Pasta ca Muddica Atturrata

A dish of cucina povera from Palermo and the whole island, built entirely on the preserved larder. Salt anchovies, the sun-dried tomato extract called strattu, dried fruit and stale bread all kept through the year, and Sicilians who could not afford grated cheese toasted breadcrumbs to scatter over pasta in its place, the 'formaggio dei poveri', the poor man's cheese. The dialect verb 'atturrare', to toast, is the same word used for roasting coffee. One tradition ties the dish to emigrants who left Sicily to work in the industrial north and stocked up on these keeping foods to cook through the long winters, tasting home. Close kin to the more famous pasta con le sarde, it now reaches even Michelin-starred kitchens.

Savoury and deeply umami from the anchovies, which melt away to leave only their salt and depth, not a fishy edge. The breadcrumbs are the point: toasted to a nutty crunch, they cling to every strand and give the crackle and richness of grated cheese. Where tomato extract is used it adds a sweet-tart warmth, and pine nuts and raisins bring the Arab-Sicilian sweet note against the salt. Garlic and a little chilli or fennel round it out.

The breadcrumbs do the work of cheese through the Maillard reaction: toasting stale bread in hot oil browns its starches and proteins into hundreds of roasted, nutty aroma compounds, and the fat it soaks up carries them, so a cheap crumb delivers the savoury depth and granular crunch of grated pecorino. Salt-cured anchovies are the umami engine: months of curing let enzymes break their proteins down into free glutamate, so when they dissolve in warm oil they release a flood of savour and their own oils emulsify into a light sauce. The oil must stay gentle, since scorched garlic or burnt crumbs turn bitter. Sun-dried tomato extract adds concentrated glutamate of its own, doubling the umami, while raisins provide sugar to balance the salt.