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03/16/2007 Archived Entry: "Report from Modica"

Our trip to Modica was very productive for my food research, and -- no small thing -- the city is an amazing and beautiful place to see. It is yet another UNESCO World Heritage Site in the southeast of Sicily, a status shared with Catania, Sicily’s second largest city (after Palermo), Ragusa, Noto, and Siracusa. An earthquake in 1693 leveled these cities and they were rebuilt in the early to mid-late 1700s in high Baroque style. It’s not only the churches and grand public buildings and palaces that were designed in this elaborately decorated mode, but also the small houses. Even modest two-story homes – essentially row houses in that they are all attached – have iron balconies, often elaborately wrought, held up by curvaceous consoles with shell motifs, cherubs, rosettes, swirls of acanthus, and other things fantastic. And every time I see curvaceous frames around Baroque windows and doors I think I should go home and recreate them with paint around my own horrible New York windows. Oh well.

Siracusa, which is my home base for the week (we rented what is called a “holiday apartment”), is somewhat different than these other cities, however. It was one of the grandest cities and seats of culture in the ancient Greek world, vying with, some say even superceding, Athens itself. So, besides its Baroque patrimony, Siracusa is also rich in Greek ruins, and Roman ruins, and it has one of the best museums of Greek and Roman antiquities in the world. It also has a medieval castle built by Frederick II, the early 13th century ruler of Sicily and the Kingdom of Naples, who is renowned for his ecumenism, encouraging his Muslim and Jewish subjects to live peacefully alongside the Christians who followed the Pope in Rome. Frederick himself, although called the Holy Roman Emperor, was not all that holy, or Roman for that matter. He was excommunicated several times by several popes. Once it was because he procrastinated in launching a crusade. As for being Roman, he was the son of a Hohenstaufen king – that would be German --and the last of the Norman-Sicilian princesses, which would make her French, but not really.

But let’s forget the history lesson. Back to Modica. It is a city built on the sides and at the bottom of a huge gorge. Or is it a ravine? I’m not sure I know the difference. The lower part of the town is called Modica Bassa, meaning Low Modica. The section of the city built on the higher ground, actually only on one side of the higher ground, is called Modica Alta, meaning High Modica. There are two impressive cathedrals here.

San Giorgio in Modica Alta is dedicated to the saint who fought the dragon. It is situated at the top of a very long and steep staircase, an architectural feat unto itself. Fortunately, we didn’t have to walk all the steps. There is a road that traverses the steps about half way up. We were able to take the car that far. Inside the soaring cathedral is all sky blue and white with accents of gold, much simpler than the heavily gilded Neapolitan Baroque churches with which I am more familiar, but it is just as awesome in its simpler way.

San Pietro is in Modica Bassa. Inside it is much more heavily decorated than San Giorgio, although not gilded either. Outside, its staircase is lined with statues of all 12 apostles – very impressive. Although it gets fewer lines in the guide books than San Giorgio, San Pietro is no less an architectural and artistic Baroque wonder.

I came for the food, however, in particular to find out about Modica’s famous chocolate, which nowadays you can even find on sale at Autogrills, the pit stops on Italy’s autostradas, the major motorways. (You may be amused to know that both the Autogrills and the roads themselves are now owned by Benetton, the clothing people.)

Modica’s chocolate is not smooth and refined. It is grainy, and there is no milk chocolate version, just dark and darker. That’s because it is made the same way the ancient Aztecs made chocolate in Mexico. It is a direct descendent of that chocolate. Modica, along with all of southern Italy, was under Spanish rule at the time the Spanish discovered the New World. Cortez’ party returned to Spain from Mexico in 1509. The Spanish introduced chocolate, as well as sweet peppers and chile peppers, potatoes, tomatoes, squash, and most beans to Europe. In Modica, they still use the Mexican metate, a stone slab with what amounts to a stone rolling pin, to grind roasted chocolate beans that are now brought from Africa.

Buonajuto is the name of the company that has made Modica chocolate famous, so I headed straight for their shop and “laboratory,” the word Italians use for factory. It isn’t actually the main factory. It is more the show factory; just behind a glass wall of the retail store, itself a vision of wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling gorgeous inlaid wooden cabinets with glass doors to show off the products, as well as displays of company and family memorabilia.

They do actually make products in the laboratorio, but mainly pastries that use the chocolate. We bought and ate on the spot a cannolo filled with chocolate ricotta cream. They were also making another of Sicily’s hallmark sweets – cassata, but with, you guessed, chocolate ricotta. As much as I liked the cannolo it was not my all-time favorite one. I did, however, fall for the vanilla-flavored chocolate, of which I bought a dozen bars to bring home as gifts. They offer tastes of the full range of products in the store, including their chocolate liqueur, which I also could not resist buying, although it isn’t easy to carry liquids home these days.

The two traditional flavors of Modica chocolate are vanilla and cinnamon, both Mexican flavors. But Buonajuto, as well as other Modicani chocolate makers, also make chocolate with hot pepper (peperoncino), which is another Mexican flavor.

