Food in medieval Sicily

By Adelisa di Salerno

My interest in Sicilian food and medieval Sicily is familial in origin. My paternal

grandmother and her family came from the tiny mountain town of Corleone (no, really).
As a child, I had fantasized that our family had some sort of connection with Richard the
Lionheart, as I knew enough Italian to theorize that Corleone meant “lion heart.” Fast-
forward many years to when I found out that Corleone actually was an Arab name,
“Qurlayun,” and the Quaglino family originally came from Lombardy. How they got
there, and the Arabs were no longer there, spurred me into some serious research into the
Arab presence on the island and the subsequent Norman rule that some Sicilians even
today look to as a golden age.

The Arabs ruled Sicily for just over two centuries, but one of the most persistent elements
of the Sicilian culture even today remains its Muslim past. In Palermo, many streets in
the old Kalsa district by the waterfront (from the Arabic al-Khalesa) put one in mind of
Cairo or Morocco, especially in the souk-like markets or the street vendors around the
Teatro Massimo from Northern Africa selling textiles, furniture, hookahs, and jewelry.
You'll find couscous, "cucusa" in Sicilian dialect, on the menu in Trapani, only made with
fish instead of lamb. Sicilian dialect itself has many words of Arabic origin, including the
name of the island's capital, Palermo — from the Arabic Bal'Harm. The Arabs introduced
irrigation techniques and the cultivation of many crops that indelibly changed the island's
cuisine – eggplants, rice, oranges, lemons, date palms, mulberries, and sugar. Marzipan
and dried semolina pasta, according to several food scholars, had their origins in the
kitchens of the Arab emirs. Today's caponata, with its sweet and sour flavors, came out of
Arabic cooking (a version of eggplant salad from the island of Ustica, off the coast of
Palermo, may be considered a proto-caponata). Sicilian cuisine today emphasizes one-
dish, stuffed meals, sweet and sour flavors, and a use of spices not found in mainland
Italian cuisine.

One of the earliest mentions of what Arabs in Sicily liked to eat, that I could find, comes
from the writings of Mohammed ibn Hawqal. In 972 during his visit to Palermo, ibn
Hawqal commented on the number of mosques in the city, more than 300. In William
Granara’s translation of ibn Hawqal’s writings, Mr. Granara points out that despite his
admiration of the beauties of Sicily, ibn Hawqal feels very much a stranger on the island.
Ibn Hawqal, although a Muslim, did not think much of his co-religionists; he attacked the
Palermo Sicilians as Muslims in their insistence on private ownership of mosques, and
personally as well, calling them dimwitted. He attributes this in part to the amount of
onions consumed in their diet: ... "And in truth this food, of which they are fond and
which they eat raw, ruins their senses. There is not one man among them, of whatsoever
condition, who does not eat onions every day, and does not serve them morning and
evening in his house. It is this that has clouded their imagination; offended their brains;
perturbed their senses; altered their intelligence; drowsed their spirits; fogged their
expressions, untempered their constitutions so completely that it rarely happens they see
things straight."
The farmers around Palermo were known for their techniques of onion cultivation, as
attested by the Andalusian ibn Bassal (which means “son of the onion grower) in his
Kitab al-Filahah (Book of Agriculture). Rather than just eating them raw, however, the
Arabs of Sicily probably did include them in a lot of recipes. Unfortunately, only one
actual period “Sicilian” recipe of Arab origin still exists today, “A Sicilian Dish” in the
Anonymous Andalusian:

“Take fat meat from the chest, the shoulder, the ribs, and the other
parts, in the amount of a rat’l and a half. Put it in a pot with a little
water and salt and some three rat’ls of onions. Then put it on a
moderate fire, and when the onion is done and the meat has
‘returned,’ throw in four spoonfuls of oil, pepper, cinnamon, Chinese
cinnamon, spikenard, and meatballs. Finish cooking it and when the
meat is done, cover it with eggs beaten with saffron, or you might
leave it without a covering, as you wish, [and cook it either] in the
oven or at home.”

If a rat’l is equal to one pound, than this recipe is calling for a pound and a half of meat to
three pounds of onions. Needless to say, that’s a lot of onions.

