Of
all of Mary Taylor Simeti’s books on wonderful Sicilian cuisine, my favorite is
Bitter Almonds (1994), her compelling
biography of the chef Maria Grammatico, who opened her now renowned café in the
breathtaking mountain-top city of Erice after spending her childhood at forced
labor in pounding almonds for sweets at a convent orphanage. It is said that Erice was one of the places
in Sicily where Daedalus landed, after flying on his fabricated wings and
losing his son for straying too close to the sun. Diodorus Siculus (1st century
B.C.E.) says that Daedalus, among other things, built the retaining wall that
holds up the ancient temple of Venus in Erice, over which Frederick II
(1194-1250) built a dramatic castle, 2,464 feet above the turquoise
Mediterranean Gulf of Castellammare. The
place is mythologically beautiful, and its flavors are Maria Grammatico’s menu,
with its couscous infused with fruity tomato and pungent olive oil, and the harmonious
threads of liqueur and sugar in the traditional almond treats for dessert. Maria Grammatico had dropped off some of
these evocative sweets not long before I visited Mary Taylor Simeti’s farm,
Bosco Falconeria, near Alcamo in Sicily in July 2017, and Mary offered them to
me for dessert, with the sugar’s granular invitation, humming above the almond’s
bass note.
Mary’s latest book, Sicilian Summer (2017), is emblematic of
the keen stewardship with which she has recovered and preserved Sicilian
culinary culture for new generations and transmitted the traditions to a
broadening global public. The book
records her cooking Sicilian traditional dishes with her four grandsons during
the ten days leading to her husband’s mid-August birthday in the oasis of their
farm in 2015. In her words, the home
cooking festival with the grandsons and the resulting book were meant “to make
these moments more significant for them and to render their memories more
indelible” (p. 10). As she provides the
recipes and describes her collaboration with four creative, thoughtful young
men, she offers a blueprint not only for experienced chefs, but also for those
of us who may value satisfying combinations of flavors above precision and
patience.
At the end of this new book, Mary shares
meaningful postscripts to her second book, the encyclopedic Pomp and Sustenance: Twenty-Five Centuries
of Sicilian Food (1989, 1998), which begins with Plato’s epistolary
complaint (4th century B.C.E.) of excessive banqueting in Siracusa
and ends with a recipe for a frozen cassata,
a gelato-based version of the dessert adopted by the aristocracy and fancifully
decorated with colorful candied fruit. In
the wake of this book, Mary says, “[t]he letters that arrived from my readers
were a totally unexpected and deeply appreciated gift, especially those from
Sicilian Americans, who either thanked me for filling holes in their memories
of family culinary traditions, or criticized the recipes—‘that’s not the way my
grandmother made it’! These letters
introduced me to Italian-American culture, sent me out to read more, and
brought home to me the importance of food as a marker of cultural identity,
particularly in an immigrant or expatriate community.” (Pp. 111-2.)
Mary Taylor Simeti first arrived in
Sicily in 1962, after graduating Radcliffe, with plans for a gap year of
service at Danilo Dolci’s Centro Studi per la Piena Occupazione (Study Center
for Full Employment) in a town just outside Palermo, promoting economic and
social development through education. As
described in her first book, On
Persephone’s Island (1987), she became a palermitana through marriage to Antonio Simeti – Tonino – a
professor, now retired, of agricultural economics at the Università di
Palermo.
Tonino's family came from the bustling town
of Alcamo, with its fourteenth-century castle and tranquil view of the
sea. His grandfather, a prosperous
producer of wines, bought the property at Bosco Falconeria in 1933, Tonino took
it over in 1962, and in 2012 his and Mary's daughter, Natalia, assumed
direction.
Bosco Falconeria (literally, Falconry
Woodland) is named for the oak forests that once covered what today are rolling
hills of vineyards, and fruit and olive trees.
A medieval document mentions a breeding station for falcons in the area,
and it is possible that Frederick II – the one responsible for Erice’s grand medieval
castle – once used these lands for the art of falconry, at which he was so
accomplished that he wrote a manual. The
farm was among the first to join Addiopizzo, a non-profit collective of
businesses that have refused to pay mafia tribute money. Addiopizzo has grown so large and central
that it now sponsors a popular annual civic festival and artisanal fair in
Palermo’s Piazza Magione every September.
Bosco Falconeria was also among the
first to become registered as organic.
In addition to meticulously avoiding pesticides and pollutants, Natalia
practices regenerative farming, with attention to preserving and enriching the
soil, and participates in conferences on enhancing farm ecosystems. This commitment is evident in the flavors of
the olive oil and in the wines produced and sold internationally by Bosco
Falconeria.
Mary and Tonino live full time on the
farm. In another house on the property, the
other full-time family residents are their daughter, Natalia, and her Finnish
husband, Rami (they met through their common practice of t’ai chi), as well as
their two sons. Around the corner from
Mary and Tonino’s gracious farm house, rebuilt after an earthquake in 1968, lives
the farm's foreman with his wife and their two children. Mary and Tonino’s son, Francesco, a
successful Brooklyn artist, his wife, Andrea, a teacher (whose mother,
Christine, is a friend and Italian student of mine), and their two sons, return
to their home on the farm every summer.
The resulting boisterous family dinners al fresco feature, for example, the salty-sweet celebration of caponata, and Mary’s meltingly tender
and complexly flavorful green peppers, sautéed with onions, which she fixed for
the summer lunch she served me (and about which I am still dreaming).
A witness to post-war palermitana women’s history, Mary
describes feminist meetings in the 1970s and 1980s in which mothers debated
abortion rights or labor laws beside rooms full of their unruly children at
play. To her recollection, very little
was said in these meetings about motherhood, as if the role of mother were
somehow irrelevant, or perhaps too difficult and complex to be dealt with. One of the things that distinguish Mary’s
work is a consciousness of the meaning of transmitting to the next generation the
values of tolerance and respect for women, a wide-ranging appreciation of the
micro-historical experiences of diverse individuals, and the sensory joys and
mind-expanding enrichment of preserving cultural culinary lore.