BeanScene Magazine

Marisa Raniolo Wilkins

Despite the fact that her parents both hailed from Sicily, Marisa says that she was born on the Italian island “by accident”. Marisa’s mother had lived in Catania, Sicily, before moving to Trieste in northern Italy with her siblings; and her Sicilian father (from Ragusa) was stationed in Trieste during the war, learning to be a tailor.
“They met and that was that, so my Sicilian heritage is a very large part of my life,” says Marisa. “Although I was born after the war, there were an awful lot of problems in Trieste at the time. My mother didn’t feel safe having her first child in Trieste with all of the turmoil that was going on, so she caught a train to Sicily to give birth and then caught the train back to Trieste a week later.

“Sicilian relatives would always come over to visit and we used go to Sicily to visit them. We had relatives in Catania, Augusta and Syracuse and they were all just so colourful. I knew I was a bit different – I wasn’t just from Trieste, I was also Sicilian. And the Sicilian culture is so different to that of Trieste.”
Marisa moved to Adelaide when she was eight years old, and has lived in Melbourne for the past nine years. Throughout her adult life, Marisa has continued to make regular trips to Sicily.

“I’ve never belonged really,” says Marisa. “In Trieste I had Sicilian heritage and then I came to Australia and I still don’t know whether I’m Italian or Australian, from Adelaide or from Melbourne, but I guess that’s nice because it’s made me who I am.”

In Trieste, the family table was often filled with a mixture of local and Sicilian food, but during trips to Sicily, as well as when entertaining Sicilian relatives, Sicilian food always took pride of place.

Marisa recalls the times her mother’s mother would come up from Sicily to stay with her family for months at a time. “She was used as a babysitter and a cook. She did an awful lot of cooking in the house and used to make soused fish. There would be all of these crockpots in our kitchen to marinate the fish in vinegar and mint – she used to love it! I also have memories of eels being chopped up and this was always strong in a Catania household.”

Growing up, Marisa and her parents would also spend the summer holidays in Sicily and a highlight of these visits was picking sea urchins from underneath rocks on the beach, which would be eaten fresh with lemon juice.

And seafood has maintained its role as a key ingredient in Sicilian cooking to this day, with many recipes that have Greek, Arabic, French and Spanish influences. “It is an island after all,” says Marisa. “If you go into any Sicilian restaurant, fish always seems to be one of the important ingredients – whether it’s a big platter of fried fish or grilled fish or a pasta with black ink sauce. There seems to be a lot of interest in fish and the Sicilians have retained that.”

In fact, one of the things that inspired Marisa to write her book, Sicilian Seafood Cooking, was that most Sicilian cookbooks written in Australia or the USA that she had come across didn’t have the fish component that she found when visiting Sicily.

This book has been a long time in the making for Marisa, an avid cook with a large collection of cookbooks from all over the world. “I’ve always been a cook and I’ve always been passionate about food. Everyone in my family was a good cook. Everybody talked about food and everybody loved food, so I guess I was pretty lucky. And if you liked the food, then that would prompt them to cook something even greater, and that went on and on.

“Every time I’ve travelled to Sicily as an adult, I’ve always come back with little notebooks filled with recipes. My recipe collection started when I was in my twenties and now I have a whole box full,” she says. “But apart from asking for recipes, the other thing I really like doing every time I visit Sicily is eating out rather than just eating at home with my relatives. My Sicilian relatives often liked to eat in restaurants and visit other parts of Sicily with us when we were there. I always discuss what I eat in restaurants with the staff – waiters, owners or chefs –and the Sicilians I have engaged with have always responded to compliments about their food.

“If I’ve identified the flavours in a dish I’ve eaten, I cross reference it with other books – so my book is not just filled with the recipes my mother cooked, as Sicily has many regional variations and that’s what I appreciate and am fascinated by.

“You don’t just talk about Sicilian food, you talk about a region of Sicilian food. It’s such a small place but the variations are immense. For example, when you speak of caponata, most people think of the version with eggplants – but, if you talk to people from the south of the island, they include peppers in the recipe. There are so many variations and people are so passionate about ‘their way’ of making the recipe. And, if you tell them that people in other parts of Sicily cook the recipe a different way, they’ll usually say ‘no, they don’t know how to cook it’.”

Caponata is covered by Marisa at length in her book, with nine different caponata recipes, her favourite one being ‘Caponata Catanese’ which was often cooked by her mother’s family in Catania.

*WIN a copy of the book*

Sicilian Seafood Cooking includes 120 traditional recipes for seafood and its accompaniments. Italianicious will be giving away two copies of the book to two lucky readers. Simply visit www.facebook.com/italianicious, hit the ‘like’ button and tell us your favourite Italian seafood dish for your chance to win. Entries close 29 February 2012.