Salt (63 page)

Today in Italy, bottarga has come to be thought of as a Sicilian food, specifically from western Sicily, and that means tuna, not mullet, eggs. The tuna trade on the west coast of Sicily combines one of the oldest saltworks in Europe and one of the oldest tuna fisheries. Between the two, the port city of Trapani juts out on the triangular tip of a narrow peninsula. Typical of Sicilian towns, Trapani has a Phoenician-Roman-Norman-Arab-Crusader history. These elements are reflected in the architecture, the language, the food, and the customs. Everything in Sicily is built on layer after layer of history—all the people who came, conquered, built, were defeated, and left.

The Castiglione tuna company, just north of Trapani, makes more than 2,000 pounds of bottarga every year, which Sicilians grate over spaghetti with olive oil, garlic, and chopped parsley. The eggs come from the bluefin tuna that enter the Strait of Gibraltar once a year and swim past western Sicily to their Mediterranean spawning grounds. Each female has two huge roes weighing between six and seven pounds each. Workers prepare a brine from the local sea salt and wash the roes in it and then cover them in the coarse-grained salt that is a regional specialty. They then place a thirty-kilogram (sixty-six pound) weight on the salted roes. More weight is added every week until, by the end of a month, sixty to seventy kilos, the weight of a middle-sized man, are pressing on the salted roes. After pressing, the roes are dried in the sun for a week.

Like the sturgeon fishermen of old, the Sicilians sell off the fish and eat the eggs. But they also sell the bottarga all over Sicily. They sell the tuna hearts as far away as Palermo, the Sicilian capital.
Lattume
, the delicate-tasting salted male reproductive gland, is for locals in the Trapani region, as are tuna intestines, stomach, and esophagus.

For centuries, this coast was famous for its salted tuna as well. But these days Sicilians don’t eat their bluefin tuna in any form; they sell it fresh for dazzlingly high prices. Ninety percent of the local catch is landed one hour after being killed and instantly sold and flown to Japan.

The passage of the bluefin off the Mediterranean coast at spawning time was first observed by the Phoenicians, who set up what is called in Sicilian
tonnaras
. As various cultures became dominant in this passage between Sicily and Tunisia, the tonnara became layered in ritual. Today it only continues in two places in Sicily, the little waterfront town of Bonagia just north of Trapani and the small nearby island of Favignana. The tonnara in Bonagia is owned by the Castiglione company, which usually, despite the high prices from Japan, loses money on it. The bulk of its profit comes from yellowfin tuna caught elsewhere and bought and packaged by the company. The bluefin is vanishing not because of the tonnara but due to far more efficient fisheries in the Atlantic. Eugenio Giacomazzi, the Castiglione production manager, said that 1,000 pounds of bluefin is now considered a good catch. That used to be three or four fish, one fish according to ancient accounts, but today it is a netful, because fish species, as they become scarce, mature younger and become smaller animals.

Castiglione has 150 employees. But every March another 120 are hired to work the tonnara. The leader is known by the Arab word
Raiz,
and the fishermen sing an Arab song, “Cialome” (pronounced
SHALOMAY
), to invoke the gods for the hunt. But the final kill goes by the Spanish word
matanza
, which, appropriately, means “slaughter.”

The tuna hunt begins in March with men on the narrow waterfront of Bonagia repairing and arranging nets as they sing traditional songs, part in Sicilian and part in Arab. Instead of exhausting the fish on the end of a line, in the Sicilian tonnara the bluefin is worn out by being led through a series of nets over a number of days. A net wall 150 feet high, four and a half miles long, is anchored to the ocean floor running east to west. In May and June, the tuna enter the Mediterranean. Approaching the coast of Sicily, they turn south to pass through the straits between Sicily and Tunisia but instead hit the net wall and run along it into what is called “the island,” which is a series of net rooms. In ancient times, the large fish were guided through the rooms by men with long sticks. Today, this is done by a scuba diver known as the big bastard. The bastard of Bonagia, Maurici Guiseppe, said that as he swims with the ill-fated fish, he passes amphorae and other ancient artifacts of shipwrecks from the Phoenicians, the Greeks, and the Romans.

The big bastard’s job is to coax the tuna from one room to another—each of the rooms has a name—until, after about two weeks, the fish are exhausted, awaiting their fate in the
camera di matanza
, the slaughter room. The net is hauled up, and fifty-five fishermen in a long boat spear and gaff fish. It is an ancient way of fishing tuna. Twenty-five hundred years ago, in
The Persians
, Aeschylus, describing the Greek destruction of the Persian Navy, said it was like slaughtering tuna. The large bluefin, even though tired out from the weeks of manipulation, thrash and struggle. The Mediterranean turns black with their blood, and the foam of the water turns scarlet as they are stabbed, gaffed, landed, and shipped to Japan.