Popular throughout Italy, not just Sicily, are small onions cooked in vinegar and sugar,
“cipollini agrodolce” in Italian and “cipiddu” in Sicilian. These sweet-and-sour delights
quite possibly had their origins among the onion-loving people of Palermo, although
sweet-and-sour flavors were found among the Romans as well.

More sweet and sour dishes

One of the signature dishes of Sicily today is “caponata,” fried eggplant with tomatoes,
celery, capers, olives, sugar, and vinegar. Caponata as we know it today dates from 1700.
However, there is an intriguing version of eggplant in a sweet-and-sour dressing from the
island of Ustica: melanzane all’Usticese. The following recipe is from Mary Taylor
Simeti’s “Pomp and Sustenance: Twenty-Five Centuries of Sicilian Food.”

Melanzane all’Usticese

Ingredients: 2 large eggplants (2.5 to 3 pounds)

Salt
One cup or more of olive oil for frying
1 tablespoon of white wine vinegar
1 teaspoon sugar
½ cup chopped fresh mint
2 cloves garlic, sliced

Peel the eggplants and cut off their stems. Cut the eggplants into into ½ inche slices, and
then cut the slices across into finger-shaped pieces. Put the pieces into a colander,
sprinkle abundantly with salt, and leave to drain for an hour. After draining, rinse the
 eggplant thoroughly, dry, and fry in the olive oil until delicately browned on all sides.
Drain on absorbent paper to remove the excess oil, then place in a shallow serving dish.
Sprinkle while hot with the vinegar, sugar, mint, and garlic. Serve cold.

The 13th century cookbook called the “Kitab al-Tabikh,” or “Book of Dishes,” has a
picked eggplant recipe:

Badhinjan Mukhallal: Take medium eggplants and cut off half their stems and their
leaves. Then half boil them in water and salt, take them up, and dry them off. Then
quarter them lengthwise and stuff them with fresh celery leaves, a few bunches of mint
and peeled cloves of garlic, and pack them one onto the other in a glass jug. Sprinkle a
little of the herbs and finely ground mixed spices on them, cover them with a good
vinegar and leave them until they are thoroughly mature, and then use them.

This recipe does not call for the use of sugar, but I can’t imagine that there wasn’t a cook
who occasionally felt the need to add sugar to the recipe to cut the eggplant’s own
bitterness and create a sweeter pickle.

Pasta, even then

After Roger and Robert de Hauteville conquered the island and the south of Italy
(officially by 1091), Roger, who was installed as count, kept Muslim servants and slaves;
although many upper-class Muslims on the island chose to emigrate, a significant number
of free Muslims stayed. Many of them continued as farmers; some continued as traders.
North African eunuchs played a significant role in the government, and court documents
from the diwan (records agency) were issued in Arabic, Greek, and Latin. The secular
court culture of Roger II, Roger I’s son and the first Norman king, was essentially an
Arab one, with secular ceremonials based on those of the Abbasids by Roger II’s great
admiral, George of Antioch.

For the scholar trying to figure out what these Arabized Normans actually ate, however,
frustration can set in. There is not one extant recipe from the period. Instead, we have to
theorize and carefully examine recipes from nearby areas (such as Andalusia); some of
the writings of the Muslim geographer al-Idrisi, who wrote about the island in The Book
of Roger; recipes from the court of Frederick II Hohenstaufen (the half-German, half
Norman grandson of Roger II who followed in his father’s and grandfather’s footsteps in
keeping Muslim servants and slaves), and the regional “traditional” recipes of the island
that until the age of the Internet, were essentially unknown outside of their regions.

We’ll turn first to the writings of al-Idrisi. Dried semolina pasta was certainly invented in
Sicily. al-Idrisi, in the 1160s, comments on the manufacture of flat thin noodles on the
island, called itriya. The word survives in dialect today in Sicily and Southern Italy as
"tria.”
How “itriya” were actually eaten can only be theorized. The food historian Clifford A.
Wright refers to the anonymous 14th century Anonimo Toscano, or Libra della cocina, in
which the boiled pasta was served with a sauce of almond milk, sugar, and saffron.

