The anniversary of the “Feast of the Dead” is deeply felt and respected on our extraordinary island.

Precisely on November 2nd, ancient traditions connected to the family are renewed and several of these pass, in a tangible way, from the table.

We don’t have to go looking for a real menu, for the commemoration of the dead, but there are some dishes that cannot and must not be missing on the day of November 2. One of these, which stands out above all is the Muffoletta.

Muffulettes, used throughout the island, are soft flat cakes of homemade bread, crushed, which are normally combined with freshly milled oil, anchovies in oil, tuma and tomato. The dressing, however, can vary according to one’s taste. It represents the synthesis of a very simple and genuine dish: fragrant and very hot bread with excellent local ingredients.

But why are Sicilian muffulettes so called?

This food has an ancient tradition. It seems, in fact, that the term “muffoletta” derives from the Saxon term muffin, that is, focaccina.

In fact, the soldiers of Emperor Frederick II, who left us the habit of flavoring the bread with cumin seeds in order to better preserve it during the long military campaigns, would have let us know it.

The muffuletta, therefore, has been appreciated for about eight hundred years and in Sicily there are many popular festivals and celebrations dedicated to it.

In some Sicilian places it is traditional to consume the muffuletta during the Day of the Dead, while on 7 December, for example, in Canicattì the bakeries bake muffulettes to be consumed for dinner. The famous pani cu “l’uegliu” (bread with oil, in the local dialect) is a typical local dish, “cunzatu” with the use of mackerel in oil, first salt and spices.

How is the muffuletta born?

From the etymological point of view it is not simple, even if many hypotheses are linked to the Saxon term “muffin”, scone. From some manuscripts we can see the news that some members of the Swabian armies, during their stay in Sicily, flavored their unleavened bread with cumin seeds to increase its conservation and to cover flavors that were not really “very fresh” of foods that were part of the their war stocks.

It is important to remember that cumin seeds have always represented, for natural medicine, a remedy for many intestinal ailments, thus attributing the “healing” properties of the muffuletta.

Today, whatever meaning attributed to it in the past, is supplanted by the desire to savor it on the day of the festival, awaited all year round by gourmets, in which pleasure for sweet and salty blend between the scents of the land of Sicily.