One of my favorite detective novelists is Andrea Camilleri. His incorruptible police inspector, Salvo Montalbano, is a fully realized and totally satisfying hero, not the least of whose charms is a devotion to food. In every story we find him passionately consuming classic dishes of his Sicilian homeland. Reading the books makes your mouth water.
I was delighted therefore to discover a cookbook called I segreti della tavola di Montalbano: Le ricette di Andrea Camilleri. (The Secrets of Montalbano’s Table: Camilleri’s Recipes.) My Italian is OK for recipes, but there are also some essays in the book that I’m sure I’m not fully appreciating. They include excerpts from the novels where the various dishes are discussed, which at least are familiar to me from my English-language editions.
Inspired by the cookbook, I decided to celebrate this Memorial Day weekend with an all-Montalbano dinner party. For the menu I chose five dishes that had activated my – and the inspector’s – salivary juices in the novels:
Caponata di melanzane
Pasta col ragù alla siciliana
‘mpanata di maiali
Peperoni arrosto
Sformatino di cioccolato amaro con salsa all’arancia
I lined up some friends who also love Camilleri, food, and Sicily and warned them that this was going to be a very iffy evening. The meal would be a pure experiment, since there would be no rehearsals; and, more important, the recipes were all in the Italian sprezzatura style – that is, written more like a poem than a set of directions, with an airy unconcern for exact quantities, procedures, and cooking times.
Tom dug into his off-premises wine storage and came up with four different Sicilian wines to serve with them. And we both started cooking a day in advance. We remained nervous during the whole preparation time, but as the seriously appetizing aromas began accumulating, our confidence grew. The results were delicious. Here are the courses:
.
Caponata di melanzane
Caponata is a staple of the Sicilian table, and there are many versions of this eggplant-based vegetable antipasto. This recipe was like none I’d ever made or even tasted before. It called for half a pound of “white” olives (an unusually large quantity, for which I had to substitute the palest green ones available), a whole bunch of celery (I used six big stalks), 12 eggplants (small Sicilian ones, I assumed; I called it 1½ pounds), two ounces of capers (that’s a lot too), and only a cup of tomato sauce. Three tablespoons each of vinegar and sugar. And a quarter-pound of toasted almonds to sprinkle on the top before serving.
It was fabulous. I’d been worried that so many olives would be overpowering in the mixture, but in the cooking they traded flavors with the other ingredients and became very companionable. The whole ensemble tasted truly of Sicily. In several of the novels Montalbano eats great bowls of caponata, made for him by his devoted housekeeper, Adelina. Five of us got almost all the way through the portion supposed to serve eight; what was left went home with one guest whose husband had unfortunately had to drop out of the party.
.
Pasta col ragù alla siciliana
.
In the book in which this dish appears, Excursion to Tindari, the inspector goes to visit a witness, and “filtering out from under the door was a fragrance of ragù sauce that made Montalbano feel faint.” The aroma that my sauce gave off while cooking was pretty great too. It’s a simple enough recipe: aromatic vegetables (onion, carrot, celery, basil, parsley) softened in olive oil, ground beef (we used a piece of sirloin that we ground fresh), tomatoes, and red wine, all cooked together long and gently.
Maccheroncini – narrow-gauge, rather short tubular pasta – are cooked almost done and layered in a baking dish with grated pecorino, the sauce, and thin slices of caciocavallo cheese. The dish then is finished in the oven, where the cheeses interact with the sauce to produce an intriguing new taste. And rich! This recipe for six would easily have fed eight – and we are all dedicated pasta eaters.
.
‘mpanata di maiali
Peperoni arrosto
.
Now, this recipe is not in the cookbook. It appears as a 200-word narrative in The Wings of the Sphinx, when Montalbano eats at a new trattoria: “This was the recipe … that the inspector asked the cook to dictate to him after he and Fazio had finished licking it off their fingers.” I was dying to try it from the moment I read it, so I made it the centerpiece of the dinner. At my table we used forks, not fingers, but our reaction was much the same.
The ingredients – cauliflower, onion, sweet sausages, potatoes – are cooked first separately, then together, with the addition of black olives. The mixture goes into a casing of bread dough, rolled thin and molded inside a springform pan, which then cooks in a very hot oven until the bread is done. It’s a rustic dish, weighty but immensely satisfying.
