Sicily, crossroads of peoples, practices and imaginary, established itself in it as a permanent food laboratory where the multicultural combination and stratification of ingredients, recipes and techniques has produced a recognizable cuisine, more or less codified.
The etymology of the word ‘caponata’ shows different interpretative possibilities: some derive his name to the Greek verb capto-captos (to cut), others to latin term caupona (tavern), reffering to the sweet and sour sauce that sailors purchased in those places to moisten and flavour their hardtack, and still others to the lampuga fish, in Sicily called capone, or to the word of Iberian origin caponada. The several attempts at historical reconstruction bears witness to the urgency, in researce, of tracing the origin of a dish that, however, lives in the dynamics of its variants, in time and space. Suffice it to say that in Sicily there are at least thirty six different caponata recipes. A constant, despite the variation of the main ingredients of the recipe over the centuries, is the presence of “small pieces” of vegetables, fish or meat seasoned with the characteristic sweet and sour sauce. The existence of similar dishes throughout the Mediterranean leads us to assume, as common denominator, not a ingredient but a cooking technique, the dicing, whose components were harmonized and preserved in their properties by the sweet and sour. This sauce of Persian origin was introduced in Sicily and Spain by the Arabs as well as eggplants, eaten fried or boiled mostly by peasants during the Middle Ages and they will appear in noble cookbooks only from the sixteenth century. The sweet and sour, usually made with vinegar and honey, took on a markedly popular character in Sicily thanks to the replacement of the latter with sugar, less expensive. Arabs introduced the cultivation of sugarcane, mainly diffused in the Conca d’Oro since 945, favouring an innovative use and anticipating by almost two centuries its culinary use in the rest of Europe.
The first evidence of the caponata as a codified dish is with the Ethymologicum Siculum, published in Messina in 1759: the entry under the heading caponata, reads as follows «dish made of various things». The indeterminacy of the ingredients again suggests that the term mostly indicated a type of preparation and not a specific dish. It is well known that even during the Spanish domination a single course was consumed in the tables of nobles, consisting of fish (quite often capone), vegetables and bread, seasoned with a sweet and sour sauce, similar to a close relative of our caponata. The appearance of eggplant as a typical ingredient, although not necessarily protagonist, can be dated to the end of the eighteenth century. Vincenzo Mortillaro, marquis of Villarena and expert of Sicilian things, indicated its presence in culinary preparation in the Nuovo dizionario siciliano-italiano (1838-1844). Later, in his Vocabolario siciliano-italiano of 1860, Antonino Traina described the caponata as a delicacy with fish, petronciani (term for a type of eggplant] or artichokes and other seasoning, usually eaten cold. Traina didn’t give a defined recipe, because there were already several variants; among them, the most complete version used aubergines, artichokes, celery, peppers, olives, garlic, onion, capers, salt and oil, to which could be added octopuses, swordfish, lobsters and chopped almonds. To complete the dish, the inevitable bittersweet flavour of tomato sauce enriched with vinegar and sugar. The caponata in this form and meaning can be attributed to the legendary Monsù, professional cooks of French origin that guided the course of Sicilian cuisine of the nineteenth century and whose recipes are still preserved. They worked in the kitchens of nobles and made elaborate dishes for them, applying to the Sicilian raw materials the refined art of those who knew how to manipulate and transform, as an alchemist of food, smells and flavors. Monsù used to accompany the fish, especially the capone, but also the game with a so-called bittersweet cuonza, to soften the hard meat and amalgamate the different flavors; it was therefore use to appareiller, to “put together” different things. Cuonza that, in the popular translation of the recipe, from supporting element became a course, with the eggplant that switches from a minor role to a protagonist. Nowadays the caponata, despite the use of some animal protein in the contemporary gastronomic proposal (for example swordfish), is the vegetable one, without fish, whose memory could be kept in the ever present and typical pine nut. The latter, very popular in Sicilian cuisine for their antiseptic qualities, were often used with fish to prevent possible food poisoning. What even in the present determines the good result of the caponata depends mainly on the element that constitutes the aura, emblematic of the search for balance between contrasting flavors that should be neither too sweet nor too sour (acitusu).