This taste for sweet and savory in pasta continued into the 16th century, if we are to
believe 16th century Milanese writer Ortensio Landi; the quote I have is taken from Mary
Taylor Simeti's "Pomp and Sustenance," but originally was from Landi's "Commentary
on the most notable and outlandish things found in Italy and elsewhere":

"In a month's time (if the winds are not against you) you will arrive on the affluent island
of Sicily, where you will eat some of these macaroni that have taken their name from [the
Greek word] 'beatify': they are usually cooked together with fat capons and fresh cheeses
dripping with butter and milk on all sides, and then, using a wide and liberal hand,
sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon of the finest that can be found. Oh dear, how my
mouth waters just remembering them."

The 13th century Liber de coquino/Anonimo meridionale, which is sometimes attributed

to Frederick II’s cook Berardo, has a recipe for lasagna – layers of pasta with grated
cheese and spices served in a trencher.

Cheese, please

The Landi quote interested me intensely, as I tried to figure out what kind of cheese he
was talking about. The island of Sicily has a tradition of cheesemaking going back to the
Greeks, with their herds of sheep and goats. The description of “fresh cheeses with butter
and milk on all sides” certainly suggested a soft pasta filata fresh cheese such as
mozzarella. But mozzarella, traditionally made from buffalo milk, is specific to the area
around Naples and is mentioned by historians no earlier than the 15th century.

The answer, for me, came from the tiny village of Aragona in the region of Catania, in
eastern Sicily, and a pasta dish that is claimed to have been made there since at least the
17th century. A traditional Easter meal (it calls for 16 beaten eggs), taganu d’Aragona is
not the pasta dish Landi is talking about, but calls for tuma cheese. Tuma is a pasta filata
cheese made from sheep’s milk. It’s called “vastedda” in some parts of Sicily such as the
Belice Valley. “Tuma” seems to refer to the cheese when only a few days old. I found a
description of fresh tuma in an article online from, all places the journal, “Emerging
Infectious Diseases,” which discussed cases of brucellosis contracted by tourists visiting
a living nativity in the Messina province. Enterprising shepherds whose animals appeared
in the nativity sold the tourists fresh cheese products, mainly tuma and ricotta:

“Tuma is a typical Sicilian fresh cheese made from sheep's milk. It has a cylindrical
appearance and is sold fresh, no more than 2 days old. It has no crust, and the dough is
white or ivory-white without holes. The texture is very soft, tender, and wet. It is
generally served with ham, wines, and fruits as a table cheese.”

In looking up the variations of this recipe, I came across one by Mario Batali, who calls
for the substitution of fresh mozzarella if tuma cannot be obtained.

This is the taganu d’Aragona recipe that came from About.com’s Kyle Phillips; unlike
those I found in the blogs of people whose families had come from Aragona, and were
remembering tastes of their childhood, the “original” recipe does not call for tomato
sauce:

Taganu d’Aragona
Prep Time: 75 minutes

Cook Time: 2 hours

Ingredients:

1 3/4 pounds (800 g) cavatuna or rigatoni

16 beaten eggs
1 1/3 pounds (600 g) tuma (a mild, creamy sheep's milk cheese), sliced
3 cups (150 g) grated well-aged pecorino
A pinch of cinnamon
A cup of hot chicken broth
A packet of saffron dissolved into the broth
8 slices day-old Italian bread
Abundant minced parsley
Lard
Salt & pepper
Meatballs and sliced hard-boiled eggs (optional)
Preparation:

Boil the rigatoni in salted water and drain them when they're still slightly al dente; while
they're cooking take a terracotta pot large enough to hold everything, grease it well with
lard, and lay four of the bread slices over the bottom of the pot. Beat the eggs and
combine them with the parsley, grated cheese, and cinnamon. Drain the pasta when it's
still slightly al dente, and transfer it to the pot, interlayering it with the sliced cheese and
the egg mixture; when all is used up cover it with the remaining slices of bread, and the
broth, in which you have dissolved the saffron. Put it all into a moderately hot (350 F,
175 C) oven, and bake until the liquid has been absorbed; it will take a while.

Remove the taganu from the oven when it's firm but not bone dry, slice it and serve it. It
will keep well for several days.

Note: If you chose to use the meatballs or the eggs, mix them into the pasta.

