Nonna’s Pasta – Sicilian Sardine Soup

This is the Sicilian Sardine Pasta from Hostaria del Vicolo, a Michelin – listed restaurant who are staying true to their roots – they call this dish:

IL PIATTO DELLA NONNA LILLA – Grandma’s sardines soup

It was a few years back, and I discovered a restaurant in a back street of the coastal town of Sciacca in Sicily. A young lady was cooking and the restaurant was more elaborate than you would expect for the area. Actually, the food was a little too modern for my liking. I ordered zuppa della nonna, grandmother’s soup, and what arrived was a bowl of sardine and cut pasta, a kind of tomato-based thick minestrone. It was breathtaking. The sense of place, along with the heritage of this recipe, has stayed with me. I had to meet the young chef who had made it. It turned out that Lila Bentivegna knew of me, and she has now spent some days each closed season working with us at Trinity. Lila and I have swapped many recipes. I mentor her and love the way she has evolved as a cook. This one is a gift from her to me and from me to you.

And it’s still on the menu today. Grazie Chef Lila Bentivegna for sharing this gift with me.

Sardine Soup
300g fresh sardines, filleted, tails and dorsal fins removed (no need to remove the pinbones).
1 medium onion, finely diced
2 garlic cloves, sliced
1 large carrot, finely diced
1 bulb fennel, finely diced
1 pinch cumin seeds
1 pinch saffron
4 large fresh tomatoes, deseeded and diced
200g tinned chickpeas, liquid only
500g tomato passata
500g water
50g dried spaghetti, broken into pieces of about 1cm – (around 1 handful of pasta)
1 lemon, juice only
50g plain flour, for dusting.
Salt, black pepper, olive oil
–
First choose your saucepan well: a heavy-based one with high sides is ideal and it does not need to be oven proof.
Place the pan on a medium heat and pour in a very generous glug of nice olive oil.
Lay the sardine fillets flat (they can be ‘butterflied’ if you like) onto a plate, skin-side up. Season them with salt and pepper. Dust with the flour.

Now lay the fillets into the hot pan, skin-side down and let them fry. Treat them with care, as if you intended to eat them fried. Once the sardines are crisp and caramelised on one side, turn them and immediately remove the pan from the heat.

Add some olive oil to the pan and toast the cumin seeds for 1 minute. Add the onion and season. Then add the fennel and carrot and add more olive oil and cook over a high heat to allow to vegetables to sweat quickly. Add the tomatoes, raisins, saffron, aquafaba, passata and water and bring to a boil. Add the sardines and broken spaghetti and cook over a low heat for around 30 minutes stirring well to aid breaking down the sardine fillets. Allow to sit for 10 minutes before serving.

Serve with a decent glug of olive oil and warm ciabatta bread and that’s it! A little bowl of Sicily.

