Paccheri allo Sgombro; or, ‘Mate, Aren’t You a Vegetarian?’

Last summer, Giulia’s mum, Rosa, invited us both on holiday to Ventotene, an island off the Italian coast between Rome and Naples. Unsurprisingly, we went. More surprisingly, Giuliano – Giulia’s dad, a man who hates the heat, the sunshine, and the sea – came with us.

Ventotene is known primarily for being a penal colony under Mussolini. The fascist would send political opponents there or to the prison on Santo Stefano – a tiny island some two kilometres off Ventotene’s coast.

In 2016, with post-Brexit jitters, Merkel, Renzi, and Hollande met on Ventotene, to pay homage to Altiero Spinelli – a prisoner of Mussolini who wrote there, during the second world war, the first text proposing a federal Europe, the EU.

These days, however, it’s mainly just a middle-class holiday resort.

Anyway, Giulia, having been a vegetarian for a decade or so, had begun again to eat fish. I, too, having been a vegetarian for a decade, did not really know what fish could really be. I was a little limited to fish and chips, to canned sardines, to distant memories of my mum once in Scotland trying desperately, unsuccessfully, to get the flesh out of a prawn. This holiday was to be my great seafood discovery.

But we’d keep the fish to the evenings. For lunch: fresh mozzarella shipped over daily from the mainland, pane e pomodori, and a salad. The same every day. But, you know, if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.

The afternoons I’d spend reading – and attempting chats with Giuliano in broken Italian: ‘Mate, err… Brigate Rosse – very bad?’; ‘Giuliano, err… Tangentopoli – very bad?’; ‘sorry, err… Berlusconi … err – very bad?’.

His responses would begin with shrugs and sighs, pass through hesitant attempts at English, and end with passionate complaints about the state of Italian politics – in Italian. I’d smile, frown, and hope I’d understood.

In the evenings, we’d go to a restaurant. It’s an island seemingly with more restaurants than inhabitants, serving more types of fish than I’d ever even heard of. I ate cuttlefish, cuttlefish ink, squid, octopus, and scorfano – for sure – with all sorts of other things marinated, fried, or raw.

Did I feel guilty eating all these little animals? For sure. Did I now understand why people are so reluctant to go vegetarian?

But there’s a way of eating meat that isn’t so reprehensible. After this initial excess, this extravagant start, we’re eating fish no more than once or twice a month. And, my tongue’s convinced my ethics that, if it’s local and sustainably sourced, there’s not too much trouble. If you’re eating anchovies from the Pacific for lunch and Arctic char for dinner, you – and the planet – have got a problem.

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The Dish.

The thing that stood out was the scorfano – a bloody intimidating thing if you see the photos – which we in English apparently call redfish. It’s gorgeous, served in a tomato sugo with paccheri – a large tubular pasta that wilts into dreamy, floppy packages.

Giulia and I recently went for a trip to Kerala, in the south of India, as we were in that part of the world for a wedding. Reading Arundhati Roy’s novel The God of Small Things– it’s based in the area – one of the characters mentions ‘the best redfish curry ever eaten’. After Ventotene, this became something of a holy grail. It was pretty smashing, though not half as good as the paccheri.

Anyway, we don’t get scorfano in the UK, so we tend to remix this dish with sgombro – mackerel. It works pretty well too.

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The Ingredients.

• 1 garlic

• 5-6 capers

• A splash of white wine

• 1 can of chopped tomatoes

• 2 fillets of mackerel – the cheapest of all fish

• Parsley

• Dill

• 200-250 grams of paccheri