An Impressive Dish Made of Glorified Leftovers
It even has its own role in a beloved movie from the ‘90s
There is no other portal into Sicilian cooking quite like the timballo, which I first read about in Pomp and Sustenance: Twenty-Five Centuries of Sicilian Food by Mary Taylor Simeti.
First published in 1989, it captures what became of the Sicilian people after all of their struggles: light and dark; sweet and bitter; abstract and bodily; frugal and extravagant; devotion to the plan and scheming one’s way out of it; absolute love for a companion but incensed and cursing their name!
Simeti herself is both an insider and an outsider, and, according to her introduction, “lacks the scruples of a proper historian.” She was a young American who fell in love with and married a Sicilian man, a straight shot into a Sicilian family.
The cookbook, filled with Simeti’s nimble text, offers a few delightfully homely black-and-white photographs, 18th-century drawings of tired temples and workers salting anchovies, a 19th-century etching of a girl who sings her heart out selling oranges, third-century vases, fourth-century mosaics, 17th-century paintings, and examples of elaborately sculpted bread offerings for a Saint Joseph’s Day altar. An infamously drab dessert called riso nero lies next to an equally…
