Insalata di finocchi e arance

A Sicilian winter salad from the months when the oranges are good and almost nothing else is. Fennel sliced translucent, orange in segments with none of the membrane, olive oil, salt, black pepper. Some versions add olives, some add red onion, some add nothing at all.

Ingredients

Serves 4.

	Metric	Imperial
Fennel bulbs	2	2
Oranges, preferably blood oranges	3	3
Olive oil	4 tbsp	4 tbsp
Black olives, optional	a handful	a handful
Salt and coarse black pepper	to taste	to taste

Blood oranges are the Sicilian version and they are sharper, which the fennel needs. Sweet navel oranges make a blander salad that wants a squeeze of lemon to compensate.

Method

1. Trim the fennel, halve it, and cut out the hard core at the base. Keep the fronds.
2. Slice it as thinly as you physically can, across the bulb. A mandoline if you have one, and a very sharp knife if not. Thick fennel is fibrous and aggressive; thin fennel is sweet and delicate, and it is the same vegetable.
3. Cut the top and bottom off each orange, stand it up, and cut the peel away downwards, taking all the white pith. Then cut the segments free from the membranes, working over the bowl so the juice falls in.
4. Combine fennel, orange segments and their juice, olives if using.
5. Salt, a lot of coarse black pepper, then the oil. Chopped fronds on top.
6. Eat within the hour.

What goes wrong

It is stringy and harsh. Sliced too thick, or the core left in. Both are fixable only by starting again.

It is bitter. Pith left on the oranges. Every trace has to go.

It is watery by the time it reaches the table. Salted too early, or dressed and then left. Salt draws water out of fennel within minutes.

It tastes flat. Not enough pepper. This salad takes far more than seems reasonable.

Why it works

Fennel is mostly water held in long fibres running the length of the bulb. Cutting across those fibres as thinly as possible shortens every one of them, which is what turns a crunchy vegetable into a tender one without cooking it. The orange juice does the rest: its acid softens the cut surfaces slightly in the few minutes before serving.

At the table

Sicilian, and a winter dish despite reading like a summer one. Blood oranges come in from December to March and that is when this is made, which is also when fennel is at its best. Out of season it is a different and much duller salad.

It goes alongside fish more often than anything else, and it is the standard thing served after something fried or heavy, because the acid does a job. As a contorno it comes on its own plate, in the Italian way, rather than beside the main.

Black olives, sometimes red onion, occasionally a scatter of dried oregano or chilli. Anchovy appears in some versions and divides opinion.

No vinegar and no lemon. The oranges are the acid, and adding more makes it sharp and muddies what is a very simple thing.

It is one of the dishes that shows what Sicily is: citrus, fennel, olives and oil, none of which are in the northern repertoire, on a table that has been Greek, Arab, Norman and Spanish and kept something from each.

What an Italian would say

That it belongs to winter and that making it in July with imported oranges is missing the point. That the fronds are not garnish and should be chopped in. And in Sicily, that a few salted anchovies in it is not a modern flourish but the older version.