They may be a Sicilian specialty, but cipollate catanesi are easy to enjoy anywhere – all you need is intense heat
Maybe it is because I know the chances of going to Sicily this summer are slim, but I keep playing bits of the trip in my head in the same way I used to listen to lines of songs on cassettes: the screeching rewind, snap-stop, replay. The ripping drive down the autostrada del sole, motorway of sun, to Naples; the overnight ferry to Palermo or Catania; the first thick coffee; the trip to the market to get a picnic for the journey to my partner’s family home. There is nothing special or unusual about a looping thought of getting away for a holiday; the evocation of heat, saltwater or cold beer.
At the moment, in Rome, the smells and tastes of Sicily are vivid to me, almost rudely so, amplified by my imagination, a cassette played through 120W amps, with distortion. The walk from Catania fish market back to the car park is always a smell-driven journey: it means passing under a bridge banked with rubbish, then past a man tending charcoal grills full of blackened pepper and onions. Writing this now, the smells of fermenting rubbish and scorched onions are as real and intrusive as the smell of the alcohol-bleach mixture my neighbour squeezes into the cracks on the communal staircase to kill “the virus”.
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