The tonnara fishermen spend March repairing the nets, April setting them up on the ocean floor, May or June fishing, then taking the nets back up. Then it is July, time to work the salt harvest.

S
OUTH OF TRAPANI
along the coast, earthen dikes begin to appear, and a few stone windmills. The dikes mark off ponds, some of which hold turquoise water, some pink. The stone towers of windmills stick out from these orderly pastel ponds. The salt-works are built out along the coast until, toward the south, deep green leafy fields take over, which are the vineyards of Marsala wine. This is one of the oldest salt-making sites in the world—the one started by the Phoenicians to cure their tuna catch, and after the destruction of Carthage, continued by the Romans. When the Muslims were in Sicily from 800 to 1000, they wrote of the windmills of Trapani.

The current windmills are based on a Turkish model that was adopted by the Spanish, who brought their windmills to Sicily and later to Holland. About the year 1500, windmills were built here by a man named Grignani to move brine through the ponds. His son was named Ettore, which is the name of these saltworks facing the isle of Mozia. Until the saltworks on Mozia were destroyed by the Romans in 397
B.C.
, the Carthaginians had made salt there as well.

Trapani salt was sent to the Hanseatic League in Bergen and was known throughout medieval Europe. But the unification of Italy in the nineteenth century made it difficult for Sicily to market its salt. The Italian government had a salt monopoly, and it protected its saltworks in Apulia by not allowing Sicilian salt onto the mainland. The monopoly was resented because it made salt expensive. In his 1891 book,
The Art of Eating Well,
Pellegrino Artusi, the Florentine silk merchant turned popular food writer, suggested for his ice cream recipes:

To save money, the salt can be recovered from the ice water used to freeze the ice cream, by evaporating the water over a fire.

For centuries an important export, Trapani salt became a local product, used to cure the tuna catch, lavishly sprinkled on grilled fish in the Trapani area, and to preserve the caper harvest. Capers are the buds of
Capparis spinosa,
so spiny, in fact, that the Turks call it cat’s claw. They grow wild in the Roman forum but are so tough that they also grow between cracks in the rocks in Israel’s Judean desert. They seem to love rocks and grow along the coastline boulders of southern Italy and Sicily, brightening them with purple and white flowers. But the buds must be picked before they begin to open, which requires a daily harvest in the summer and a careful examination of each bud. Then the buds must be cured to bring out the characteristic flavor. The French consider their best capers, which come from Provence, to be the smallest, and they pickle them in vinegar.

In past centuries, when Mediterranean products were difficult to get in northern Europe, nasturtium buds were used as a substitute, as in this English recipe.

Nasturtium Indicum.
Gather the buds before they open to flower: lay them in the shade three or four hours, and putting them into an earthen glazed vessel, pour good vinegar on them, and cover it with a board. Thus letting it stand for eight or ten days: then being taken out, and gently press’d, cast them into fresh vinegar, and let them so remain as long as before. Repeat this third time, and barrel them up with vinegar and a little salt.—
John Evelyn,
Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets,
1699

In Sicily, the prized capers are large and come from the island of Pantelleria, which is part of Sicily, though closer to Tunisia, or the tiny Sicilian islands off the north coast. Sicilian capers are kept in coarse Trapani salt, often without vinegar, soaked before using, and served with grilled fish.

Confined to their island market by the Italian monopoly, Sicilian traditions—tuna, capers, table salt, the island’s ample olive production, cheeses, and sausages—were not enough to sustain the saltworks, and most were abandoned by the 1970s.

But not the saltworks of Antonio d’Ali, who had kept his alive at a third of capacity for years. “We kept going because we always hoped that the monopoly would be dropped someday,” he said. In 1973, the Italian government ended the salt monopoly, and today these saltworks provide salt throughout Italy, which was what the Italian government had feared in the first place.

C
OMPETING WITH TRAPANI
for longevity are the saltworks the Phoenicians started at Sfax, across the Sicilian straits in Tunisia. Today, Sfax is an unglamorous industrial town with three- and four-story buildings and a few palm-lined boulevards. It is Tunisia’s second largest port after Tunis but the leading port for phosphates, olive oil, and salt.