ON THE AVENUES: Under the volcano in Catania, Sicily (Part One).

ON THE AVENUES:
Under the volcano in Catania, Sicily (Part One).

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

“Nowhere has truth such a short life as in Sicily; a fact has scarcely happened five minutes before its genuine kernel has vanished, been camouflaged, embellished, disfigured, squashed, annihilated by imagination and self-interest; shame, fear, generosity, malice, opportunism, charity, all the passions, good as well as evil, fling themselves onto the fact and tear it to pieces; very soon it has vanished altogether.”
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, "The Leopard"

Based on our scant week’s residency in Catania last November, Tomasi di Lampedusa’s reflection about the brevity of Sicilian truth might better describe adherence to traffic laws, which in practice tend more toward vague suggestive recommendations than ironclad do’s and don’ts … and soon vanish altogether.

Consequently, we chose to walk as often as possible. Even so, I experienced an alarming weight gain, attesting to the reality that in Sicily, diets also abruptly vanish.

Catania is a city of 325,000 people, second largest in Sicily behind Palermo. It perches by the Mediterranean Sea on the island’s eastern side. The citizenry resides atop the volcanic detritus of millennia, with suburbs ascending steadily to where the slopes of Mt. Etna begin.

The volcano’s perpetually smoldering 11,000-foot crater looms on one side of Catania, and a vast expanse of salt water on the other. Numerous other settlements, villages, vineyards and farms dot the landscape. So it has been since ancient times.

During our holiday in Catania, the region’s typical autumn weather – high humidity and rain from clouds trapped by Mt. Etna’s height – produced misty, overcast days that almost continuously obscured the volcano from our vantage point on the ground.

Luckily, we were aloft and seated near the aircraft’s windows during both of our clear, sunny days, first on a Wednesday trip to nearby Malta, and then during the first leg of the journey home. Seeing the snow-covered volcano from the air was stunning, and ranks with my greatest ever travel thrills.

As an adult, scientific pursuits have not been a priority for me apart from a rudimentary knowledge of fermentation. However, as a child, I was fascinated by dinosaurs, geology … and volcanoes.

At some point along the way a transition occurred, and my focus shifted to the humanities, history and geography. These have served me well in barroom debates, but when the opportunity came to visit Catania, suddenly I experienced overlapping chronologies. Can old publicans learn new tricks?

Prior to leaving the States, we booked a Mt. Etna van tour with an English-speaking driver/guide. Unfortunately, Monday proved to be the worst weather of the trip, although our man Tomassino was an entertaining and authoritative source of information about the volcano and its surroundings. It was a welcome refresher course, absorbed with wine and occasional nibbles from local farms.

Taken together, volcanoes, earthquakes, fault lines and rifts are interrelated aspects of a planet in constant movement. In fact, Mt. Etna is continuously active. It vents and breathes, and occasionally lava will work its way through a fissure and begin flowing somewhere down the mountainside. The scene was placid in November, but minor eruptions occurred in February, 2017.

If only we'd been there then!

Catanians refer to Mt. Etna as “she,” and to themselves as her children. Residents of the region have learned to live with the volcano because in terms of probability, constant minor rumblings tend to forestall a Mt. St. Helens-style epochal explosion borne of long-term pressure unrelieved.

However, this has not always been the case. A little over 300 years ago, Catania suffered through both a volcanic eruption and an ensuing earthquake, an unfortunate combination resulting in the destruction of much of the 2,000-year-old city.

The urban core was rebuilt in the then-current Baroque style, with ash-gray lava basalt used strikingly as exterior embellishment, only to be damaged yet again when the Allies bombed the port during WWII. Today, Catania’s compact Baroque city center is surrounded by rings of subsequent construction and development.

Catania is a working city, with less of a tourist presence than other more famous Italian locales. It is lived in, well used and frayed around the edges, not at all pristine in a Scandinavian kind of way. There is litter and graffiti in Catania, and the street lights don’t always work. At first glance, the scene is chaotic. Sicily has numerous issues. Perfection doesn’t exist.

But give it a few days, and Catania starts making sense – and a visitor can eat and drink like royalty at reasonable prices.

We arrived at our hotel at around 6:00 p.m., following three flights totaling 22 mind-numbing hours, enlivened by the stereotypical hair-raising taxi ride from the airport, which is located about as far from downtown as Louisville’s.

