Recipe: Gangivecchio's Antipasti Rustici / About Antipasto

ANTIPASTI

"Come un innamoramento, un pasto comincia con un flirt, che chiamiamo antipasti.
(Like a love affair, a meal begins with a flirtation that we call antipasti.)

In Italian, antipasti literally means "before the meal." Appropriately enough, antipasti are small portions of foods that are served as a tantalizing overture to the fundamental courses in a menu. In Old Sicilian, they're called vucativi, from the Latin vocare, meaning to call-in this case, what we are calling is the appetite. In our Sicilian dialect, we also say isca i viviri, which is difficult to translate but roughly means something like bait to be drunk or like an almost-liquid bait so light it can be swallowed like water.

Antipasti are the most felicitous part of a menu-not too serious, yet extremely seductive. Mamma loves preparing classic antipasti dishes as well as inventing new ones, perhaps because in the past no such course existed in Sicilian homes, particularly in the countryside where we live. In Sicily, until the last several decades, antipasti were served only at special celebrations or large functions like weddings and official receptions. Many Sicilians were too poor and too busy to prepare antipasti.

Restaurants really invented antipasti, which were and are often still temptingly displayed on a long table containing as many as two dozen or more dishes. These dishes ranged from stuffed vegetables to marinated seafood, usually served at room temperature. I believe that this enormous offering was developed by clever restaurant owners as a sensible way of satisfying their hungry, demanding customers while the pasta and other dishes were being cooked to order in the kitchen. As much as my mother enjoys a delicious, big antipasti table, she also believes it defeats the purpose of a balanced menu. There is so much food that these temptations can become an entire meal, especially if diners return for second helpings, like my mother always does. (When I read Mamma what I'd just written, she protested and corrected me. She explained that she never has second helpings; she returns with her plate to the antipasti table for the sole purpose of tasting each dish presented.

At our restaurant at Gangivecchio, we typically serve three or four of an assortment of our antipasti rustici. A small amount of each antipasto is arranged on individual plates for every diner. In the summer there might be bruschetta (grilled bread) spread with either a simple puree of tuna or a spicy tomato sauce with tiny dice of swordfish - see recipe, along with a few specially seasoned olives, salami or mortadella, and thin slices of melon with mint and balsamic vinegar. The season dictates the selection, of course. In fall or winter, we serve fried pecorino with pistachios, drizzled with honey, polpettine agrodolce (little sweet-and-sour meatballs) - see recipe, crisp fritters, or a slice of Paolo's sumptuous gorgonzola and pear tart."

Source: Sicilian Home Cooking by Wanda Tornabene, Giovanna Tornabene and Michele Evans