The word “taganu” is a dialect word, thought to be Arabic. According to Oretta Zanini de
Vita and Maureen Fant in “The Encyclopedia of Pasta,” the taganu is “an earthenware
pan with steeply flaring sides.” Today, the people of Aragona have a taganu contest,
where everyone brings their taganu to the town square for judging.
The brucellosis article also mentions ricotta cheese. Ricotta is well-known to have been
made in the medieval period. According to Mr. Wright, one of the earliest mentions or
depictions of ricotta is related to Sicily:

“Professor Santi Correnti, chairman of the history department of the University of

Catania and a preeminent historian of Sicily, writes that during the reign of the Sicilian
king Frederick II, in the early 13th century, the king and his hunting party came across
the hut of a dairy farmer making ricotta and, being ravenous, asked for some. Frederick
pulled out his bread loaf, poured the hot ricotta and whey on top and advised his retinue
that cu' non mancia ccu' so' cucchiaru lassa tutto 'o zammataru (Those who don't eat
with a spoon will leave all their ricotta behind).”

The first depiction of the making of ricotta is an illustration in the medical treatise known
as the “Tacuinum sanitatis” (medieval health handbook), the Latin translation of the Arab
physician ibn Butlan’s eleventh century “Taqwim al-sihha.”

From sweetened ricotta put over cuccia (a wheatberry pudding eaten on St. Lucy’s Day)
or piped into cannoli, to ricotta salata grated over pasta (an aged, salted form of ricotta
where the curds pressed in wicker baskets to drain and solidify), ricotta is omnipresent in
Sicilian cuisine today. As far as how the Normans might have been served ricotta, looking
at what Sicily produced, it might have been as simple as ricotta mixed with the island’s
incomparable honey and sprinkled with almonds and pistachios. Frederick II did not
seem fussy about how he ate his ricotta while on the go.

Something fishy going on?

Awhile ago, the food writer Charles Perry had told me that the samak musakbaj in the
Baghdad Cookery Book and scapece alla Vastese, a preserved fish dish from Abruzzo,
were virtually identical. I had wondered how this dish got to Abruzzo; after reading a
book about the Muslim colony of Lucera, I have a theory. When the colony was
destroyed in 1300, a large chunk of the enslaved inhabitants were sent to Abruzzo. Some
of the inhabitants of Lucera also may have escaped to the mountains of Abruzzo before
the going got bad.

Frederick II liked scapece; according to Anna Martelloti in her “I ricettari di Federico II”
(her translation of the Liber de coquina and Anonimo Meridionale), while at the
Colloquium of Foggia in March 1240, he ordered the cook there to make him
"askipeciam et gelatinum."

It’s not a hard reach to go from the Arabic “samak musakbaj” to the Latin “askipeciam”
to the Italian “scapece.” When Sicily and Southern Italy were taken over by the Catalans,
they brought “escabeche” with them from Spain; in Sicilian dialect, the word has been
translated to “schibecci.”

In an Italian review of Martelloti’s text, I found mention of another form of scapece from
Puglia, which some recipes called “scapece alla Gallipoli.” In this case, instead of large
pieces of whitefish or hake, fried, and preserved in vinegar and saffron, the fish is small,
whole “pupiddi” (any ideas on what these fish are most akin to, let me know), fried, and
layered in grated bread soaked in vinegar and saffron, all packed into wooden tubs. The
town of Gallipoli was conquered in 900 by the Muslims, but I don’t think they held onto
it very long.

Here is the recipe mentioned by Mr. Perry:

Scapece alla Vastese

2 1/2 lbs. thick white fish seaks.
flour
olive oil for deep frying
salt
generous pinch of saffron
2 or 3 coriander seeds, crushed
1/2 a cup chopped celery leaf
5 cups of white wine vinegar

Lightly coat the fish steaks with flour, and fry until golden. Drain on paper towel and
sprinkle with salt. Dissolve the saffron in a little bit of the vinegar, then add it to the rest
of the vinegar, along with the coriander and celery leaf. Place vinegar in a pan,and bring
to just boil, then remove from flame, cover the bottom of an earthenware dish with a
layer of fish steaks, and sprinkle with some of the vinegar. Add the remaining fish, and
pour over the rest of the vinegar.cover the dish, and place in a cool spot for 24 hours.
When ready to eat drain all vinegar from dish.

