The Hidden Kitchen

On a map of Sicily, Gangi is a mere speck in the remote Madonie Mountains. The drive from Mt. Etna goes through spectacular rock formations and along roads framed by stone walls sprouting blood-red poppies and delicate Queen Anne’s lace. The heady scent of yellow broom flower invades the car at every turn.

Suddenly, you come upon a dome-shaped hill covered from top to bottom with houses. From there, the road leads to a place that isn’t even a speck on the map: Gangivecchio, or Old Gangi. Here, in 1363, the Benedictines built an abbey huddled up against the mountain to protect it from the fierce north winds.

In 1978, Baronessa Wanda Tornabene, her daughter Giovanna and son Paolo opened a restaurant at Gangivecchio in the restored abbey that her late husband’s family has owned for 141 years. Fourteen years later, after Sicily-based American writer Mary Taylor Simeti raved about Gangivecchio’s prix fixe lunches for the New York Times travel section, American visitors to Sicily began seeking out the remote abbey.

And last year, mother and daughter published “La Cucina Siciliana di Gangivecchio: Recipes from Gangivecchio’s Sicilian Kitchen” (Knopf, 1996), which won a James Beard cookbook award. The abbey had become a certified foodie phenomenon. When I was in Sicily in May, I decided to take a look.

You don’t see the abbey at first, just a long lane lined with trees. Two dogs ran down it to greet us, followed, a few minutes later, by Giovanna Tornabene, a handsome 40-ish, outdoorsy woman in flannel shirt, rolled-up canvas pants and running shoes. “I’ve just been planting some flowers,” she said casually, peeling off her garden gloves and lighting a cigarette.

She showed us Tenuta Gangivecchio, an old stable that her brother Paolo Tornabene, an architect, transformed into a guest house five years ago. Several of the simple, comfortable rooms have terraces overlooking the monastery’s informal gardens. For taking in the view of the mountains dissolving in the blue distance, white molded plastic garden furniture and a few canvas sling chairs sit off to the side. It’s all very far from the grandeur or the formality of, say, Badia a Coltibuono in Tuscany.

Before dinner, Giovanna took me for a walk around the grounds. “This fountain beside the spring goes back to 1700-something,” she said, stopping to admire the carved heads spurting water. “The building seems to me sometimes so old and so indifferent. You have your fax, your telephone, but you’re here for only a moment.”

The baronessa called out from a window to the gardener--Gangivecchio raises nearly all its own produce--to bring her some more fava beans from the garden. Peppe Beviacqua, the gardener, is also the restaurant’s waiter. “When he came to the estate 30 years ago, he was 30 years old but didn’t know how to read, and my mother taught him. She also taught him to knead the bread dough too,” Giovanna said with a smile. “He liked it when we opened the restaurant, because the work inside is much easier than what he used to do.”

In the plain interior courtyard, a worker swept away straw to reveal the pattern of the ancient stones. At the very center was an extravagantly flowering red rose bush that Giovanna planted to honor her father, Enzo Tornabene, who died in 1984. The rosy pink plaster was weathered and crumbled away in places, and two enormous old fig trees offered the only shade for the family’s aged donkey.

Dinner that night (for guests at the Tenuta or by special reservation) was served in the rustic dining room of the guest house. Gold tablecloths covered with green and yellow plaid paper draped the tables; pop music played on a boom box. The other guests were a couple from La Can~ada Flintridge exploring the woman’s Sicilian roots and two Australian couples traveling together. Everything was cooked by Paolo except the antipasto and the dessert.

The baronessa, an ash-blond 70-year-old woman who managed to look aristocratic in a plaid flannel shirt and blue cotton pants, went from table to table greeting guests. Giovanna arrived in a quilted jacket, carrying a big flashlight. They sat down to eat along with the guests.

To start, there was Wanda Tornabene’s recipe for cuddura patedda, squares of fried bread dough topped with reduced tomato sauce. Then a pasta, fettuccine with pumpkin, arugula, thyme and hot pepper.

The Tuscan friend I’d persuaded to accompany me with the promise of Sicilian home cooking was unimpressed; the pasta was overcooked and the sauce too modern for his taste. But he approved the second pasta, fusilli with halved baby artichokes, fava beans and wild fennel.

Two pastas at one meal? “In Sicily, we say that two pastas will save any situation, even a troubled marriage,” Wanda said. “We have more pasta dishes than names for babies.”