It was our good fortune that while we were in the store the current, young Buonajuto, Pier Paolo Ruta, and his father, Franco Ruta, came in. I introduced myself and we started talking. They couldn’t have been more charming and informative. In telling the tale of his family and their business, Pier Paolo mentioned that they thought they were originally a Jewish family. And I don’t think he said this because he was looking at a guy named Schwartz with a Jewish punim. It was just part of his proud family history. His maternal grandmother, whose husband was the founder of the company, was Jewish, which would make his mother Jewish, he said, which would make him Jewish, although he is Catholic.

One chocolate specialty of Modica intrigued me in particular. It is half moon pastry of thinly rolled short dough about two inches in diameter enclosing a filling of chocolate and ground meat. They are called ‘mpanatigghi, a dialect word that comes from the Spanish word empanada, which in turn became the Italian word empanadillas. I bought a package of them from Buonajuto. I thought they were terrific, and I intend to develop a recipe for them for the “Big Book,” as we are calling my new project covering all the regions of southern Italy. My friend Michelangelo Arezzo, who is from a noble Modicani family, said he’s tasted better. But then he grew up eating homemade versions. When I figure out how to do them, I’ll have to see if Michelangelo approves.

Another specialty of Modica is a sort-of, kind-of focaccia called scaccia. Ersilia La Pergola, Michelangelo’s wife, took us to her favorite scaccia bakery. They were still baking at the back of the shop and, as I must say almost always happens in hospitable southern Italy, the owner and his wife invited me to watch and learn, telling me as much as I wanted and needed to know to reproduce this fabulous product back home. It isn’t really a kind of bread, as the word focaccia would lead you to believe. Giuseppe Spadoro, the baker, said the word scaccia comes from focaccia – well, it certainly sounds like it might. But Ersilia, who is a linguist and English professor at the University of Catania, thinks it comes from the word schiacciata, which means flattened, and is used as a name for other types of flatbread in other regions of Italy.

Now this may be a bit confusing (as so many things in Italy are): In Catania, which is not that far from Modica, they have scacciata, which is a two-crust pizza, as I described in my last letter. But in Modica they eat scaccia. Both doughs are made with semolina flour, hard wheat flour, but the Modicani scaccia is a very thin dough (Giuseppe rolled it out in a pasta machine) with only a tiny bit of yeast. It takes no risings. The yeast does all its work in the oven. It is filled with a slew of different things – tomato, cheese and basil; pancetta, parsley and cheese; anchovies, cheese and parsley; potato chunks, onion, parsley and cheese; ricotta and onions; ricotta and sausage; eggplant, tomato and cheese – and it is rolled up so that the dough and filling are spiraled together. After baking, the dough has the texture of pasta. On the other hand, scacciata in Catania is more like bread, a puffy dough-like pizza, and the most common and traditional filling is tuma, a fresh cheese, maybe with a bit of anchovy and/or olives.

Hot out of the oven, we tasted scaccia filled with tomatoes and cheese. The following morning, for breakfast at the Arezzo-La Pergola country villa – in fact a baronial mansion from the early 1700s -- outside Modica, we warmed up a couple of other flavors in the toaster oven. I think I may like it even better reheated.

Not so incidentally, the cheese that is always used for Modicani scaccia is cacciocavallo Ragusano (Ragusa is nearby), which is totally unlike the cacciocavallo of other southern regions. It comes in rectangular forms, not rounded, and it can be soft and mild when young, or, when well aged, firm, sharp, and salty with a texture hard enough to grate to top pasta. Indeed, grated cacciocavallo is much more likely to be served than Parmigiano-Reggiano or any kind of pecorino. (In Manhattan, it is available at Di Palo on Grand and Mott Sts.. In Brooklyn, I can buy it at Coluccio on 60th St. and 12th Avenue. It is also very likely available at Agata and Valentina on First Ave. and 79th St. – Agata Musco is from Catania.)

If you think scaccia and chocolate were the only things we ate in Modica, you have no idea how intensively I do research – in other words, how much I can eat in one day. For lunch between the scaccia and chocolate, we went to a restaurant called Osteria dei Sapori Perduti, which roughly translates as the Saloon of Lost Flavors. One of the “flavors” prepared by chef Stefania Ferrante, actually a self-trained home cook, is a pasta called lolli, which is one of those things that you would have to have grown up eating to like. It is always served with a zuppa of the kind of fava beans that are dried with their skins on. I like the earthy fava well enough, but lolli, which are approximately three-inch long, thick cylinders of dough, are starchy and heavy.

All the soups are served family style in tall terracotta tureens, and I could not resist having one of those sitting picturesquely on our table. I took the pasta in broth with tiny meatballs. The pasta was tiny, tender squares (quadrucci). The tomato-tinged broth was more salty than tasting of meat. But the practically pea-sized meatballs were so delicious I didn’t mind the lackluster broth.

Bob’s ravioli were superbly light pillows filled with marjoram-flecked ricotta and covered in sugo di maiale, pork ragu. In this southeast province of Sicily, in this cooler season, tomato sauce cooked with pork is more commonly served than a simple tomato sauce. In fact, for a main course, Iris and I shared a plate of the pork that cooked in the sauce. With a piece of gelatinous pork skin (cotica) in our bowls, aside from the fabulous meat, we were very happy.