This soup is from a place called Hosteria del Vicolo, which is a beautiful little restaurant in a seaside town called Shaka in Sicily. I’ve been to Sicily a few times because of the work that I do with the Rockfort family. Um, and I go to this restaurant whenever I’m in Sicily. It’s a familyun business. the daughter’s cooking and the father’s on the floor and it’s just delightful whenever I go there. This is the dish that I have every time and it’s super lona. So this is a sardine soup and I loved it so much that I asked her for the recipe and this is the recipe. So a big shout out and I have put a link to her in this as well and they’re beautiful business. So ever you’re in Sicy you must visit. So, we start with these sardines and we want to create a nice crispiness on the skin. I think that’s really important. It’s going to help us to get that coloration in there as well and get a lovely flavor in there. Try not to burn the pan. You don’t have to cook these sardines all the way through, by the way, but try not to burn the pan. So that’s really important because we want to use this pan to make the soup all the way through. So a little bit of pan control right now is really important. And this restaurant, by the way, like I said, father’s on the floor, daughter’s in the kitchen um with her partner, and they just cook the most delicious food. They cook really elegant and quite fancy food, but they also have this on the menu that I think is kind of goes back to a family tradition for them and a family recipe. So I always have this when I’m there. I absolutely love it. Put a few more in there. And take your time doing this. Almost as it says in the recipe, just take your time as if you were going to serve these sardines as a lunch preparation. So, you really you’re caring for them. Don’t just throw them in. So, you can get a really nice color on the skin, nice crispiness going on. They’re delicious. And sardines, they’re in season. I’m filming this at the very beginning of August, but they’re so they’re super in season right now, sardines, and they’re they’re just coming into the English waters. So, we’ve got herrings and sardines coming in, which is why the tuna’s coming in as well. So, you’ve got that fantastic uh fatty bait fish coming through, but they are so delicious. I love the oil that’s produced. In fact, I had a dish at Browns yesterday. The team at Browns cooked me a dish of little breaded sardine fillets that were served with a tomato salad. So simple and olive oil was just utterly delicious. One of the nicest things I’ve eaten for a long time. In they go. We just keep working that through. But you’ll note even with that flour in there, I’m not burning the pan. We’re not letting it get too hot. We’re not getting the pan super hot. That’s really important. So I just use a little bit of seasoned flour to protect the fish when we go in. But equally there’s a little trick there. That flour is aiding to the thickening of the soup eventually. So it is playing another part as well as protecting the fish. Okay. Right. There’s those sardines. I’m just going to turn that pan off quickly and walk you through all the ingredients we need for this beautiful dish. As listed below, we’ve got this fantastic array of ingredients. Feels like I’m in Sicily. And Sicily has this influence from North Africa. And this is, I think, why I really love this dish. You really feel that spice and you feel the warmth and you feel that sort of, you know, this is Italian food but with a really interesting influence in it. We got cumin here, which goes into the pan in a second. We’ve got garlic, we’ve got diced onion, we’ve got diced fennel, we’ve got diced carrot, we’ve got raisins, we’ve got chickpeas, but we only want the the water, the aquafabra in there as well. We don’t want the actual chickpeas, but I’ll come on to that in a minute. We’ve got a lemon. We’ve got some plain water. We got some chopped up tomato skin on. We’ve got some pata, whatever you can get. Little saffron, not too much of that. And then just plain old spaghetti, just like that, which we’re going to use as well. So that’s it. That’s pretty much what there is. I had a little tray of flour here which I used to crisp up my sardines. They’re ready. So now we can get on and make our soup. In goes the spices. Delicious cumin goes in there. Now in goes the onion. And like anything like this, as soon as it goes in the diced onion, we’re going to start seasoning now to season the whole dish. That’s really important. So, it’s nice seasoning in there. Now, let that all cook down nicely. And that salt, as always, is going to bring out the moisture and just allow that onion to sweat rather than fry. We’re not looking for that. We’re looking for all the water to come out and for the moisture to come out and it be utterly delicious. There we go. In goes the fennel nicely. Very important they’re diced absolutely perfect. Just like that as well. Not really. I didn’t dice them. Someone diced them for me. Lucky me. But uh diced they don’t have to be. It’s a it’s a minestronei. It’s a simple soup. It’s for this is a family nona style soup. Needs to be served in the garden with a big chunk of chibata bread and olive oil and it’s just wholesome and life affirming. So don’t get too caught up in it. Just just lean into it. Nice carrot in there. That’s going to bring sweetness and texture as well. Get that in. Continue. Keep that heat up. You need to hear that frying all the time. It’s not difficult. In it goes. Lovely. I would see now I see that that if you come in Sam that you’ll see all that olive oil has been absorbed by the vegetables there. Right. I’m going to put more olive oil. Now I want to make sure there’s always enough olive oil in this to keep it going. It’s the salt that’s done that that’s really slowed the pan down, drawing all the moisture out. So that’s what’s happened there. Into that is going to go my garlic. But I just need to slice that very quickly. I’m just going to slice the garlic while the vegetables are slicing down. Yeah, such a quaint, beautiful little restaurant in Shaka. Um I I I’m a big fan of it. And I think also sometimes when you have these dishes