Then came a mixed grill of delicious coarse-textured pork sausages, involtini (veal scaloppine rolled up with a stuffing of bread crumbs, grated cheese and chopped ham) and chicken skewered with fresh bay leaves and bits of onion. To finish, there was a dauntingly sweet lemon pudding (gelatina di limone) and an even sweeter cassata of fresh ricotta and chocolate.

Two Australian couples eating at the restaurant clamored for Wanda to pose with them for a photograph, holding up a copy of the cookbook, which she’d just autographed. “Prince Charles is in the book,” one of them called across to me, royalty-struck. They were all leaving very early the next morning to catch a plane in Palermo. When Wanda took her leave, she hugged all the visitors to Gangivecchio like old friends.

Over coffee, her daughter talked a little about the history of the old abbey. Her great-grandfather bought the property in 1856, four years before Garibaldi came ashore near Marsala on Sicily’s western coast and routed the Bourbon kings who ruled what was then the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.

Then her grandfather gambled away the family fortune, and the Tornabenes took to selling off land to make ends meet. By 1978, the 1,600-acre estate had shrunk to 140 acres surrounding the abbey itself. That was when the baronessa decided to take a stand: Not one more parcel of land would be sold.

The road from Gangi to Gangivecchio had been completed in 1976, and they were no longer so isolated. A family friend, a priest, suggested that the baronessa, a passionate cook, open a restaurant.

Her husband was appalled by the idea. “My ancestors would turn over in their graves,” he said. He stayed in his room when guests were around after his wife and daughter opened the abbey’s dining room in 1978.

Of course, the idea was quite novel at the time. A baronessa cooking for common people? At first, they got a lot of guests from Gangi, curious to see what the inside of the great abbey looked like and how the Tornabene family lived. It soon turned into a big social event, especially at Sunday lunch, when the restaurant would serve 100 to 150 people. Then guests started coming from all over Sicily. Gangivecchio is only about an hour from Cefalu, 1 1/2 hours from Palermo, 2 1/2 from Syracuse.

Some years ago, the Tornabenes enclosed a large terrace for a rustic dining room, with heavy dark beams and old terra cotta tile floors. Eventually they added a larger kitchen off the hallway where monks used to sleep.

“It’s a much more professional kitchen,” said Giovanna, “but mother still likes to make her desserts in her own kitchen, where she’s happiest.”

Her daughter was a reluctant convert to cooking. In the book, she describes how her mother pushed her: “When some dish I was uncomfortable cooking had to be prepared right away for three dozen people expected for lunch at the restaurant, she would suddenly develop a monstrous headache, vanish into her bedroom and close the door. Once the task was successfully accomplished--by me--she would suddenly appear, having made a remarkable recovery.

“I saw through her clever strategy, but how could I not admire her wisdom and be amused? And the happy result has been my own slowly formed love affair with the kitchen.”

I stayed for lunch the next day, and it was a more consistent meal than dinner. It began with the fried bread dough, this time layered with a little piquant olive paste and sprinkled with salt, and a slice of soft ivory-white caciocavallo cheese made at the neighboring farm. Then spaghetti with a marvelous pesto of frutti secchi: hazelnuts, walnuts, pistachios, pine nuts and almonds, perfumed with basil and garlic. Then we had skinny pork sausage and veal involtini, this time in a fresh tomato sauce, served with crusty golden sauteed potatoes and fava beans cooked with spring onions.

Dessert was the baronessa’s dolce al cucchiaio (spoon sweet), a large bowl of pastry cream flavored with gin, rum, Cognac, a few drops of Amaretto, fruit and crumbled cookies, dusted with unsweetened cocoa and chocolate bits.

Giovanna describes the cooking of the region as simple country food. “People around here were always very hungry, and when you’re hungry,” she told me, “your mind begins to invent. They would find wild things, even the flowers of some trees, like sambuco. You can put them in pastella and fry with a little salt, and it’s wonderful.”

How did such simple rustic food come to be the subject of a major cookbook?

One day, author and Alfred M. Knopf editor Peter Gethers stopped in for lunch. He was traveling in Sicily with his girlfriend and his cat (named Norton), who stars in several of his books. It was on a busy weekend, when mother and daughter barely had time to say a few words of greeting.

A week later, Gethers was back, lured by the memory of Wanda’s sofficini (fried pastries filled with warm lemon cream). This time it was less crowded and the women showed Gethers around the grounds. Before leaving, he casually asked whether they had ever considered doing a cookbook.

“What was very important, he had his cat with him,” says Giovanna. “My mother is just in love with all the animals.” But the idea of writing a book had never entered their heads. They forgot all about it until, a few weeks later, Gethers called to ask whether they were ready to come to New York to sign the contract.

