Pasta con le sarde

Frank22 January 2022pasta, pastas, soups and risottos/primi piatti, Sicilia42 Comments

One of Sicily’s signature dishes, pasta con le sarde, or Pasta with Sardines, is also one of my personal favorites. I was lucky enough to enjoy it on its home turf a few years back, during a trip for a family wedding. Unfortunately, replicating this classic back here at home isn’t easy. Its eponymous star ingredient, fresh sardines, are hard to find Stateside, while another key ingredient, wild fennel (known in Italian as finocchietto) is basically impossible to find, unless you want to try foraging along the California coast.

But there is a cheater’s version of pasta con le sarde using canned sardines and cultivated fennel, both of which you can find in just about any supermarket in the land. Having experienced the original dish in Sicily, I can confirm that, while it might not quite capture the unique flavors of the original, this version comes pretty close. And in any event, it’s delicious in its own right.

For anyone who might be put off by the sardines, which have a reputation for having a strong “fishy” flavor, I’d give them another chance. In this recipe, the sardines are modulated perfectly by the fennel’s sweet anise, and scented with typically Sicilian flavorings—raisins, pine nuts and saffron—to form a kind of non-saucy pasta sauce which Italians call a condimento. It’s a unique flavor combination you won’t want to miss.

Ingredients

500g (1 lb) bucatini
Salt

For the condimento:

1 onion, finely chopped
2 fennel bulbs, just the stems and fronds
4-6 anchovy fillets
3 or 4 small (4 oz/124g) cans of sardines packed in olive oil
A handful of raisins soaked in warm water
A handful of pine nuts
A few threads of saffron, soaked in warm water
Olive oil
Salt

For the topping (optional):

100g (1 cup) breadcrumbs
Olive oil

Directions

Boil the fennel stems and fronds in large pot of well salted water until tender, about 10 minutes. Transfer the fennel out of the pot with a slotted spoon, drain in a colander and let cool. Then chop the fennel and set aside for later use. (NB: Do not discard the cooking water!)

While the fennel is cooking, sauté the breadcrumbs in olive oil over gentle heat, stirring so the breadcrumbs are all coated in the oil, until they turn a golden brown. Turn off the heat and set aside until needed.

In a large sauté pan or braiser, sauté the onions in olive oil until they are translucent. Add the anchovies and let them melt into the onions. Then mix in the chopped fennel and sauté for a minute or two. Then add the saffron with its liquid, along with the raisins and pine nuts. Simmer everything for a minute or two longer to let the flavors meld. Taste and season with salt if it needs it. Finally, add the sardines and give everything a gentle stir, letting the sardine fillets break up but not disintegrate. Lower the heat as far as it will go to keep this condimento warm.

Meanwhile, add the bucatini to the same pot where you had boiled the fennel. Cook until al dente.

When the pasta has cooked, transfer it to the pan with the condimento and toss everything together gently.

Serve, topped with a sprinkling of the breadcrumbs.

Notes

Most recipes for pasta con le sarde tell you to use the bulb of the fennel along with its fronds, rather than the stems. But actual finocchietto has no bulb, only thin stems and fronds, so you’re changing the texture quite a bit by using the bulb. And the flavor, too, as the bulb is very mild as compared with the intense anise flavor of finocchietto. Fennel stems, if you’ve ever tried them, have a stronger taste, so a combination of stems and fronds better mimics the taste and texture of the original. Plus, you can keep the bulb for other uses, whether raw in a salad or cooked, say in a gratin or sformato.

As for the sardines, do make sure they’re packed in olive oil. If you’re lucky enough to find fresh sardines at your local fishmonger, by all means go for them. You’ll need to clean them, of course, which means you’ll need more fresh sardines to account for the discarded heads, tails and bone, perhaps half again as much as the pasta by weight. Although sardines are a bit larger, the method is very much like cleaning fresh anchovies, illustrated in this post.

Variations

There are many, many variations. In their lovely book, La Cucina Siciliana di Sangivecchio, Wanda and Giovanna Tornabene tell us that “[t]he woman in every Sicilian house has her own way of preparing Bucatini on le Sarde, one of the island’s most famous and best appreciated pasta dishes. If two Sicilian women discuss their special version, each will insist ‘Mine is better’.”

The breadcrumb topping, for one thing, doesn’t figure in all recipes. In some recipes you set aside some or all of the sardines (fresh, of course) for frying in olive oil. You then top each portion of the finished dish with the sardines. (Wanda Tornabene says this is the “old fashioned Sicilian way” her grandmother made it.) In some recipes, you add some tomato purée or concentrate to the condimento, often just a spoonful or two for color.

A particularly common version of pasta con le sarde, typical of Palermo, is baked in the oven. For this version, you alternate layers of pasta and condimento in a baking dish. In some versions, you fry the sardines separately and layer them along with the pasta and condimento. The layered dish is topped with breadcrumbs and baked in a moderate (180C/350F) oven for 15-20 minutes, then left to rest before serving. This baked version is often served at room temperature, which makes it a very practical make-ahead dish. (It was this version, in fact, that I enjoyed in Sicily, during my visit there in 2019.)

While bucatini is the typical pasta for making this dish, you will find some recipes with other long pastas like spaghettoni or even short ones like ziti.

Origins

The story goes that pasta con le sarde was invented by the cook to the 9th century general Eufemio da Messina, while da Messina was on campaign in the area of Siracusa, a city on the eastern shore of Sicily. (Other sources place the action on the other end of the island, in the town of Mazara del Vallo, near Trapani on the western shore.) Faced with the challenge of feeding a hungry army under wartime conditions, the cook took what he could scavage from the sea (sardines) and the land (wild fennel) to dress pasta, making this, accordingly to some, the first ‘surf and turf’ dish of all time.

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