ALICE IN AMALFILAND

Alice will be published in early summer, with illustrations by the talented Anna Monaco, a.k.a. Anouk, who also created the artworks for the first two volumes, Pomodoro and Limone. The books are not currently for sale – the only way to get your hands on one is to approach it in its natural habitat of Positano, where they like to nest shyly in Le Sirenuse guest rooms. They are docile and respond affectionately to anyone who offers them love and protection.

The Anchovy's Leap

How a humble fish conquered an entire nation

“In the Langhe, the Monferrato hills, around Saluzzo or Vercelli, in Brianza, in Pavia or Milan, people like salted anchovies. They're a ‘poor’ food that everyone can afford. They amplify taste and last for ever”.

Nico Orengo's 1997 book Il salto dell'acciuga – ‘The Anchovy's Leap’ – is a paean to the cultural significance of the humble fish in his native Liguria (where they are known as u pan du mâ – ‘the bread of the sea’) and in landlocked Piedmont to the north, where anchovies are an important part of the local cuisine despite the region's lack of a sea coast. The ‘leap’ Orengo is referring to in this passage is the way these silvery fish managed to ‘jump’ across high mountain ranges to reach communities that lived far from the sea.

Paradoxically, it was mountain dwellers who were the chief anchovy pedlars. When their work in the fields was over following the September harvest season, these young anciuè, as they were known, would set out from a handful of communities in the remote Val Maira valley west of Cuneo and travel to the populous Po Valley flatlands of Piedmont and Lombardy, where each one had a designated sales patch. The salted anchovies they hawked from village to village on brightly painted blue wheelbarrows arrived via Ligurian ports from as far afield as Malaga. It was this ‘inland’ demand for anchovies – which unlike meat could be consumed on one of the many Lenten days in the Catholic calendar – that gave rise to one of the great Piemontese specialities: bagna cauda (literally ‘hot dip’). Bagna cauda has been described by local writer Mario Bocchio as “a declaration of identity, a small liturgy that describes Piedmont better than any treatise”. Served as a dip for raw and cooked vegetables on cold autumn and winter days accompanied by a glass of rustic red wine, it is not for the faint-hearted: the official recipe (to serve 12 people) calls for twelve heads of garlic, just over half a kilo of salted anchovies, six cups of olive oil and one of walnut oil.

But it's not just the inhabitants of Liguria, Piedmont and Lombardy who appreciate anchovies. Uniquely, alici form part of the culinary traditions of every single Italian region, from Calabria to the Alps. It could be argued that it was the anchovy that united Italy, far more than pizza, pasta or olive oil, which for centuries were confined to southern regions.

History supports the claim. Linked to the salt pans of Trapani, Marsala and other coastal regions, Sicily's fish-salting industry has ancient origins. Far away in Florence, one day in 1518, Michelangelo sent his servant out with a shopping list that included anchovies (as the servant was illiterate, the Tuscan artist sketched each item next to its name). In the cold Venetian winter of 1753, notorious lothario Giacomo Casanova persuaded a beautiful young nun he was pursuing to meet him in a rented apartment. Dinner was an important part of his seduction plan. When the 28-year-old 's cook presented him with a tasting menu designed to stoke the convent girl's amorous flames, Casanova told him there was only one thing missing: an anchovy salad. In Venice, these may have been fresh rather than salted – perhaps marinated simply in olive oil and white wine vinegar, cozied up against a couple of peeled garlic cloves, sprinkled with parsley, as served in the lagoon city's traditional bacaro wine bars even today.

So insatiable was the Italian appetite for anchovies that in the late 19^th century, when overfishing briefly depleted Mediterranean stocks, they were forced to look elsewhere. Rumours of the abundant shoals to be fished off the Cantabrian coast of northern Spain reached the ears of a Neapolitan seafood distributor called Angelo Parodi – alongside the news that they could be purchased for next to nothing, as while southern Spaniards appreciated anchovies (especially when deep-fried as boquerónes), the same was not true of their northern cousins. In 1889, Parodi sent a young Sicilian fish-salter called Giovanni Vella to the region to persuade the local Cantabrian fishermen to sell him all the anchovies they caught, then to salt them and ship the cans back to Italy. Within a few years, a lucrative trade had been established. Thus was the Cantabrian anchovy industry born – and soon enough, Spaniards of all regions developed a taste for the fish, especially when Vella introduced the brand-new technique of preservation in olive oil. Today, the Spanish market accounts for nearly half of all the anchovies consumed in Europe.

Italian anchovies have leapt not only from net to barrel to saucepan, but also onto the page and the movie screen. Italy's great literary anchovy epic is Sicilian writer Giovanni Verga's 1881 novel I Malavoglia, which recounted the hardscrabble life of a fishing family from Acitrezza on the island's eastern coast. It's a tragic story of hopes and aspirations unravelled by fate and circumstance – a theme ironically enshrined in the name of the family's precious fishing boat, la Provvidenza (‘Providence’). In 1948, film director Luchino Visconti – a Tuscan aristocrat who had become a fervent supporter of the Italian Communist party – used Verga's gritty narrative as the basis for his film La terra trema. A classic of the country's neorealist cinematic movement, it was shot entirely in Sicilian dialect with a cast of non-professional actors, many of them fishermen.

How would the Malavoglias have prepared the anciova (to use the local dialect term) that they caught and salted? Perhaps in that timeless Sicilian classic, spaghetti with anchovies, lemon and breadcrumbs, which Rome-based food writer Rachel Roddy has helped to popularise outside of Italy. It could not be more simple: you infuse some garlic and onion in olive oil on a low heat, then after removing them, add some preserved anchovy fillets to the allium-scented oil in the pan and let them dissolve. At the same time, lightly fry some breadcrumbs and cook the spaghetti until it's al dente. Drain the pasta and add to the anchovy pan with the breadcrumbs, squeezing in the juice of half a lemon and stirring to amalgamate. Serve with chopped parsley. It's the Mediterranean on a plate.

Artwork © Anouk