For a lively contrast, I served peperoni arrosto alongside the ‘mpanata. Adelina gives Montalbano this dish in The Shape of Water. Big red bell peppers are roasted, peeled, sliced, and dressed with olive oil, garlic, parsley, oregano, salt, and pepper. No vinegar needed: the peppers’ own combination of sweetness and acidity takes care of that.
.
Sformatino di cioccolato amaro con salsa all’arancia
Not that we needed a dessert after all this, but a tiny sweet thing makes an appropriate finish to an elaborate meal. Montalbano ate this bitter chocolate timbale in orange sauce in The Snack Thief, after a sauté of clams in breadcrumbs, spaghetti with white clam sauce, and a roasted turbot with oregano and caramelized lemon. After this he “went into the kitchen and shook the chef’s hand without saying a word, deeply moved.”
Chocolate, butter, sugar, flour, and eggs made for a dense batter, and I worried that the little tortes might not be willing to unmold. They made no trouble about that, but they did come out a bit dry. Perhaps I left them in the oven a mite too long. They were richly chocolaty, though. The garnish of orange peel and the sauce of orange juice boiled down to a syrup was unusual and very good on them. A dab of whipped cream wouldn’t have been bad, either.
* * *
So there was my Memorial Day dinner – and memorable it indeed was. I’d like to think that Montalbano himself would have approved the menu. We certainly would have invited him – or his creator– had either been available.
Good thing I’d eaten before I read this post! So wonderfully delicious!
What a splendid feast it was! Thank you for sharing it with us.
Charles and I enjoyed it enormously. But both you and Tom outdid yourselves with this dinner. It could only have been better if Montalbano himself had joined us at the table.
Now you’ve got me craving a return trip to Sicily, or at least another Montalbano novel.
Thanks, Michele. I can’t do much about the trip you’re craving, but if there are any of the novels you haven’t read, I can lend you copies!
[…] my friend Diane Darrow picked up a copy of I Segreti della Tavola di Montalbano–Le Ricette di Andrea Camilleri […]
Please can you tell me where you found a copy of this book, as I am really struggling to locate one.
I bought it online from an Italian bookseller. I don’t remember the name of the site, but it’s easy to find others using google. Here’s one in the UK:
http://www.bookdepository.com/I-segreti-della-tavola-di-Montalbano-Le-ricette-di-Andrea-Camilleri-Stefania-Campo/9788895177472
Love Inspector montalbano. Thanks for the recipes. Must have been a fun parry.
[…] A Sicilian Meal for Montalbano […]
I can’t believe I found ” ‘mpanata di maiali”…this recipe has been driving me crazy since I read The Wings of the Sphinx
thank you for that and if I’m lucky maybe I can get my hands on the cookbookl. I was just thinking to myself….”why isn’t there a cookbook somewhere”
Thanks for the recipes. – I do hope someone translates that book soon.
I’m looking for the recipe for whatever it was that Montalbano was to be served by the mother of the childhood friend of his that had been shot to death in “The Terracotta Dog”. She convinced him to stay for dinner saying that the dish included tomatoes, mint and peppers and I can’t remember what else. The name escapes me: tupileries, tuli-something. Anyone remember? I don’t have the DVD or I could look it up for the name.
It’s called Attuppateddri, and the recipe is on page 34 of I Segreti della Tavola di Montalbano, the book by Stefania Campo. It’s a dish of snails. It was GeGe’s sister, Mariannina, who had been their teacher at school, who made the dish for him. (Happens on page 223 of the paperback Terra Cotta Dog.)
The English subtitles of the TV version has Mariannina saying ‘It will be too heavy for you… Tupparelli with meat sauce… I made it with mint, hot peppers, and lots of oil. Delicious!’
A search for tupparelli finds little so I thought this comment might help future searchers find your details from the book.
Hi Diane,I have just found your website after my wife asked me if there were any Montalbano cookbooks in English. I’m not sure if there are so she will have to learn Italian. However are you aware of another Italian detective Commissario Brunetti by Donna Leon who also likes his food. There is a book of recipes ” A Taste of Venice” At the table with Brunetti.These are taken from the novels. Some are very similar to Montalbano’s. OK so most women are in love with Salvo Montalbano but it may be worth having a look at the recipes.