Gethers had found them a collaborator, Michele Evans, an experienced cookbook author, who quickly became a co-conspirator. Finally, they were thrilled about the idea of writing a cookbook.

“What was also very important was that it would be published in English, and not in Italian,” says Giovanna, “because my mother is very jealous about the recipes. Even now she won’t sell the book to anybody in the area.”

Evans came to Sicily four or five times and stayed for several a month or two each time. The Tornabenes also went to Evans’ home in the Caribbean to work and put a fax machine to heavy use. With writing, translating, testing and retesting, the project ended up taking 5 1/2 years.

This obliged the Tornabenes to take a new look at the dishes they had always taken for granted (in the process reinvigorating their cooking at the restaurant). They came to realize how unique their family cooking is. The cookbook is not a primer in Sicilian cuisine but a look at one particular family’s cooking and how it came to be.

In her introduction to the book, the baronessa writes, “Each region of Sicily prefers its own specialties. We in the Madonie most admire our hearty pastas, meat ragus, veal or pork involtini, fresh vegetables like wild mushrooms, wild asparagus and greens, fava beans and delectable fruits. . . . The Madonie’s favorite desserts--exquisite fresh fig tarts and ricotta cakes--are supreme in their simplicity. Our recipes are our personal legacy and our own interpretations of classic Sicilian dishes.”

Now the same team is at work on a book that will include recipes left out of the first one. Giovanna is collecting recipes from all the old women living around Gangi. The new book will tell the story of the mystical side of Gangi--and of Sicily.

Contrada Gangivecchio, 90024 Gangi (Palermo), Italy. Telephone-fax (011) 39-921-644804. Lunch 29,000 lire ($18) per person, not including wine or drinks; reservations required. Visa accepted. Closed Mondays. 1:30 p.m. seating.

Tenuta Gangivecchio. Same address and phone number. Demi-pension 90,000 lire ($55) per person, includes room, breakfast and dinner.

SOFFICINI (Fried Pastry Stuffed With Pastry Cream)

Sofficini is served at the end of every meal at Gangivecchio. This recipe is easily doubled.

2 cups flour

5 tablespoons sugar

1/4 cup lard, melted and cooled, or olive oil

Water

1/2 recipe Crema Pasticciera, well-chilled and brought back to room temperature

Sunflower or vegetable oil for deep-frying

Powdered sugar

Mix flour and sugar with fingers in large bowl. Make hole in center of mixture and add lard and 2 tablespoons water. Work flour mixture with hands, adding little water at a time, until smooth dough forms (1/2 to 3/4 cup of water should be used). Cover dough and let rest 1 hour.

Divide dough into 2 pieces and roll each through manual pasta machine, or use rolling pin to form very long strips, about 4 inches wide and a little less than 1/8 inch thick. It is important that dough is thin.

Put rounded teaspoon of Crema Pasticciera in center of strips at 2-inch intervals. Fold dough in half lengthwise, covering cream-filled portion, as if folding sheet of paper. Press outer edges of dough together, then press down dough between each filled portions with fingertips. Make 2-inch squares by cutting along entire length of pieces of dough with serrated pastry cutter. Then cut between each filled portion. Three sides of each pastry will be cut; the fourth, folded.

Heat 3 inches oil in deep-sided frying pan until oil is hot but not smoking. Lower 4 to 6 sofficini into hot oil with slotted spoon and cook until golden brown on both sides, 2 to 3 minutes. Drain on paper towels. When all sofficini are cooked, let cool 2 minutes. Sprinkle with sifted powdered sugar and serve immediately.

24 sofficini. Each pastry:

155 calories; 17 mg sodium; 50 mg cholesterol; 5 grams fat; 26 grams carbohydrates; 3 grams protein; 0.03 gram fiber.

CREMA PASTICCIERA (Basic Pastry Cream)

Crema Pasticciera keeps well in the refrigerator for one day. The recipe can be halved easily.

6 cups milk

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Peel of 2 large lemons, in inch-long strips

8 egg yolks, at room temperature

2 1/4 cups sugar

2 cups cornstarch

Slowly bring milk, vanilla and lemon peel to simmer in large, heavy-bottomed saucepan over low heat. Simmer, stirring occasionally, 20 to 30 minutes.

Beat egg yolks and sugar together in large bowl until light and fluffy. Add cornstarch and blend well.

