Insalata di Arance

The salad grows out of the long Arab presence in Sicily, the emirate that ruled the island from the ninth to the eleventh century and reshaped its farming and its palate. The Arabs brought irrigation, sugarcane, the bitter orange and the lemon, and a taste for pairing sweet with salt and sour; the sweet orange itself came later, carried west from Asia by Portuguese traders around the sixteenth century. On the plain below Etna the cold winter nights turn the flesh of Tarocco, Moro and Sanguinello oranges deep red, and it is these blood oranges, in season from December to March, that the dish is built on. The Palermo habit of laying salted herring over the slices carries the old agrodolce logic into a single plate; poorer households ate it as a whole winter supper, richer ones as a course.

Each mouthful is juicy and bright: the sweet-tart orange runs with cold juice, the fennel and onion add a clean anise crunch and a sharp bite, the olives and cured fish bring salt and brine, and the raw olive oil ties it together with a peppery warmth. Light and refreshing, it cuts the richness of a winter meal.

Several things make the plate work. The deep red of the flesh is anthocyanin, a pigment the Sicilian blood orange makes only when the wide day-to-night temperature swing of the coastal winter stresses the fruit, which is why the colour and the balance of sugar and acid peak in these months. Peeling the orange right down to the flesh strips away the white pith, whose limonin and related limonoids are bitter, leaving clean sweetness and citric-acid tartness. Salt from the herring and olives does double duty: it suppresses the perception of any lingering bitterness and lifts the sense of sweetness, so the fruit tastes sweeter beside the fish than it would alone, while the orange's acidity cuts the oily, salty richness of the fish and oil. The olive oil, for its part, dissolves and carries the fat-soluble aromas and coats the tongue so the flavours linger.