Sfincione: A Tall Leavened Flatbread from Palermo with Onion and Anchovies
The old street sellers of Palermo had a cry no advertising agency would approve today: scarsu r'ogghiu e chinu ri pruvulazzu - short on oil and full of dust. That was how they hawked their goods from a cart by Porta Sant'Agata, goods the street really did coat in dust, and people stood in line for them anyway.
Sfincione (Sicilian: sfinciuni) is a tall, spongy leavened flatbread baked in a pan, topped with slow-cooked onion, tomatoes, anchovies and breadcrumbs with cheese - a Palermo dish that not even Italian cooking can quite pin down - it sits somewhere between pan pizza and focaccia. These days nobody promises dust, but the oil is poured on generously.
Why Sfincione Is Named After a Sponge and the Pizza After Sicily
The name most likely describes the dough: the Latin spongia, sponge, fits a crumb full of big bubbles that soaks up oil the way a kitchen sponge soaks up water. "Sicilian pizza," on the other hand, is a name sfincione never got in Sicily. It was coined by Sicilian emigrants in America, who baked the flatbread from home in New York ovens and added mozzarella - an ingredient the original never had. That same lineage produced Detroit pizza in 1946, baked in steel pans from a car factory. Back home, sfincione belongs to Palermo and the countryside around it: neighboring Bagheria bakes a white version without tomatoes, with tuma cheese and a pinch of cinnamon, and takes it so seriously that it has adopted sfincione as the town's signature dish.
The Nuns of San Vito and the Tomato That Came Late
There are two versions of the origin and not a single document. In the better-known one, sfincione was baked in the 18th century by the nuns of the San Vito convent, not far from the del Capo market, as a feast-day bread richer than the everyday kind; the convent tradition was recorded a hundred years later by the folklorist Giuseppe Pitrè. In the other, it was the work of the street sellers at Porta Sant'Agata, the ones with the cry. Only one thing is certain: the convent sfincione had no tomatoes - it came with caciocavallo cheese, poultry giblets, peas and béchamel, and today's red version appeared only at the end of the 19th century. The most famous form of the dish is a century younger than its name. The state seized the convent in 1866 and turned it into barracks, so all that is left of both legends in Palermo is the cart. But the cart still rolls.
Onion Before Tomato, Breadcrumbs Before Cheese
The tomato is the most visible and least important thing on a sfincione. The lead role goes to the onion, cooked down so long that it turns sweet and stops being a vegetable. The anchovies melt away in the oven and leave salt behind, not fish; on top go breadcrumbs, which stood in for cheese in poor Palermo, and only when times got better did grated caciocavallo join them. Sicilian cooking sites still argue over whether the real sfincione has cheese or just breadcrumbs, and both sides are right, each in its own decade. Under all of it the dough rises tall and bakes almost black on the bottom of the pan. That dark base is the signature of a baker who knows what he is doing.
Sfincione used to be feast-day food: it was baked for the Immaculate Conception on December 8, when Christmas starts in Palermo, and Bagheria's white version belongs on the New Year's Eve table. These days it is sold all year round, by the slice in bakeries and on the street as sfincionello, a smaller round portion from a cart, where the seller warms it on a griddle before serving, douses it in oil and showers it with oregano. If you want to see how seriously the town takes it, head to Bagheria in November for the Sfincione Fest, held there since 2017.
The Cart by the del Capo Market
I had my sfincione in Palermo at a small cart just off the del Capo market (see Where to Eat in Palermo). Instead of a cry, the seller had Sfincionello bello bello painted on the side of his cart. He warmed the pieces on both sides on a hot griddle, then poured olive oil over them and showered them with oregano. The dough was beautifully soft and the tomato topping bold, but the best part was the base, and in places the top too: crisp, even a touch burnt. That portion was pure heaven; it instantly brought back the focaccia barese from the Magda bakery, which I still consider the best I have ever eaten. A huge piece on a paper tray cost 1 EUR.
