Pani Cunzatu: The Bread of Shame
I managed to get pani cunzatu wrong twice. First in Catania, where I sat down at the table and took it for one more member of Sicily's sprawling pizza family, then again at home, when the first draft of this article nearly claimed it was a flatbread made from pizza dough. Wrong both times (though pizza dough does turn up here and there).
Pani cunzatu (in Italian: pane cunzato) is a halved loaf of Sicilian semolina bread, drizzled with olive oil while it's still hot and topped with tomatoes, cheese, anchovies and oregano. The toppings go on while the bread is still warm. By the standards of Italian cooking, which loves a long pedigree, it's an almost cheekily simple dish.
Why Pani Cunzatu Is Called the Bread of Shame
Its proper name simply means seasoned bread: the Sicilian cunzatu is the participle of the verb cunzari, condire in Italian, to season. But alongside the official name there's a nickname that has stuck to it, pane della disgrazia, the bread of misfortune or of shame, and that one tells you more about Sicily than any grammar lesson. It used to be the food of families who had nothing else: anyone truly at rock bottom ate the bread with oil and salt alone, and anyone who could afford an anchovy smeared it over the cut side and counted himself lucky. The shame in the name isn't the fault of the food - it belongs to the times that made it necessary.
In the Sicilian countryside bread was baked once a week in the communal oven, and a fresh loaf was the event of the week: it was cut open while still hot and the women would dress it - cunzari - with whatever the garden and the pantry had to offer - oil, tomato, a piece of cheese, wild oregano. Men wrapped it up to take out to the fields, fishermen took it out to sea. Nobody knows exactly when that routine turned into a dish with a name; pani cunzatu didn't make it into a cookbook until 1976, and everything older than that is oral tradition. So when you come across the label "the world's oldest sandwich" somewhere, you're reading advertising, not history.
One Bread, Four Sicilies
You'll find pani cunzatu all over Sicily and nowhere outside it - the area around Trapani, with seaside Scopello, is considered its birthplace, but today almost every corner of the island keeps a version of its own. On the Aeolian Islands it isn't folded shut into a sandwich but served open, with capers and ricotta salata on top; locals call it bruschettone, a giant bruschetta. Messina adds pickled eggplant and sun-dried tomatoes, and around Catania they bake the bread twice to make it crunchier.
Semolina Bread, Oil and Wild Oregano
There's no arguing about the ingredients here. A real pani cunzatu stands or falls on durum semolina bread with a thick crust, baked over wood; on ordinary bread the whole thing collapses, and the bread is exactly what tells a tourist imitation from the real thing. The cheese is usually primosale or caciocavallo. The anchovies bring the salt, the oregano the aroma, and the olive oil flows generously, because for centuries it was the only sauce anyone could afford.
You eat it with your hands, and best while it's warm, as long as the crust still holds and the oil hasn't soaked through the paper. These days it's mostly summer food for the road: in Scopello a bakery sells giant portions for three euros and the line runs out into the street, while a restaurant in Palermo can turn the same bread into a course costing ten times that. Buy it where they wrap it in paper for you.
Anchovies on the Edge of Catania
I ate my pani cunzatu at a small place called La Luna on the edge of Catania. What came out was the generous end of the tradition: anchovies, cherry and sun-dried tomatoes, black olives and pepato, a pecorino with whole peppercorns baked right into the cheese, all of it tied together with oil and oregano. The ingredients were what you expect in Italy: simple, but top quality. The bread crunched, the tomatoes came through sweet against the salty anchovies, and nothing in that combination clashed. The large portion cost 10 EUR. I'd got this dish wrong twice; that day at La Luna we settled it.