Bread, the staff of life

Bread held a special place in the hearts of the Muslims and the Greeks. For the Greeks,
Sicily was the island of Demeter, and in Roman times the island was known as the
granary of Rome. Food historian Clifford Wright notes by the time the Muslims arrived
on the island, Greek bakers had come up with 72 different types of bread. Muslims swore
oaths on bread and salt, and according to Mr. Wright, even as late as 1350, there is a
record of two Muslim merchants in the Palermo marketplace swearing a contract on
bread and salt.

What kind of bread was eaten by the Muslims and the Normans? This is unknown. The
island predominantly grows semolina,or durum wheat, although in winter a soft wheat is
grown. Today, the Arab legacy in breads is shown with bread flavored with sesame seed
like that around Catania, or cumin seed. And bread at the table is not cut, but torn by the
hands, just as the Cairo Geniza documents specify that it should be, according to Mr.
Wright.

The bread recipe I am including is for the ubiquitous pane riminciato from Mary Taylor
Simeti’s book, which is made from durum wheat. Breadmaking traditions vary from town
to town in Sicily; Ms. Simeti says one old woman told her that in her childhood in her
tiny mountain village, they kneaded elderflowers into the dough.

I have made this recipe with fantastic results, although I have not tried reserving a
criscenti to use to rise the next batch. I like to use the semolina atta flour found in Indian
grocery stores, mixed about half and half with unbleached white flour.

Pane riminciato
Ingredients
7 1/2 cups of durum wheat flour (this is semolina flour ground to a silky finish, if you
cannot find durum wheat flour, use 4 cups semolina to 3 1/2 cups unbleached all-purpose
flour, or go ahead and use the semolina, but be sure to pound the hell out of it when you
knead it)
2 tablespoons of yeast (use two packets of dried yeast)
2 1/2 cups warm water
1/4 cup of olive oil
salt (a nice sea salt is very Sicilian, salt is produced on the flats of Trapani)

Put the flour into a bowl and make a well in the middle of it. Dissolve the yeast in 1 cup
of the water and wait for 15 minutes until it is foamy; then pour the yeast solution into the
well of the flour, mixing it with your fingers, and rubbing the flour between your hands
so that the yeast is well-distributed. Add the rest of the warm water a little at a time,
mixing constantly with your fingers. When you have a dough that holds together, turn out
onto a floured board or table. Add your olive oil and salt in at this time, and knead for 5-
10 minutes and until the oil is absorbed, punching the dough to release the gluten Form
the dough into a ball and put into an oiled bowl, and let rise for 45 minutes.

When the dough is risen, remove from the bowl and if you wish to make criscenti for the
next baking, do it now. Take some of the dough and make little balls, like golf balls, oil
the surface of each ball well, and put into an airtight jar in the refrigerator, where they
should keep for about a week. Each ball of dough, when combined with 3/4 cup of flour
and a little water and left to rise overnight, should provide the yeast for two pounds of
flour.

If you don’t want to put aside criscenti, separate your dough into about three loaves and
let rise for another 45 minutes. Put the loaves into a 425 degree Fahrenheit oven. You can
sprinkle the dough with uncooked sesame seeds before baking.

What are things you can do with bread? In “Kitab alTabikh,” there is a recipe for
bazmaward: a semolina breadloaf hollowed out and stuffed with cooked minced meat
pulverized with salted lemons and walnuts, and the mixture moistened with vinegar and
rosewater. The loaf is sliced, the slices packed into a moistened earthernware tub lined
with mint leaves, and served cold, and “is one of those foods that tastes even better the
next day.”

In Pomp and Sustenance, Ms. Tayor-Simeti redacts a Catanian recipe called pasticcio di
Ibn-Itmnah, named after the emir of Catania who colluded with Robert and Roger
d’Hauteville in their invasion of the island (he was feuding with his brother-in-law, the
emir of Trapani). It was allegedly one of his favorite dishes, invented for his pleasure.
Ms. Taylor-Simeti’s versions contains minced braised chicken, mixed with pulverized
pistachios and almonds, parsley, capers, beaten eggs, and breadcrumbs moistened with
chicken broth and lots of lemon juice. Chicken is not often found on modern-day Sicilian
menus, being seen as a special occasion dish. The ingredients are fiercely local: the lands
around Catania, in the vicinity of Mount Etna, are filled with almond, pistachio, and
lemon trees.