Ciao
David
I wouldn’t be surprised if the Stefania Campo book was soon translated, so keep checking, David. Yes, I’ve read all the Donna Leons and I know of the Brunetti cookbook. Haven’t looked into it myself, because friends tell me it isn’t all that good. I probably should check it out, though. Thanks for reminding me.
I would live to find a recipe for Arancini as made by his housekeeper!
There’s a recipe in the book, but it doesn’t sound as if it’s exactly like Adelina’s. BTW, I hope you meant “like” rather than “live,” since even her arancini aren’t worth dying over!
What a delightful post! I googled “pasta ‘ncasciata” while reading Camilleri’s latest (Angelica’s Smile) and found your blog.
Camilleri’s newer books don’t have the same mouth watering descriptions of food as his earlier ones…
So I was very happy to find your blog 🙂
Diane. i’m going to love this blog. Having discovered your Nero Wolfe page I now see you’re also a Montelbano fan. My family and I came back from a holiday in Sicily only last week. Last year my and wife were also in Sicily and and I went down to Punta Secca to see Salvo’s house (I feel I know him too well to keep calling him Montelbano) from the TV series. We discovered what was then a simple restaurant on the beach with really good food. This year we took the family back to the restaurant but it had been tarted up somewhat and I was a little disappointed with the food – although everyone else seemed pleased with it.
I have a question. ‘Sweet sausages’ don’t mean anything to me. It’s not a term I’ve ever come across in the UK. I googled it and wasn’t convinced I’d found the right things. What are they?
I love the Montalbano TV series too, and hope to get down there to look at his house one day. I understand you can actually rent it for a vacation.
In America, “sweet” is sort of a metaphor. It means an Italian-style pork sausage made with only salt, pepper, and sometimes crushed fennel seeds — as opposed to “hot” sausage, which includes hot red pepper.
I’d love to get the recipe for the mpanata di maiali
Peperoni arrosto if you can provide it.
That’s not one recipe, it’s two, and I don’t have versions suitable for publication. The peppers are in the Montalbano cookbook, which you can buy from Amazon but only in Italian, and there’s no actual recipe for the ‘mpanata. You can read the 200-word description of the dish in The Wings of the Sphinx — it’s on page 159 of the English-language paperback.
Hi Diane
Ive just returned to Canada from a month in Sicily. I’d read all the Montalbano series as research prior to the trip and being a bit of a foodie was delighted with his love of food. Then while in Ortigia, I came across a used copy of the cookbook and though I understand no Italian scooped it up (being sure google would help) and there you appeared.
If you have tried any other recipes from the book since your first post can you share recommendations or your opinion of them. I too am planning a dinner party around this cookbook.
If you’ll just type “Montalbano” in the search field on the upper right hand side of any screen of my blog, Elisabeth, you’ll get comments on all the book’s recipes that I’ve tried.
I’ve been enjoying the Montalbano TV series and am just starting to look out for the books – and to cook the food. Thank you so much for doing all this research! Inspired by the scene in Carousel (or Merry-go-round) I made your recipe for Pasta ‘n casciata (second version) – it was delicious, but we felt it needed a higher proportion of tomato sauce to pasta. The second day (naturally there was a mountain of leftovers) I made some more tomato sauce just with gently stewed sliced onion, a can of chopped drained tomatoes, some white wine and a little stock, and layered the leftovers on top. It was pretty perfect (though I say it myself!). Of course, lots of dishes are better on the second day… Incidentally, I couldn’t get caciocavallo, young or old, so I used fontina (which I think has more flavour and sharpness than mozzarella) layered in between the pasta, and grated pecorino on top.
I’m now thinking of trying the Ragu alla siciliana, but I’m wondering why you seem to stick to beef in your meat recipes. Other recipes I’ve seen for this dish (in Italian) mention a mixture of veal and pork, or all three.
Thanks!
What you did sounds like an excellent way to refresh the baked leftovers. Fontina isn’t very Italian, but I’m sure it was good!
I used beef for the ragu alla siciliana simply because that’s what its recipe in the book “I segreti della tavola di Montalbano” called for. Other meat mixtures would certainly do well there also.
How nice to read about a Sicilian Meal for Montalbano. I’ve just watched the first 8 episodes on DVD, from my friend Martin (author of inspector Papadopoulos) and now my wife and I are also fan of the commissario. Martin made me be aware of your blog. Thank you for sharing this “inside” information!