There is exactly one thing all of Sicily agrees on: the fried ball of rice, filled with meat sauce and peas or with butter and ham, is to be eaten hot, with your hands, and preferably standing up. On everything else, starting with the name, the island splits in two. In Palermo it is arancina, feminine, round like the fruit it is named after. In Catania it is arancino, masculine, and often pointed. Get the gender wrong in the wrong bar and nothing happens to you, but everyone notices.
One word, two genders
In Sicilian the word is arancinu, and Sicilian uses the masculine for the fruit too: an orange is aranciu. When the name crossed into Italian, Palermo followed the logic of the national language, where the orange is feminine, and said arancina: a little orange. Eastern Sicily kept the gender of the dialect and said arancino. It is not a matter of recipe but of translation: two different ways of carrying the same word from one language into another.
The most accepted reconstructions trace the rice, the saffron and the idea of a portion you can carry with you back to Arab Sicily, between the ninth and the eleventh century; the breadcrumbs and the frying, which make the ball what we know today, came much later. In the national register of traditional food products the entry is filed as «arancini di riso», masculine plural, and Palermo has never been happy about it.
Palermo: round, and feminine
The Palermo arancina is a sphere, and the sphere is an article of faith. The two classic versions are «a carne», with meat sauce, peas and caciocavallo cheese, and «a burro», with béchamel, cooked ham and cheese. You buy it in fry shops and bars, in the Ballarò and Capo markets, and it has a day of its own: 13 December, Saint Lucy's day, when by tradition the city eats no bread and no pasta, and arancine, together with cuccìa made of boiled wheat, take the place of everything else. The arancina page tells the recipe and its geography; the place to start tasting it is the where to eat in Palermo section.
Catania: pointed, like Etna
On the other coast the arancino changes shape. The Catania version with meat sauce is often conical, and the explanation given in town is the simplest one: it looks like Etna, tip pointing up. The classic filling is meat ragù, but in Catania imagination is allowed: alla Norma with aubergine and salted ricotta, with pistachio, with cuttlefish ink. Here too the ritual belongs to the bar, somewhere between breakfast and lunch, perhaps after a walk through the Pescheria fish market. The arancino page and the where to eat in Catania section line up the rest.
The map, province by province
On BigItalia the two pages are not copies of each other: each covers its own provinces. The arancina applies to Palermo, Trapani, Agrigento and Caltanissetta, that is western Sicily; the arancino to Catania, Messina, Syracuse and Ragusa. The line, though, is not a wall. In Syracuse and Ragusa you hear both forms, and Andrea Camilleri, who came from Porto Empedocle but set his novels in the Ragusa area, titled a collection «Gli arancini di Montalbano» in 1999, masculine. In the middle sits Enna, where the match is still open. Every town, in its food section, sees the page that belongs to it.
What the Crusca said
In 2016 the Accademia della Crusca, Italy's language academy, was asked to referee and answered like a diplomat: both forms are correct, arancina and arancino, each with its own area and its own history. Palermo read the answer as a victory, and so did Catania. The derby goes on, and that is probably the best thing that could happen to it: no Italian dish advertises itself the way this one does.
If you are in Sicily this week
The arancina and the arancino are only the beginning. In Catania pasta alla Norma carries the name of Bellini's opera; on the slopes of Etna the Bronte pistachio ends up in the filling of the rice balls as well; in Messina the pitone is the local answer to the same bar-counter hunger; in the province of Enna the cassatella di Agira closes the meal; and on the island of Pantelleria the caper carries the IGP mark. All the dish and product pages live in the Food section, which grows town by town. And for the full story of the Crusca ruling, the almanac entry for 2 September has the whole episode.
