FRIED BROAD BEAN MACCO

My diet is mainly vegetarian, out of preference and for many other reasons that some underestimate and others simply do not want to hear.
“Because in our traditional cooking we have meat, fish and everything. This new habit of not eating meat is just a fashion.”

Fortunately, today’s real culinary fashions concern other things and are the territory of many fine chefs.
But rather than debate environmental and ethical questions here, let us focus on tradition itself.

Meat and fish were not everyday foods for those who were not wealthy; quite the opposite.
Most popular recipes used ingredients described as humble. Nutrient-rich foods that fed and sustained pre-industrial populations.

Harvests of cereals, pulses and potatoes determined the survival of thousands of people, and sometimes their deaths.

The recipe below belongs to our Sicilian food tradition.

Fried macco is what we might now call the “gourmet” version of a dish historically described as poor.

But what does poor mean? What is poor about this dish?

Sowing, harvesting and the subsequent stages, from cleaning to packaging pulses and flour, require months of effort from people, machinery and the land, as well as favourable lunar cycles and weather.

Then there is the work in the kitchen, and the source of culinary creativity born of desperation and, here indeed, poverty.

There is hunger, because dishes like this emerge from hunger: for food and for survival.