L'Italo-Americano

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 3, 2026 www.italoamericano.org 26 L'Italo-Americano LIFESTYLE FASHION FOOD ARTS ADVICE F or three weeks or s o e a c h s p r i n g , the elder comes into flower along t h e f i e l d e d g e s and roadsides above Troina, and the town's bakers go out with baskets to strip the flat white heads off the bushes. What they gather is the rea- son their bread cannot be made properly at any other time of year: the vastedda cu sammucu, the focaccia with elderflower, belongs to Troina, a mountain town in the Nebrodi of north-cen- tral Sicily, and to nowhere else in Italy. T w o s h e e t s o f d u r u m - wheat dough make the shell, one below and one on top, enriched with lard, whole eggs and a little milk, and left to rise slowly. Between them go slices of tuma, the fresh unsalted sheep's cheese that Sicilians eat within days of its making, a layer of the local salame, and diced pancetta, of course fried first. What about elderflowers? Well, t h e y a r e w o r k e d i n t o t h e dough itself and scattered again over the top before the pan goes into the oven for about half an hour at 400°F, long enough to darken the crust while the inside stays soft. Not something for the faint-hearted, our vastedda cu sammucu is hefty on the s t o m a c h , b u t d e l i c i o u s nonetheless. Elder (Sambucus nigra, or s a m m u c u i n t h e l o c a l s p e e c h ) i s a f a s t , s c r u b b y s h r u b o f h e d g e l i n e s a n d waste ground, flowering from late May into June and treat- ed across Europe as a nui- sance or a medicine. Its blos- soms turn up in cordials and in the fritters Italians call f r i t t e l l e d i s a m b u c o , t h e berries go into preserves, but h a r d l y a n y o n e b a k e s t h e flowers into a savory bread. In Troina, though, sambuco is used to give vastedda a green, bitter-edged perfume that holds its own against the salame and the fried pork, to make a delicacy so loved that producers now dry the flower heads so the bread can be made also later in the year. If you wonder about the name vastedda, be ready to receive an answer that leads a long way north. The word is used across the island (just l i k e t h e v a s t e d d a i t s e l f : Palermo's spleen sandwich, the pani ca meusa, is served in one) and it came into Sicil- i a n f r o m O l d N o r t h e r n French wastel, which is gastel in Old French and gâteau in the modern lan- guage; medieval England had wastel bread from the same root. So, the ordinary Sicilian word for a round loaf was left behind by the Normans. Troina, where they left it, sits at just over 3,600 feet on a ridge that looks straight across the valley at Etna; it is one of the highest towns in Sicily and cold enough in winter to startle anyone who t h i n k s o f t h e i s l a n d a s a place of heat. A Greek settle- m e n t s t o o d h e r e i n t h e fourth century BC, a Byzan- tine stronghold after it, and i n 1 0 6 0 R o g e r d e Hauteville took the town from its Arab garrison and made it the seat of his new county: Troina became the first Norman capital on the island. Its cathedral became Sicily's first bishop's seat in 1080, and Urban II celebrat- ed Mass in it in 1082. When the bishopric moved on to M e s s i n a i n 1 0 9 6 a n d t h e capital to Palermo, Troina was left with a Norman bell tower, a Norman word for bread, and a beautiful view. A century after the Nor- mans came the patron saint, Silvestro of Troina, born a r o u n d 1 1 1 0 , a B a s i l i a n monk at the monastery of San Michele Arcangelo, a Greek-rite house that kept the Byzantine liturgy under Norman rule; he traveled to Rome in 1155 to be ordained by Adrian IV and was credit- ed, on the way home, with h e a l i n g t h e s o n o f K i n g William I. His body was lost after his death and recov- ered only in 1420, and he became patron of the town after the plague of 1575 lift- ed, as Troina tells it, when h i s r e l i c s w e r e c a r r i e d t h r o u g h t h e s t r e e t s . T h e l o c a l h i s t o r i a n F r a n c o Amata dates the vastedda to those same fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which would make it a feast bread that grew up with the cult of Silvestro himself. And, indeed, the saint still sets the calendar of vasted- da cu sammucu, which tra- ditionally belongs to the fes- tino of San Silvestro that opens in mid-May, when the R a m a r a c l i m b i n t o t h e Nebrodi forests and come back down carrying laurel to the sound of drums. May, conveniently, is also when the elder is out. Nothing written about the vastedda, however, is as old a s t h e t r a d i t i o n i t s e l f , t h o u g h c o n v e n t k i t c h e n books of 1869 and 1912 give the recipe in rotoli and once, the old Sicilian pound and ounce, with ingredients a Troina baker can easily rec- ognize even today. And in a letter to his mother dated June 3, 1908, Federico De Roberto, the Catania novel- ist of I Viceré, reported eat- i n g a t T r o i n a a k i n d o f stuffed focaccia, not very light, which he had nonethe- less digested well. Interestingly, Troina has a p l a c e i n c o n t e m p o r a r y American history, too, as the town was fought over for six days at the turn of July and August 1943: Robert Capa w a s o n t h e r o a d b e l o w i t w h e n h e p h o t o g r a p h e d a Sicilian farmer in a cloth cap pointing out to a crouching American officer which way t h e G e r m a n s h a d g o n e . Sixty-two of Capa's prints from those weeks now hang p e r m a n e n t l y i n t h e t o w n where he made them. Since 1987, the vastedda has had a sagra of its own in June, free to anyone who climbs the mountain for it, with tastings in the piazza a n d d e m o n s t r a t i o n s b y women who have made the thing all their lives. It is on the national register of tradi- tional Italian food products, and in December 2019, the t o w n b u i l t a S l o w F o o d c o m m u n i t y a r o u n d i t , along with two other local survivals: the nfasciated- de, a sweet of fig must and toasted almonds, and picio- cia, a polenta ground from grass peas. GIULIA FRANCESCHINI Elderflowers in the dough: vastedda, the bread of Sicily's first Norman capital Women in Troina prepare vastedda cu sammucu, the town's traditional bread filled with cheese and salame and scented with fresh elderflowers, made only during the brief spring flowering season (Image generated using Adobe Illustrator AI)

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