The conquests you can still taste

In 1154 a geographer from Ceuta finished fifteen years' work in Palermo. Al-Idrisi had been commissioned by Roger II to describe the known world; the king died within weeks of its completion.

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One passage describes Trabia, a hamlet east of Palermo with mills on year-round water, turning out itriyya in quantities that loaded ships for Calabria and beyond.

Itriyya is dried pasta. That sentence is the earliest documentary evidence of pasta made for export anywhere in what became Italy — which is not the same as inventing it, whatever the road signs imply. The word is Greek before it is Arabic, and it turns up as itrium in the Jerusalem Talmud some seven centuries earlier. What 1154 dates is the shipping, not the making.

Under all of it there is grain. Cato called Sicily the storehouse of the republic; Cicero quoted him while prosecuting the governor who had emptied it.

Some of that wheat is still sown. Tumminia goes from seed to harvest in three months — which is precisely what its Greek name, trimeniaios, says — and mills out grey. The black bread of Castelvetrano is made from it. The sheep stayed as well: in the Belice valley there is a cheese stretched like mozzarella but made from whole sheep's milk, the only one in Italy. Sheep's curd fights the stretching, which is why almost nobody tries.

The fields themselves run on the same clock every year: green through March and April with the wheat standing, gold by May, cut from late May into June. After that the interior stays bare and pale until the rain returns in October — the one stretch of the island where the postcard colours are the exception, not the rule.

Ripe durum wheat seen from inside the crop at head height: a dense stand of straw-coloured stems and bearded ears across the bottom of the frame, their black awns fanning out against a deep cloudless blue sky that fills the rest of it. Nothing green is left in the ears. Open full screenA cut loaf of dark bread photographed from directly above on a plain white surface: the heel of the loaf standing upright with a domed, sesame-studded brown crust, and one thick slice lying below it, cut face up, showing a pale grey-brown open crumb with a thin dark rim. Open full screenA woman in an apron at a kitchen counter, laying out hand-rolled semolina pasta: dozens of thick yellow strands in rows on a printed cream cloth, one more still pinched between her fingers, and the thin steel rod they are rolled around lying on the dark marble behind. Open full screen

The Arabs held the island for two and a half centuries, and the kitchen never went back.

Ibn Hawqal walked Palermo in 972 and recorded papyrus cut along the Papireto for rope and paper, Persian cane in the fields, and market gardens of aubergine, artichoke and melon fed through underground channels.

The almond keeps its own calendar, flowering around Agrigento from late January into February, weeks ahead of the same trees on cooler ground inland. Lemon trees on the coast carry a third crop through the summer, the verdello — picked green and ripe despite the colour.

What is not in dispute is the taste. Vinegar set against sugar is the clearest surviving habit, and pasta con le sarde carries the whole pantry in one pan — sardines, wild fennel, pine nuts, raisins, saffron, and toasted breadcrumb instead of cheese, because cheese would be wrong.

A white plate of spaghetti dressed in a pale sauce, topped with a loose heap of feathery green wild fennel fronds and scattered coarse golden breadcrumbs, with more crumbs fallen on the rim of the plate and a fork resting at the left edge. Open full screenLemon trees in bright sun, branches dense with dark glossy leaves and dozens of ripe yellow lemons hanging at every level, a few white blossoms among them, with fan palms and a flat white wall behind. Open full screen

The first tomato sauce written down in Italy appears in a Naples cookbook of 1692, under the name salsa di pomodoro alla spagnuola. Nobody had thought to put it on pasta yet.

The prickly pear that now looks like the emblem of the island is a Mexican cactus, five centuries resident. Growers cut off its whole first flowering in May so that it blooms again; the second crop is later, larger and sweeter, and is called bastardoni.

Modica chocolate is the strangest survival of the three. The paste is held below forty degrees and never conched, so the sugar never dissolves and the bar breaks dry and grits against the teeth. The cold stone grinding is Mesoamerican, the sugar is Spanish, and the result is neither.

A sprawling prickly pear at close range, its thick gnarled woody stems and flat green pads dotted with small dark areoles filling the lower half of the frame and carrying dozens of ripe fruits in magenta and purple-red, each with a sunken flat crown, with a few pale yellow flowers among the pads at the top right. Blurred behind it, a long rectangular pool of still water, a clipped hedge, a dark wall and low tile-roofed buildings under an overcast sky. Open full screenTwo thick, roughly broken slabs of dark chocolate stacked on a sheet of pale printed wrapping paper, the broken edges facing the camera and showing a dry granular interior flecked with undissolved sugar, with loose cocoa crumbs scattered beside them. Open full screenA farm courtyard in low evening light: a long low range of limewashed rubble-stone buildings under terracotta tiles across the back, with a deep round-arched passage in the middle, red doors along each wing and bougainvillea over one side. In the foreground, three beds of small halved red fruits lie drying cut-side up. Open full screen

Palermo says arancina, Catania says arancino, and both are right: Italian makes the fruit feminine, Sicilian does not. The line between them runs down the middle of the island, along the same seam every other division here has followed.

Panelle are chickpea flour cooked to a paste, set, sliced thin and fried, then loaded into a sesame roll — often with a potato croquette in beside them, which is a decision nobody here apologises for. Sfincione is named after a sponge and carries tomato, stewed onion, anchovy, caciocavallo and breadcrumb, and no mozzarella whatever. Pani ca meusa is spleen and lung fried in lard: schetta, single, with lemon, or maritata, married, with ricotta and caciocavallo.

Over the top of all of it runs the abbanniata, the market cry. Not shouting — a sung line about price and quality that the seller composes for himself and then keeps, the way a man keeps a name.

