The Last Cannoli

Although Maria Grammatica gets all the press among pasticcerias in Erice, Sergio had told us to buy our breakfast pastries at San Carlo Pasticceria.  In the morning, Alec braved the chill and set out on a pastry buying mission, while I stayed under the covers.  One of the things I love about bakeries in Spain and Italy wrap your goodies up in little packages even if you are just buying them for yourself.  They look like presents, and put me in a celebratory mood.  The specialty pastry of Erice is the Genovese, which looks like an oversized ravioli dusted with confectioner’s sugar.  Genovese are typically filled with pastry cream, but sometimes you can find them filled with nutella.  Our children ate two each for breakfast.   Alec and I split one of the pastry cream ones, which was still just a bit warm, and then tasted the rest of the booty he had brought home.  Like most Sicilian pastry, much of it is made with almond paste.  And there were also dry milk biscuits, perfect for dipping into coffee or tea, delicate, fan-like pastries filled with fig, and little round bocconcini.  I visited the shop later that morning—it is tiny and immaculate, and run by a very old woman with a steely hair tucked under a white baker’s cap, a sturdy body, and sensible shoes.

We strolled through the nearly empty town for a few hours, browsing in shops and exploring the gardens around the castle; although the chill had remained, the sun was war and felt good on our faces.  The castle affords an amazing view of Trapani below, the salt flats, and the sea.  It’s easy to understand why this piece of high ground was so important to so many groups over many hundreds of years.

Although we had heeded Sergio’s advice in the morning, I had read enough about Maria Grammatica’s cannolis to need to try one.  And besides, she seemed to be the only one in town who made them.  Grammatica grew up in a convent in Erice where she learned how to make the cookies and cakes she sells in her shop; the book Bitter Almonds: Recollections and Recipes from a Sicilian Girlhood tells her story.  And when it comes to cannolis, she knows what she’s doing.  Grammatica’s, like the one I had at Sant’Andrea, is a bit creamier than the ones I’d had in Syracuse, and it also had small pieces of dark chocolate mixed into the fresh ricotta filling.  I thought long and hard about which of the four cannoli I had eaten would get my vote for best cannoli of the trip, but I had trouble deciding.  Maybe that one on the street at the market in Syracuse.  Or Grammatica’s.  Hell, they were all terrific.

After our sugar stop, we retreated to the room to rest awhile—we all got under the covers and watched Free Willy.  Then it was time to make our big last supper decision.  The night before we had asked Sergio where we could get some good pizza.  “Well,” he said, “if you want the best pizza in Sicily, you have to go to Trapani.”  Alec and I looked at each other.  “Calvino’s?” I asked.  “Of course!  But you may have to wait, and they don’t take reservations.”

Going to Calvino’s meant driving all the way back down the mountain, and then up again.  They didn’t open until 7 pm.  And we had a 6:30 am flight the next morning.  So pizza meant an hour or two less sleep (and maybe some puking on the part of our kids), given the drive time and wait time.

But really, it wasn’t much of a decision—of course we went!  We parked near the water and arrived at the restaurant just after 7, relieved to see the lights blazing and people streaming in the door.  The building that houses the restaurant was a brothel before it became a pizzeria, and the dining area still consists of a maze of small rooms.  There is a large, brightly lit front room where folks place to go orders.  A counter is stacked high with cardboard pizza boxes, and you can see into the kitchen where racks and racks of dough rounds rest on long pizza stones that can each hold 5 or 6 pies.  It didn’t seem too crowded yet, and we walked through the front room to the dining room and asked for a table for four.  The gatekeeper shook his head.  “No,” he said.  “Riservado.”   So much for not taking reservations. Not again, I thought.  “But we’re flying home tomorrow,” I pleaded, flapping my arms in case he didn’t understand English.  “No.”  He was nice about it, but firm.  There didn’t seem to be a single chink in his armor.   The smell of melting cheese, and the sharp aroma of singed crust from the wood-fired oven was almost too much to take.

“What do we do now?” I asked Alec. 

“We get it to go, and we eat it on the street,” he replied.

“Of course!” I didn’t care about where I ate the pizza, as long as I was eating that pizza before the end of the night.  We ordered two small and two medium sized pizzas—a margarita for the kids, one with mushrooms and one with artichokes, for us, and one with salami for Alec.  It’s a good thing we asked what acciughe were, almost as an afterthought, when we ordered, or we would have had a whole lot of anchovies on our hands.

By this point the front room was jammed, and I tried to surreptitiously take some pictures, but the guy at the register saw me.   I thought he was about to scold me, but instead he invited me into the kitchen where the guys posed and mugged for the camera. 

We ended up piling our pizza boxes on the narrow counter in the front room, and sharing the space with a middle-aged man and his mother, and another family of four.  I guess they hadn’t gotten the memo about reservations either.  We were all in it together.

The pizza came out hot and bubbling and delicious.  A slightly chewy crust, fresh tomato sauce, strong black olives, fresh oregano.  It completely hit the spot.  I can’t tell you how many pieces I ate because I simply lost count.  But I have to tell you—and I may get tarred and feathered for this by the Sicilians—I like New York City pizza better.  Either the high end pies at Franny’s in Brooklyn, or a good, solid slice like Ben’s in the Village.  And then there’s the ultra thin crust pizza at Pete and Elda’s in Neptune, NJ.  Don’t get me started.

The family we shared the counter with told us where to go for our last gelato, but it was closed, so we went to the next place down the road, where we saw the middle-aged man and his mom.  And with that, we had our last Sicilian meal.  An excellent trip overall, food wise and otherwise.