Ibn Itmnah lived two centuries before the scribe of “Kitab al-Tabikh” put pen to paper.
Whether bazmawards are a Persian twist on a Sicilian specialty, or the pasticcio is a
modern-day descendent of bazmaward, we will never know. But the pasticcio is Sicilian
in a way that bazmaward is not, and I would prefer to see it at a Sicilian feast, even if the
period antecedents of the dish cannot be perfectly attested to. Here is my tweaked version
of Ms. Simeti’s recipe.

Pasticcio di Ibn Ath-Itmnah

Serves 8 to 10
One large round loaf of semolina bread, hollowed out
Two boneless chicken thighs and one boneless chicken breast, or four boneless chicken
thighs
One-quarter olive oil
2 cups (approximately) chicken broth
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 large onion
1/8 cup toasted almonds
1/8 cup pistachios
1 tablespoon capers
1 tablespoon chopped parsley
2 eggs, lightly beaten
Juice of 1 lemon

Sautee the chopped onion in the oil until translucent, then add the chicken to brown; add
1 cup broth, salt , and pepper, and simmer until tender, adding more broth if needed.
(Note: to the medieval cook, this seems to be positively underspiced. Suggested
additional spices: cumin, cinnamon, sumac, and coriander.) Cool the chicken and cut the
meat into small pieces. Reserve both the meat and the broth.

Cut the bread horizontally, a little less than halfway down, so as to make a dish and lid.
Hollow out the bread and reserve the crumbs. Grind the almonds and pistachios finely in
a food processor. Add the cooled chicken meat with the broth and onions, and grind
together with the nuts; then add the breadcrumbs and eggs, adding more broth if needed.
Add the parsley and capers, and pulse until barely mixed.

Turn the mixture into the hollow loaf, cover with the bread “lid,” and bake for 20 minutes
at 350 degrees. Chill, slice, and serve cold.
Something sweet to eat?

There is a honey and sesame sweet, made in Sicily to this day, called cubbaita. The name
comes from the Arabic qubbayta. The “Kitab al-Tabikh” has several sweets recipes made
with sugar, sesame oil, honey, almonds, and pistachios, although none are called
qubbayta. There is a recipe for sesame candy, from the “Mappae Clavicula,” which dates
from the 12th century. Here is the recipe as translated in David Friedman’s “Miscellany.”

The recipe for sesame candy. 

Put white pure honey near a moderate fire in a tinned pan and stir it unceasingly with a 
spatula. Place it alternately near the fire and away from the fire, and while it is being 
stirred more extensively, repeatedly put it near and away from the fire, stirring it without 
interruption until it becomes thick and viscous. When it is sufficiently thickened, pour it 
out on a slab of marble and let it cool for a little. Afterwards, hang it on an iron bolt and 
pull it out very thinly and fold it back, doing this frequently until it turns white as it 
should. Then twist and shape it on the marble, gather it up and serve it properly.

1 c honey 3/8 c sesame seeds
Cook the honey, using a candy thermometer, removing it from the heat whenever it starts 
boiling too hard. About an hour gets it to 250°, about 20 minutes more to 270°. At either 
of those temperatures it works, but ends up soft rather than crisp. At about 280° it 
becomes crisp­­the problem is to keep it from scorching.
When you reach the desired temperature, pour it out on a buttered marble slab (or 
equivalent). Sprinkle on toasted sesame seeds if you like them (note that the original has 
sesame seeds only in the title!). Let it cool about 5 minutes, until you can handle it with 
your bare hands and it is no longer liquid. Then pull it with your hands like taffy (i.e. 
pull, fold, pull, fold, etc.). You will find that as you pull it it turns to a silky pale gold 
color.

However, the way cubbaita is made, it is not pulled like the “Mappae Clavicula” recipe,
and is more of a hard candy. I translated this recipe from an Italian Website.