Three golden deep-fried rice balls in breadcrumb, each set on a spoonful of tomato sauce dotted with cracked peppercorns, lined up along a long white rectangular platter on a white marble table. Open full screenA hand holding an opened soft white roll, its top half flipped back, with three or four pale golden chickpea fritters laid across the lower half, against a blurred doorway and greenery. Open full screenA cut square of sfincione seen from the side on a pale glass plate: a thick, open-crumbed bread base, a thin pale layer of melted cheese, and a rough orange-red crust of tomato, onion and toasted breadcrumb on top, with a darker breadcrumbed underside. Open full screenA street market under red, green and yellow-striped awnings: wooden crates of tomatoes, strawberries, green beans, aubergines, courgettes and corn on trestles down both sides of a flagstone lane, a seller in a red shirt serving a customer, and shuttered ochre houses with balconies behind in hard midday sun. Open full screen

Cassata argues with itself. The name is either Arabic qasʿah, a bowl, or Latin caseus, cheese. The Arabic reading is the one everyone repeats, and it is Michele Amari's guess from 1872; the oldest attestation is a Sicilian glossary of the 1300s defining cassata as food made of bread dough and cheese. The version everyone photographs is newer than it looks. Palermo convents were building it that way by 1799, and a city pastry maker, Salvatore Gulì, put the candied pumpkin on top and took it to Vienna in 1873.

Cannoli are named for the river cane the shells were rolled around. They must be filled to order, because within minutes the water walks out of the ricotta and into the pastry. A cannolo filled in advance is a soft, sad object, and a reliable instruction to leave.

Granita is older than refrigeration and arrived at it backwards. Men cut snow off Etna, and off Monte Lauro in the Iblei, and buried it under straw in stone pits; some are still there above Buccheri, one of them dated 1730. It is eaten at breakfast, with a warm brioscia col tuppo — the bun named for the knot of hair women pinned at the nape.

A whole cassata on a scalloped gold cake board, held by someone in a white jacket: glossy white icing with piped scrollwork and beading down the sides, a band of pale-green marzipan showing at the rim, and a rosette on top of translucent candied citron, orange and pear slices with glacé cherries and green candied peel. Open full screenA plate of about nine cannoli on a paper napkin, seen from above: blistered dark-brown fried shells, each packed with white ricotta, the ends finished with a glacé cherry or chopped pistachio. Open full screenSeen from above: two brioche buns with round topknots on squares of white paper, beside a paper cup of coffee granita and a paper cup of lemon granita, with blue plastic spoons standing in both. Open full screen

Marsala is an English invention with a Sicilian address. John Woodhouse landed in 1773, found a local wine kept in wood in perpetuum, and fortified the casks going home so they would survive the voyage. Benjamin Ingham industrialised it. Vincenzo Florio bought the ground between the two English yards in 1833, and within a lifetime his firm had swallowed both of them.

In the flat south-east, Cerasuolo di Vittoria was raised to DOCG in 2005 — Nero d'Avola for the frame, Frappato for the scent.

Grillo, which now makes a great deal of the island's good white, has Catarratto and zibibbo for parents. That is the exact cross a baron made near Favara in 1869 — except that Grillo was already planted all round Marsala five years later, which is far too fast. So it is almost certainly not his, and nobody knows whose it is.

The vendemmia starts in the west in high summer and finishes on Etna in late October, sometimes into November. Olives come off from late September into December, and blood oranges run from December through to spring — by which point snow can still be lying high on Etna, so a single April day can hold snow and citrus both.

Rows of low green vines running away over bare dark red-brown soil on a gently sloping hillside. A rough wall of irregular dark stone cuts diagonally across the middle of the picture, stepping the ground up to a higher level, and behind it a slope is cut into several narrow vine terraces, each held by a similar wall. Open full screenTwo sun-browned hands reaching in from the left and bottom of the frame to lift two long bunches of dark blue-black grapes clear of the leaves, with more fruit and vine leaves filling the background. Open full screenA dim limewashed stone room with a ceiling of wooden joists and boards and deep round-arched recesses in the walls, each holding a small barred window. Filling the centre is a huge timber press: two tall uprights carrying a massive squared horizontal beam that runs the width of the room, with a stack of timbers on a low platform beneath it. Large rendered stone tanks stand to the right. Open full screenInside a wine cellar: dark oak barrels stacked two high along a whitewashed wall on stone plinths, chalk-marked heads with paper tags, a stone vaulted arch opening onto more barrels, and a sand floor scored with cart tracks. Open full screen

A tonnara is a sequence of net chambers narrowing until the last one, where the floor is raised and there is nowhere left to swim. The rais commands it. The Florio plant at Favignana ran until 1977; the nets were last raised there in 2007, and it is a museum now.

What survives is quieter, and it keeps. Bottarga: the roe sac lifted out whole, buried in sea salt, turned every day, then pressed and dried hard. At Sciacca the anchovies are headed and gutted by hand on the quay, layered with salt and shut in the dark for a year. At Trapani the sea is walked through shallower and shallower basins until it gives up its salt in the last of them.

The long hall of a former tuna plant, pale limestone pillars down both sides and a lit arched window at the far end. A wide carpet of empty tuna tins runs the length of the centre in graded bands — salmon-pink nearest, then green, then gold, then rows of round silver and blue tins at the back — with the brick floor left bare on either side. Small historic black-and-white photographs hang on the walls. Open full screenShallow rectangular basins of still water under a deep blue sky, low earth banks between them, a large cone of white salt at the right and smaller covered heaps beyond, rows of stacked curved terracotta roof tiles along the near bank, and a windmill with a red conical cap reflected in the water. Open full screen