Side Dishes

If fish is the king of food, then vegetables are the queens of Sicilian cuisine. I though it odd when I first came to the United States that children were told that if they didn’t eat their spinach, they would not get any dessert. I had never heard of a child having to be coaxed into eating spinach! To everybody I knew, vegetables were as delicious as any dessert.

We always thought that my mother, who missed Ragusa more that any other member of the family, exaggerated when she described the Sicilian vegetables as being so much tastier than their American equivalents. We thought that she was romanticizing because she missed her birthplace, but when we began to return to Sicily as adults, we discovered that she was right, flavors are more powerful, fragrances are more pungent, and colors are more intense.