Qubbayta

Ingredients for 8 people:

400 grams of sesame seeds
 250 grams of honey (orange blossom or acacia honey if you can get it)
2 tablespoons of vegetable oil, spread on a marble slab

Melt the honey in a pan and let it brown, but not burn; keep stirring! Add the sesame
seeds slowly and keep on stirring until the honey-sesame seed mixture becomes thick.
Pour the mixture on the oiled marble slab, leveling with the blade of a big knife. Let chill
for a short while, then draw some lines into the hardening paste with the knife and deeply
engrave it in squares. When the paste is fully cold and hardened, you can separate the
squares.

As for the original, Arab qubbayt? I found a few citations in “The best divisions for the
knowledge of the regions,” a 10th century geography book by Muhammad ibn Ahmad
Muqqaddasi (translated by Basil Anthony Collins) that the city of Harran, now in
modern-day Turkey, exported qubbayt, “preserves of locust-fruit and nuts.” We’re talking
carob here, not bug parts. The author also cites qubbayt made in Palestine, and on page
184, says in al-Ramla, “They make from the locust tree a sweetmeat from the locust tree
called qubbayt; that which they make from sugar they call natif.” Cariadoc has a
translated recipe for natif, or what is known today as hulwa or halva, a nougat confection.

There is a Greek honey and sesame seed candy called pasteli, which is virtually cubbaita
except for the name. My personal theory is that the Arabic Christians of the island just
applied the name they knew to the candy that they knew. And before the Muslims had
invaded Sicily, the island was held by the Greeks. After the Arabs invaded, there were
said to be a lot of half-hearted conversions by islanders; ibn Hawqal disparaged the rural
populations for their base, mumbled Arabic, and intimated that Christian women who
married Muslims were allowed to raise daughters as Christians. And I think this is how a
Greek candy came to be called “qubbayt” – as the Christian women of these “half-
Muslims” continued to make this sweet as they always did, and passed the tradition on, in
an area where honey was more available than sugar.

Final notes:
I’d like to thank Charles Perry, Clifford A. Wright, Duke Sir Cariadoc (David Friedman),
and the SCA-Cooks list for guidance on the recipes in the initial version of this paper

Bibliography:

Books
Cariadoc’s Miscellany, David Friedman, 1988, 1990, 1992
The Normans in Sicily, John Julius Norwich, Penguin Books, 1970
A Baghdad Cookery Book, Charles Perry, Prospect Books, 2005
I musulmani in Italia, Vito Salierno, Capone Editore, 2006
Pomp and Sustenance: 25 Centuries of Sicilian Food, Mary Taylor Simeti, Alfred A.
Knopf, 1989
Muslims in Medieval Italy: The Colony at Lucera, Julie Anne Taylor, Lexington Books,
2005
The Cultures of His Kingdom: Roger II and the Capella Palatina in Palermo, William
Tronzo, Princeton University Press, 1997
A Mediterranean Feast: The Story of the Birth of the Celebrated Cuisines of the
Mediterranean, from the Merchants of Venice to the Barbary Corsairs, Clifford A.
Wright, 1999

Papers:

Sicily, Salah Zaimeche, Ph.D., The Foundation for Science, Technology and Civilisation,
November 2004
From Islam to Christianity: The Case of Sicily, Charles Dalli, University of Malta

Online articles

Antonio Cascio, “Live nativity and brucellosis, Sicily,” Journal of Emerging Infectious
Diseases, Dec. 1, 2006 http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Live+nativity+and+brucellosis,
+Sicily.-a0156362206

Kyle Phillips, “Aragona’s Easter pot: taganu d’Aragona”

http://italianfood.about.com/od/bakedpasta/r/blr1165.htm

Clifford Wright, “Grain Trade in the Mediterranean,”

http://www.cliffordawright.com/caw/food/entries/display.php/topic_id/9/id/8/

Clifford Wright, “The Medieval Beginnings of Sicilian Cuisine,”

http://www.cliffordawright.com/caw/food/entries/display.php/topic_id/13/id/35/

Clifford Wright, “A history of ricotta cheese”

http://www.cliffordawright.com/caw/food/entries/display.php/topic_id/12/id/87/