when you’re on holiday and then you come back to the UK, you think actually it doesn’t really translate. It only works cuz it’s a holiday dish. It’s a bit like wine, isn’t it? You drink wine on holiday sometimes. You come back and you think, “Nah, not nice.” But this absolutely translates. I’ve cooked it all the time. Cooked it loads at home. And uh it’s it just always delivers. And it’s cheap and easy and kind of just just so wholesome, so lovely. I love it. There’s a couple of clever little tricks in here as well that you know have got heritage. you know, these tricks were kind of these are this is someone who’s lived a life through food that’s come up with this soup and it’s got generations of input in it. So, you’re you’re borrowing you’re being gifted those inherent years of cooking and cooking and cooking and understanding something. I just think that’s that’s so lovely. And when I’m cooking like this, I like to imagine the person that started creating this was kind of cooking by the sea in Shaka. And they’re thinking about this dish and why it worked and who they were feeding and why they were making it so robust and how they made it marry with this the sea. And I love all that. I just think that’s a that’s a beautiful thing. Okay, into there goes tomatoes. They’re just tomatoes with the seeds removed. Uh skins left on. They’re just pieces of tomato. We leave them quite whole like that because we want a little bit of texture at the end. The whole thing should have that sort of almost a minrron feel to it. So really important. So that goes in. Just sort of bleed those out a little bit. Beautiful. There we go. Okay. Into that now goes a few raisins. And this is I guess to do with like the North African end of it, but I just think they bring so much to it. The whole thing’s really savory, but that little those little sweet nuggets of raisins in there, it’s a bit like pine nuts and raisins. I love pine nuts and raisins together. And uh this is a bit like that. So, just cook that until the tomatoes start to cook down. Okay. Now, very simply, if you get all that prep done first and you’re looking at all the prep, you can stand there and really indulge and lean into the process and just enjoy it. So, it’s not difficult to do. It’s also not particularly complicated or clever, which I like about it. Needs a little sprinkle of gold saffron. Not too much, but it does bring quite a lot. It’s that that sort of floral flavor that it brings that I really like. Doesn’t bring a huge amount of coloration to it. You’re not looking for that. You are looking for that floral note, that tanning note that saffron brings that I just think makes things feel exotic and gives them another depth, another layer. Okay. Now, into that goes the liquid from a tin of chickpeas, the aqua faba. So, that goes in and that’s obviously got really big thickening properties in it. It’s got all the starch from the chickpeas. So, if you look there, Sam, I’m not putting the chickpeas in, which you could, I guess, but I think it would change the nature of the dish. So, I don’t want to put those in. All right. I just want the liquid. And the liquid is going to bring the thickness. That’s really important. In goes the water. 500 mls of water. That is into this goes pata. Whatever pata you can get. This is just the one we use in the restaurant for all sorts stuff. It’s 500 mil of pata as well. That goes in. Give that a good mix. This is just one of those dishes just bring it all together. Okay, once all the liquids have gone in, I’m now going to go back and pop in all my sardines. Let those cook right down. Now, let those cook down like that. It’s all the whole thing is going to break down. It’s going to This is going to cook for 40 minutes. 30 to 40 minutes. And the whole thing is going to break down. But what you’ll get out of that, the other end, something that’s utterly delicious. Here’s the other cool trick that goes in here. This is just standard spaghetti. Dried dried spaghetti. How much spaghetti is it at in the recipe? It is 50 g of dried broken spaghetti. And the spaghetti is just adding texture and flavor. The spaghetti is just adding lovely texture to it. And those little pieces of broken up spaghetti in there. They’re also going to thicken the whole soup up as well. So just break that spaghetti up roughly. Smash it up. Put it all in like that. It’s my favorite one. That’s my favorite one. Okay, so that soup has had about 35 minutes. Thickens up hugely. It all can comes together. That’s the aquaf fabber in there. It’s the flour that we started with the sardine and it’s the starch from the pasta. This is no soup, my friends. This is a meal in itself and I just think it’s utterly delicious. You got the the sort of robustness and the depth of flavor from the sardine. For me, I kind of want to put olives in it. I want to put capers in there. I want to There’s so many things I could do with this. I’m not going to because that’s the recipe that she gave me and I want to stick to it and I love it for what it is. But such a beautiful thing. Let’s plate that up. Okay, S. Here we go. This is my resident, my main Italian man in the whole restaurant. This is the guy I go to for anything. Katcha, Pepe, Parmesan, anything Italian. I want to know what you think of this. This is from Sicily. So, not a million miles from you and Calabria. Of course, this is this is from Sicily. Um, this is from that lovely lady I told you about, Ila. I’m going to finish that with some olive oil. So, sardine soup. Are you familiar with this recipe? Very familiar, actually. Are you? Yes. You’ve seen it before? Yeah, I’ve seen it before. Of course. It’s delicious. And it’s delicious. Yeah. Do you want to try? I want to try. Yes. And then so good the saffron and the cumin and that that would have been influenced right from North Africa coming up through Italy, wouldn’t it? Of course. Yeah. Absolutely incredible. The s the saffron goes into the pasta as well. Right. Could you do me a huge favor and just say thank you to Yla in Italian for me as a real genuine thank you from me for the recipe. I think I might take some of that. I’m going to have some for my dinner. at that place.