Remove milk mixture from heat and discard lemon peels. Gradually beat 3/4 cup hot milk into egg mixture. Slowly stir egg mixture into remaining milk in saucepan, stirring constantly until thoroughly incorporated. Return pan to high heat and let boil, stirring constantly, until thick and creamy, about 2 minutes. Be sure to scrape bottom of pan while cooking so it doesn’t burn.

Variation: To make chocolate pastry cream, omit lemon peel and stir 3/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder into hot milk and vanilla. Add 1 tablespoon Amaretto coffee liqueur, then follow recipe for Basic Pastry Cream. Taste for sweetness; more sugar may be needed.

1 1/2 quarts. Each 1/2 cup:

328 calories; 69 mg sodium; 191 mg cholesterol; 6 grams fat; 63 grams carbohydrates; 6 grams protein; 0.02 gram fiber.

U’MACCU (Fava Bean Soup with Fennel and Pasta)

U’Maccu is a humble, thick delicious soup that has been the mainstay of the Sicilian country peasant’s diet for centuries. In winter, when farmers’ gardens and plots of land were barren, the dried fava beans provided healthy, hearty sustenance. If using either tagliatelle or spaghetti, break into 1-inch pieces. Serve the soup with bread or bread sticks.

Soak fava beans overnight in large bowl covered with 3 inches cool water. Drain beans and remove tough outer skins. (Skins should slip off easily.) Pinch off dark germ, or sprout, at one end of each bean.

3 cups (about 1 1/2 pounds) dried fava beans

1/2 cup olive oil plus extra for topping

Salt

1/2 cup chopped dark green fennel tops

6 ounces ditali, tagliatelle or spaghetti

Freshly ground pepper

Put beans into pot with olive oil and enough water to cover by 2 inches. Add 2 teaspoons salt and bring to boil. Immediately reduce heat and simmer 1 hour, stirring occasionally.

Add chopped fennel tops and continue cooking, stirring often, until beans are very tender and literally fall apart, 20 to 30 minutes.

Bring 2 quarts water to rolling boil in another pot. Add 2 teaspoons salt, stir and add pasta. Cook pasta, stirring often, until al dente or just tender, 8 to 10 minutes.

Puree 3 cups soup in blender or food processor and return to pot. Stir soup vigorously with wooden spoon so no whole beans or large pieces are left.

Drain pasta, reserving 2 cups cooking water. Add pasta to soup and stir. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Soup should be thick, but if too thick, add reserved hot pasta water, little at a time, until desired consistency. Taste again and adjust seasoning.

Serve immediately. Drizzle individual servings with olive oil.

9 cups. Each 1 1/2-cup serving:

522 calories; 407 mg sodium; 0 cholesterol; 20 grams fat; 66 grams carbohydrates; 23 grams protein; 2.32 grams fiber.

CAPONATA DI VERDURE (Green Vegetable Stew)

All green vegetables are used in the dish, unlike the classic Caponata in which eggplat and olives are features.

1 1/2 pounds broccoli, cut into 1-inch chunks

Salt

1/2 cup celery, thinly sliced

1 1/2 pounds spinach

1 1/2 pounds chicory

1 1/2 pounds Swiss chard

1/2 cup olive oil

5 cloves garlic, thinly sliced

Freshly ground pepper

Red wine vinegar

1/2 cup toasted bread crumbs

1 tablespoon capers

8 canned anchovy fillets

2 tablespoons pine nuts

1 lemon, seeded and very thinly sliced

Cook broccoli in lightly salted boiling water until just cooked, 3 to 4 minutes; drain. Boil celery in same water 30 seconds; drain. Add spinach to same water and cook 20 seconds. Refresh in ice water and drain, squeezing out extra water. Repeat with chicory and chard. (Note: Cook chard last because it discolors water.) Coarsely chop all vegetables.

Heat olive oil with garlic in large skillet over medium heat and cook 5 minutes, stirring often. Add vegetables and season to taste with salt and pepper. Mix well and simmer 15 minutes. Taste again and adjust seasoning. Stir in vinegar to taste, 3 to 4 tablespoons.

Transfer to large, round platter and arrange in high, dome shape. Sprinkle top with bread crumbs and capers. Arrange anchovy fillets across top of caponata and sprinkle with pine nuts. Garnish platter with lemon slices. Serve cool.

10 to 12 servings. Each of 10 servings:

197 calories; 434 mg sodium; 3 mg cholesterol; 13 grams fat; 17 grams carbohydrates; 8 grams protein; 2.25 grams fiber.

* Bowls from Bristol Kitchen, South Pasadena.