I met sommacco properly the way most of us do these days: on someone else’s cooking. A Lebanese friend had dusted a plate of roast chicken with something dark and purple-red, and when I asked what it was, she said sumac as though everyone knew. It was tangy, almost lemony, with a smoky little sigh underneath. What she didn’t tell me, because she didn’t know, and why would she, was that the spice on that chicken had a Sicilian passport as good as Andrea Camilleri’s or Luigi Pirandello’s.
Because here is the thing you may find hard to believe: this most Middle Eastern of spices has been grown in Sicily for a thousand years even though, for most of that time, it wasn’t even used for food! A shrub that loves poor ground.