According to the helpful hotel desk clerk, the perfect spot for our first evening meal in Catania was La Terrazza del Barone, located in the same neighborhood, just around the corner and two short blocks away.

However, we couldn’t eat quite yet, because in the Mediterranean tradition, restaurants close after lunch and don’t reopen until 7:00 p.m. at the absolute earliest. After freshening up, a brief orientation walk revealed our crucial proximity to Via Plebiscito, a lengthy, curving and utterly illogical street hosting numerous neighborhood trattorias, such that the smell of food was never very far away.

Many of Via Plebiscito’s trattorias are renowned for grilled horse, offered by the cut like beef, or ground and made into meatballs and burgers. Measured on a per capita basis, Italians are the European champions of horse meat consumption, and on Sicily, Catania is the acknowledged leader in equine gastronomy.

It happens that 27 long years had elapsed since my previous Italian meal. I’ve never knowingly consumed horse, and neither of us had visited Sicily, so the Baylors were fully prepared to go “all-in” on opening night, and the results were fabulous.

It was necessary to relearn the consummately civilized, enduring principles of Italian dining. Menus in Italy tend to be organized by course, intended sequentially, as constituting a philosophy of relaxed dining and perhaps a guide to living as a whole.

Antipasti (appetizers) are followed by pasta, then a main course and dessert – sweets, perhaps coffee or liqueurs, or a second bottle of wine.

The object is to refrain from one’s evening meal until 7:30 or 8:00 at the very earliest, and devote a large portion of the evening to leisurely working your way through it – unless you’d rather grab a quick drink and a few nibbles before getting into mischief elsewhere. This also is allowed. Sit and linger, or eat and run. Bring the kids and spill out into the street. Enjoy.

La Terrazza del Barone proved to be a classic family institution, staffed with professionally attired servers tending garrulously to business. Despite a language gap, they were unfailingly helpful during our first evening’s meal, as well as two subsequent visits.

My horse meat came unadorned, in the form of a mixed grill. As I’ve always maintained, once we’ve made the decision to eat meat, parts is parts. Horse has a flavor just like beef, pork or chicken, and while describing it isn’t really possible, I found it tender and succulent, tastier than expected.

I’d do it again, and hearty red wine didn’t hurt, either. It was almost 10:00 p.m. when we finished, and the place was still packed. The festive meal compounded our exhaustion, fueling ten hours of much needed sack time, followed by a copious hotel breakfast on Sunday morning prior to the requisite orientation stroll, and an introduction to cannoli.

(to be continued as time permits)

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It's more delicious to avoid those "complicated feelings" about eating horse meat.

I'm already saddened that we traveled all the way to Sicily four months ago and Mt. Etna didn't get the "Roger's here" memo and erupt, instead waiting until the past week to toss out some pyrotechnics.

This week's activity wasn't particularly big — "a minor eruption by Etna's standards," said Marco Fulle, an astronomer at the Trieste Astronomical Observatory in Italy, who also tracks volcanoes.

Now comes a reminder that one of the fundamental joys of cuisine in Catania not only remains taboo back here in Trumpicana, but in fact has been banned by papal decree since the year 732.

Except the Pope lives in Rome, and Rome is in Italy, and so is Catania ... so never mind. Italians ignore the Vatican's birth control edicts, too.

I'll always remember my mixed equine grill (above) at La Terrazza del Barone. It was delightful, and I'd like to go back to Catania for horse burgers some day, perhaps with horseradish.

Actually, I'd just like to return to Catania, horse or no horse.

Why We Have Such Complicated Feelings About Eating Horses, by Eric Grundhauser (Atlas Obscura)

Horse meat has rarely gone down easy.

In many cuisines — Chinese, French, French Canadian, Kazakh — eating horse is no big deal, and sometimes even considered a delicacy. But in the U.S., the U.K., and much of the modern English-speaking world, the idea of horses as food is considered a big no-no, even among avid meat eaters.

The practice of eating horses goes back to the time of early man, with evidence of horse consumption dating back to the Paleolithic era. But using horses as food has long presented both practical and emotional quandaries. Almost universally, horses have long been seen as companions and beasts of burden. “It’s an animal we anthropomorphize, but it also comes from this tradition of herbivores that we feel more comfortable eating,” says Amy Bentley, a Food Studies professor at New York University, who has never tried horse meat herself. “So, I’m sure that makes it more flexible in that way.”

