109 ~ Food ways and trout ways of Sicily

Greetings, dear readers. I’ve been on a bit of a blog hiatus due to travel the past month or so - a funeral in England, a wedding in Sicily, and Switzerland in between, all while trying to get the vegetable gardens planted when not leaving for the airport.

            In Sicily I attended the wedding of my nephew, Mattia (his father, my brother-in-law, is Sicilian). I've always enjoyed traveling in Italy, even though the place can pretty much be summed up as pasta, old buildings and bureaucracy; a museum with nice food (and sometimes difficulty in buying a ticket).  Still, with a bit of online investigation before my visit this time, I learned something else about Italy, and specifically Sicily  - the island is home to a native trout, the Mediterranean Trout, a.k.a. Salmo cettii. The fish, a cousin of Brown Trout, is endemic to southern Italy (including Sicily and Sardinia) and Corsica. With some further riffling through the ether's electrons I found one Peppe Torre, the only official fly fishing guide in Sicily. By email we arranged to meet after my nephew's wedding, and go in search of trout.

            Going in search of anything in Sicily will likely take you in some way via the Italian trio: old buildings, bureaucracy and, grazie a Dio, some good food. I focused on the good food, which is easy to find (there and anywhere in Italy, or Spain, France, Portugal or any other country that's neither England nor the country - this one - that invented fast food, which helped fog our memory of how to eat well).

           Peppe and I met and started our fishing adventure with excellent coffee in the ancient city of Siracusa, on Sicily’s southeast coast. He was pony-tailed, tattooed, outgoing and the only fishing guide I've ever had who cranked AC/DC out the car windows. This was fun already. My Airbnb in Siracusa had a small kitchen, and I looked forward to the possibility of adding some wild Sicilian trout to my Italian food explorations.

Peppe telling it how it is (with a nice trout fly tatt).

Mediterranean Trout, a la Peppe.

As we drove from Siracusa toward the streams, Peppe pointed out various points of food interest along the way, such as groves of peaches, lemons, oranges and, of course, olives. Our first stop was a small mom 'n pop shop in a village to order sandwiches - panini - for a streamside lunch later in the day.  To layer between the slabs of good bread, we chose local cheese, salami, and a green olive relish. We added a couple of Italian bottled beers to the order and were good to go. 

Assembling genuine panini Siciliani.

Almost... First came an amusing traverse of the Sicilian bureaucracy. Anyone who fishes in Italy, resident or non-resident, is supposed to purchase a license from the province in which they either live or fish, and the license is then good for fishing throughout the country. A problem we had is the way the province of Siracusa does it: anglers must apply in person for a fishing license, and it can take from a week to a month for the application to be processed and the license issued - hardly conducive to the business of a fishing guide. Peppe's workaround (something Italians are skilled at) was to have me go online with my phone and purchase my license from the better organized, more efficiently run northern province of Lombardy (home of Milan). He just shrugged at the fact that my license fee would go into the coffers of Lombardy, not Siracusa - what are you gonna do? 

            The dry, scrabbly, chaparral we continued to drive through toward the streams didn't look like trout country. Sicily wasn't always like this. Although somewhat hard to imagine today, forest covered much of the island when the Romans arrived. Over the following centuries the Empire cut most of the Sicilian forest for lumber, especially for use in shipbuilding. A hotter, drier climate followed as a result, as did more agriculture and herding, and the forest never recovered. Still, some Mediterranean Trout managed to maintain a hold in some streams at higher elevations, where air and water are cooler, and that's where Peppe and I (and Angus Young) headed.

           As we walked toward the first stream, the Manghisi, the food explorations continued as Peppe showed me a large, fragrant cluster of wild oregano, in beautiful pink flower, and soon the scent of wild mint filled the air (the latter also a common occurrence, in fact, while trout fishing back home in the Driftless).

I was surprised at the small size of the Manghisi, just a shallow creek, no river here, and it barely qualified as a stream. Clearly, except for the sea, Sicily doesn't have a lot of water to go around...  Still, the Manghisi held trout, and my fly rod and I were able to find and land some, all too small to legally keep, and Peppe educated me about their coloration and pattern, which identified them as hybrids of Brown and Mediterranean Trout, not the pure, true Salmo cettii.

            We tried the next stream, the Anapo, which, again, was among the smaller waters I've ever fished. This time I was rewarded by finding some true native Mediterranean Trout. The fish are obviously related to Browns, yet also clearly distinct once you know what to look for (larger, diffuse black spots, and no red spotting). In the life of a trout angler, there will come only so many times to catch a new species of trout, and so it was a special afternoon.

Small streams generally hold small fish, and I ended the Sicilian trout adventure without landing any trout large enough to keep and cook for dinner. Instead, that evening I had to content myself with some sublime grilled octopus at a restaurant in Siracusa. The trout ways of Sicily may be small and narrow, but, grazie a Dio, its food ways are abundant.

~ FYI, someone who knows a helluva lot more about eating well in Italy than I do is my sister Anne (Mattia's mother): www.annesitaly.com

Bird in a stream, in Sicily. Photo by Peppe Torre.

Mediterranean Trout (Salmo cetti)

Dinner alternative.

Speaking of food, please join me on Saturday, August 10, for a hands-on, afternoon workshop in making sauerkraut and kimchi, at Folklore Village near Dodgeville.  Details and registration available here.