The sicilian

For us, beautiful Sicily is associated primarily with the powerful and insidious Sicilian mafia, films about the godfather and the phrase "Cosa Nostra" (Italian: our business).

But these are just stereotypes that directors use from film to film to make the picture a success. After all, what could be better than an exciting plot, where the handsome protagonist saves himself and protects his love fatal beauty from the Sicilian mafia.

Let's take a look at Sicily as a beautiful region of Italy that has rich traditions, culture and cooking with ancient recipes for Sicilian cuisine. Sicilian cuisine refers to Mediterranean cuisine.

This is also due to the region in which Sicily is located and climatic conditions. Winter in Sicily is short and absolutely not cold, but summer is long and hot. This climate allows you to grow fruit and olive trees, as well as use fresh vegetables all year round to prepare Sicilian dishes.

Sicilian cuisine was influenced by Spaniards, Greeks, Arabs and, of course, residents of other regions of Italy. The Greeks were the first navigators to reach Sicilian shores. They gave dishes of Sicilian cuisine such new ingredients as olives, olive oil and wine.

After the Greeks, the Romans visited Sicily, who taught the locals to grow wheat and cook flour from it. Now Sicilian cuisine is beyond conceivable without wheat bread, which is sprinkled with sesame seeds.

It is believed that it was the Hellenes who first prepared the Sicilian Ricotta (cheese). And the forced need of ancient people to collect bread crumbs and add them to food for satiety, transformed into a national dish of Sicilian cuisine pasta with bread crumbs.

Arab colonists taught Sicilians how to prepare dishes with the addition of apricots and citrus fruits. Until now, in the recipes of Sicilian cuisine, you can easily find Arabic dishes. For example, rice with raisins and saffron. It was the Arabs who began to plant orchards, palm trees, melons and sugarcane in the fertile Sicilian lands.

Now we offer you a small hit parade of the most popular and favorite dishes of residents and guests of Sicily. There will always be pastes in the first place, for a Sicilian, as well as for an Italian, there is nothing like pasta. Animal meat, poultry, fish and seafood are often added to pastes. No paste is served without the appropriate and suitable one hundred sauce (cheese, cream, tomato, etc. ).

Recipes for Sicilian cuisine often use fish and seafood. Swordfish, red mullet, sardine or tuna dishes are considered a real delicacy. The famous meat dishes of Sicilian cuisine are Polpe'tte, small meat pies, Scaloppi'ne, veal schnitzel with Marsala wine, Kotole'tte, fried schnitzel with Parmesan.

Famous for the whole world of the sweetness of Sicilian cuisine. Canno'li crispy tubes with delicate cheese filling. Cassata is a fruit cake, and Granita's famous Sicilian ice cream is considered a fine dessert in hot weather. Another famous ice cream in Italian and Sicilian Gela'to cuisine. It is made from fruit, almonds, pistachios or mulberry.

For candy lovers, Sicily is just a sweet Paradise on earth. The most famous treats are sweets with whole nuts inside (hazelnuts, almonds), with nougat filling. Sicilian Frutta di martorana is a true masterpiece of Sicilian cuisine. A clever imitation of reduced-size fruits (lemons, oranges, watermelon, grapes, etc. ), which are actually made from almond paste.