to 94°C. They then
add rennet (the lining of a kid’s stomach) that causes the curds and whey to
separate. The curds become valuable pecorino. The whey is re-heated again
(ricotta’ means re-cooked) to 94°C and more rennet added which coagulates
the left over fat. It is then strained into a small wicker basket. It can be eaten fresh with bread, or salted and mixed into pasta, or stuffed into ravioli. Or sweetened with vanilla and whipped as a dessert. To preserve it for the winter it is salted with sea salt - sometimes it is flavoured with chili. By then it will keep for a long time and it eventually gets to a point where it can be grated like parmesan.

The days have been sunny but cool - perfect for walking - but at night it has been quiet cold. We wend our way down from 5,280ft, our highest point, to the
beautiful bay of Cefalu with its magical Norman cathedral, its lovely shops and its fruit, veg and fish markets.We are at sea level after fourteen miles of downward climb - hard on the knees and much of it descending steeply in what Antonio describes as the ‘Geisha girl shuffle’. Finally the heat hits us, acres of lemon groves cover the landscape and by the time we reach the sea we are still lily white but nicely ‘re-cooked’ just like ricotta.

Landscape Photography by Ian Graham and Agi Lehar Graham