However, there's this little matter of logic.

The cultural development surrounding the production and eating of horse meat differs from country to country, but for the most part, it has been eaten out of necessity. “Here’s this huge animal with hundreds of pounds of meat on it,” says Bentley. “If you’re going to eat animals, it’s a pretty logical animal to eat.”

Boasting culinary Indiana Joneses?

I was on this tangent earlier in March.

My kingdom for a horse (sausage), part two ... the backlash bits.

My kingdom for a horse (sausage), part one.

Here's another Guardian consideration of the "horsemeat furore." Click through just to see the sexy chocolate grasshopper.

The horsemeat furore was compounded by foolish foodie machismo; Culinary Indiana Joneses like to boldly eat what others wouldn't try. But that's just showing off, by Jay Rayner (The Observer/The Guardian)

A few years ago, on a trip to Tokyo, I ate sperm from the fugu, the blowfish famed for the toxicity of its internal organs. This reads like a boast, doesn't it?

My kingdom for a horse (sausage), part two ... the backlash bits.

Part one here.

Andrew Higgins ends his New York Times piece about food as a barometer of the European Union's enduring cultural divisions with this observation:

Some French fans of horse meat are hoping that the fuss could add a frisson of excitement to eating horses and help lift the stigma from a fare that, even in France and Belgium, is generally viewed as old-fashioned and uncool. Several popular Paris restaurants are reported to be interested in adding horse to their menus.

Make it organic and locate a euphemism, and we may have a deal.

Ever since the European "horse meat in my Whopper" scandal broke, I've been thinking back to a couple of magazine pieces written by John Ed Pearce in the late 1980's in the CJ's old Sunday magazine, in which the perennial curmudgeon sought to offend every dog lover in the metro area by professing the culinary potential (and cultural relativity) of Bowser Burgoo and other canine dishes. Folks were plenty steamed, but really, aren't parts just parts once you've resolved to eat meat?

In an era of foodie-ism, the literal hot dog is an idea whose time finally may have come, although some eaters are ready for a systemic counter-revolution, as considered in this Guardian essay from the fall of 2012. The excerpt below makes reference to The Trip, which the Confidential household viewed last year. Poole's essay is lengthy, but well worth the time, so put some civet coffee in the Ikea press pot, and enjoy a good read.

Let's start the foodie backlash, by Steven Poole (Guardian)

Food is the new sex, drugs and religion. Cookery dominates the bestseller lists and TV schedules. Celebrity chefs have become lifestyle gurus and cooking is referred to as a high art. Steven Poole has had his fill of foodism.

 ... One thing I do know is that "brawn" is pâté made from a pig's head: the name is an obvious example of menu euphemism. Verbs tend to ascribe benign agency to the parts of a dead animal, as with the announcement by the waiter at L'Enclume who, in Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon's TV series The Trip, introduces a dish thus: "You've got some little manx queenies which are baby queen scallops. They're resting on grilled baby gem and parsley coulis as well as a light creamy horseradish sauce." When the waiter leaves, Brydon comments: "Rather optimistic to say they're 'resting'. Their days of resting have been and gone. They are dead."

My kingdom for a horse (sausage), part one.

I didn't squawk about the steak, dear. I merely said I didn't see that old horse that used to be tethered outside here.
-- WC Fields

Two articles in the New York Times consider the implications of Secretariat Shish Kebab, first from a standpoint of hygienic faith.

Of Fraud and Filet, by Frank Bruni

 ... We’re spooked by the horse meat story, disturbed by the fish tale and riveted by other instances of false food advertising because they remind us of a truth we try hard to forget. Every time we eat something that we haven’t grown and reaped and cooked ourselves — which means, for most of us, every time we eat — we’re taking a leap of faith: that it was protected from contamination; that it was inspected properly; that the cook didn’t mix in something objectionable; that the waiter didn’t drop it on the floor. We’re in a position of both extraordinary vulnerability and extreme trust.

Then, how these little bits of Seabiscuits 'n' Gravy in Ikea's spicy meatballs pertain to the very notion of European unity.

Recipe for Divided Europe: Add Horse, Then Stir, by Andrew Higgins

... The horse meat scandal has brought into the open the deep divisions, cultural and otherwise, that bedevil the European Union.

Part two here