Savouring Sicily
Toni Mason
lumes of smoke rise from the just-harvested wheat fields as we wind our way up pitted roads towards the village of Vallelunga, one and a half hours south-east of Palermo. At the end of its long sweltering summer, the interior of Sicily doesn’t need burn-off to do scorched earth, but just past the village the dry hills give way to the green vines of Regaleali, the estate of one of Sicily’s most important wineries, Tasca d’Almerita. It’s early October and the estate’s harvest is in full swing.
We haven’t come for the wine, though. We’re here to have lunch with Marchesa Anna Tasca Lanza, a renowned Sicilian cookbook author who runs a cooking school, The World of Regaleali: Cooking, Culture and Country Life in a Sicilian Vineyard, on the estate her family has owned since 1830.
Readers of Anna’s cookbooks, The Heart of Sicily and The Flavours of Sicily, and two on Sicilian herbs and fruit, Herbs and Wild Greens from the Sicilian Countryside and The Garden of Endangered Fruit, will know her passion for seasonal local produce. Nearly everything used in the kitchens comes from the estate – lamb, poultry, eggs, cheese... And in her market-sized garden she grows many varieties of tomato, vegetables, including the wild fennel widely used in Sicilian cuisine, and figs, quinces, bay laurels and citrus, another Sicilian favourite.
The yard outside the Case Vecchie (“old houses” – the first built on the estate), the complex where she has her cookschool kitchen, is humming with tractors bringing grapes to the barn where they will be partially dried before being made into passito, or dessert wine. Inside, Anna is offering slices of pecorino made by the estate’s shepherds, accompanied by fig jam spiked with peperoncino (chilli), which Sicilians use to season their food as we use black pepper. Students on Anna’s five-day course visit the shepherds to watch them making pecorino, then ricotta from the whey.
Lunch is prepared by Anna’s assistants. Jessie, an American cook, is making the risotto with oyster mushrooms – one of the few things not from the estate. Anna, a lively woman with a relaxed, easy manner (there’s nothing intimidating about this aristocrat from a family of counts), keeps an alert eye on activities at the stove, jumping up from time to time to check consistency and taste. “I watch everything that happens in the kitchen,” she smiles.
Risotto should be made all’onda, Anna explains, “like a wave”, so that it flows when ladled or poured on to a serving platter yet can hold its form – not too soupy, not too dry. This is illustrated perfectly as ours is served.
The whole meal speaks for the virtue of the simplest yet deft preparation of the best-quality ingredients. A plate of red, orange and green tomatoes, drizzled with peppery estate extra virgin olive oil and bursting with flavour, accompanies moist pork fillets, simply panfried and seasoned with anise and dried herbs. A basket of delicious yellowish Sicilian bread made with semolina flour is passed around, and Anna’s husband, Vences, a specialist in Sicilian history and entertaining conversationalist, pours the estate’s classic white, Regaleali, a blend of local varieties Inzolia, Grecanico and Catarratto.
To finish, Anna has made an intensely flavoured fresh peach granita, a crushed-ice dessert said to have originated from flavourings being added to snow from Mt Etna. Hers is a refined version of what can be bought on the streets all over Sicily. She has added dried grapes steeped in Diamante, a Moscato-dominant dessert wine her father, Count Giuseppe Tasca d’Almerita, created for his wife to celebrate their 60th wedding anniversary.
When Anna decided to start a cookschool, she attended a meeting of the IACP (International Association
of Culinary Professionals) in the US. It was a mixed experience. People were interested to discover another branch of Italian food, but it was disappointing, she said, that they knew only 
Photography by Andrew Coffey
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