sicily, if it had to pick just one
A little mound of black rice in the centre of the plate, and down its sides an orange sea-urchin sauce running like a flow. At the top, in place of snow, white tufts of almond ricotta. A few drops of green oil, a grating of zest. It's Etna, made small and set in a bowl.
The ripiddu nivicatu has always been this: the black squid-ink rice is the lava rock, the ricotta at the summit is the snow, the red sauce is the lava coming down. Giuseppe La Rosa invented it in 1974 (La Siciliana), and it became the dish that tells Catania better than any other. Here the snow is almond ricotta and the lava is made with sea urchin, but the mountain is the same.
The first spoonful is taken from the bottom, pulling everything up together, rice, ricotta and sauce, the way the dish wants. The black rice is creamy, deep, it tastes of dark sea, of that cuttlefish that leaves its flavour lingering at the back of the mouth. The almond ricotta arrives right after, fresh, barely sweet, and acts as a counterweight. Then the urchin, and here the plate opens up: iodine, sea, a full savouriness that doesn't leave. Full, creamy, savoury, all in the same mouthful.
I eat slowly, taking the three layers together each time as I should, and every spoonful changes a little depending on how much ricotta or urchin I pull up. It never fully blends, and that's right, because the point is feeling them arrive one after another in the same instant.
And while I eat I think that if Sicily had to choose a single dish to leave behind, to put in a case and say here, this is the island, I'd choose this one. Not for the flavour alone, but because it's the only one I can think of that is also a portrait. There's the cuttlefish of the sea below and the ricotta of the mountain above, there's the black of the lava and the white of the snow, and it isn't a metaphor placed there for show, it's exactly how Sicily sits, pressed between the volcano and the sea. A dish that explains a place while you eat it doesn't come along often.
