Street food PAT

Arancina

Fried rice ball stuffed with meat ragù

also known as arancine

Saffron rice, ragù with peas and caciocavallo cheese inside a golden crust. Round and feminine in Palermo, pointed and called arancino in Catania: the quarrel is serious.

Rice reached Sicily with the Arab rule between the 9th and 11th centuries, together with the saffron that colours it: hence the orange-like shape and the name. The first written mention dates from 1857, in Giuseppe Biundi’s Sicilian-Italian dictionary, which records «arancinu» as a sweet rice dish shaped like an orange. The savoury meat filling came later, and ragù with peas is the version everyone now calls «alla carne».

In Palermo the arancina is round and feminine; in Catania it is arancino, with a point that recalls Etna. In 2016 the Accademia della Crusca ruled that both names are fine, and convinced nobody. The two classic versions are ragù and butter (ham and mozzarella); fry shops make dozens more, from spinach to cuttlefish ink.

Arancina day is 13 December, Saint Lucy’s day: by Palermo tradition no bread or pasta is eaten that day, and the fry shops work from dawn. The rest of the year you find it in bars and rosticcerie all over the island, hot, eaten standing up.

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Arancino fried rice cone stuffed with ragù, pointed like Etna

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