Emiko Davies makes eating sarde in saor, her favourite Venetian cicchetti – the small snacks served at the Italian city’s many bars – sound like an especially delicious taste of history.
“Sarde in saor are never missing in a Venetian bar,” says the Italy-based Australian-Japanese food writer and photographer, talking to SBS Food during a long-awaited visit back to Australia.
“It's like a sweet and sour kind of topping with sultanas and really, really slowly cooked onions for sweetness and then you have vinegar, and you pour that [the sauce] over fried fish and it preserves really, really well - you can eat this a week later and it's even more delicious than the first day that you made it,” she says. (Try her recipe ).
This sweet-and-sour sardine dish, which dates back to the 1300s, is one of the many recipes included in Davies' new cookbook, Cinnamon & Salt, a wonderfully varied, beautiful and anecdote-filled book about cicchetti, the little sweet and savoury bites and small dishes, everything from fried cheese to a humble bread pudding, that are a key part of the Venetian way of life, and a central part of Davies’ love of this watery Italian city.
“I've been going back and forth from Venice since I moved to Florence, which was in 2005. And I've spent quite a lot of time there. I even did an internship there for four weeks. But I've only ever eaten at a restaurant twice. When I go to Venice, I just eat cicchetti and I just enjoy so much being able to try lots of different things and just do it the way that the Venetians do. So I sort of follow my friends’ lead. They take me to a cicchetti bar and when you hop around going to the next one and the next one, there's always, lots of great things to try in each in each bàcaro - these are the cicchetti wine bars. And I love that, because you get a little bite here, a little bite there. You get to try so many wonderful things that way,” she says.
And it’s an all-day adventure.
Sweet-and-sour fried sardines are a classic cichhetti in the watery city. Source: Hardie Grant Books / Emiko Davies
Source: Hardie Grant Books / Emiko Davies
Emiko Davies in Venice Source: Hardie Grant Books / Valeria Necchio
“I think something that makes it different from your regular Italian aperitivo or, like Spanish tapas, which are usually an evening activity, in Venice cicchetti are appropriate at all times of the day,” Davies explains. “So, you can go there in the morning, you know after maybe visiting the market. You've done your market shopping at the Rialto and you picked up some fish and some vegetables and then you hop over to the nearest bàcaro … so it’s totally appropriate to do it in the morning, in the mid-morning, in the evening, in the afternoon, in the middle of the day. It's like a way to take a break, like going for a coffee, but it's also a way to bump into people, meet people see them, and have a little catch up with friends. So it's very casual and any time of the day goes.”
The recipes in Cinnamon & Salt reflect the wide range of flavours and ingredients that appear in cicchetti – which in turn reflect Venice’s rich history. “The cuisine of Venice is utterly unique in the Italian peninsula,” Davies writes in the book. “Refined, yet simple, it has origins that carry the legacy of the Venetian Republic’s immense wealth and cultural influence. Foreign ingredients like sugar from Syria and Egypt, dried fruit, citrus and fried sweets from Persia, spices from India and Indonesia, then later, Norwegian stockfish, corn from Central America and coffee from Turkey, all became part of Venice’s indispensable pantry … yet at the same time, the cuisine relies heavily on the fresh and excellent but humble ingredients that the lagoon environment and surrounding countryside offer each season.”
Humble ingredients are at the heart of another of Davies' favourites, the pinza di pane – a bread pudding studded with dried fruit that she says is possibly one of the oldest recipes in the Venetian dessert repertoire. “It is a recipe that is kind of a recycling of whatever you whatever you have on hand, really,” she says – while the pinza in the book uses up bread, polenta is also common, and regular flour and buckwheat are used too. uses dried figs and sultanas, lemon and orange zest, fennel seeds and a dash of grappa (you can also use rum or white wine), creating a dense, delicious pudding. 
Another classic in the dolce e bevande (sweets and drinks) chapter is , rich, buttery ring or s-shaped biscuits. Like many of the recipes, these have a long history – the original bussolai, which originated on the island of Burano, she explains in the book, were made from bread dough and baked until dry and hard, and would last for months. The sweet modern version is often served with a glass of sweet wine. “For me, this is a really natural way to finish a meal, to get the bussolai and dip them in wine. And they're very nice like that. But they’re also delicious any time of the day with a coffee or just a little snack. Very, very nice. They're not too sweet so you can pick them up any moment of the day.”
Pinza di pane and bussolai Source: Hardie Grant Books / Emiko Davies
Seafood features in many recipes, including that very popular sardine dish discussed above (if you aren’t a sardine fan, good news – Davies says that sweet-and-sour sauce also goes well with scampi, chicken or vegetables “it’s really good with pumpkin and eggplant”) and another that caught our eye because it uses a tinned fish that’s often overshadowed by the ubiquitous tun: (Crostini with mackerel, olives and pine nuts). It turns out that this too reflects a key part of Venetian history.
“All tinned fish and all preserved fish is actually really important in Venice. I always found it curious because Venice has such a great abundance of fresh seafood, being right there on the lagoon,” Davies says. “But despite that the preserved fish, like baccala and stockfish and tinned tuna and smoked herring, those are things that you find in every single wine bar and even restaurants… then when you think about the history of Venice being you a seafaring place where people were going on boats for a long time and needing food that would be non-perishable, or at least would last a while, then the preserved fish starts to make sense.
Crostini con sgombro, olive e pinoli Source: Hardie Grant Books / Emiko Davies
“Tuna, tuna is beloved. And you'll find tuna in all kinds of forms in Venetian wine bars, often on crostini … so this mackerel one is a variation – you could use tuna as well. Personally, I find mackerel so much more flavourful than tinned tuna. I love it. I always have a tin of mackerel in my pantry, so that’s how that ended up [in] there.”
Cicchetti can be a snack or the base of a meal; one that sounds likely to be forming part of many meals is the (Venetian-style potatoes – buttery golden potatoes with caramelised onion), which Davies says are just as delicious piping hot as they are cold the next day – and a favourite of the book’s recipe testers.
“Many, many people chose the patata alla Veneziana and they all said that that was something that was going into their regular rotation. It's so delicious. It's a really nice alternative to roast potatoes.”
Venetian-style potatoes (Patate alla veneziana) Source: Hardie Grant Books / Emiko Davies
Some of the recipes are tied tightly’ to Davies' memories of the city, like the inspired by the time Davies spent, as a fine art student, working in the Armenian monastery on the Venetian island of San Lazzaro. One of her favourite parts of the days, she explains in the book, was breakfast, where the fare included their famous rose-petal jam. Others are inspired by her wide reading. She created her tempting after reading about these fried cheese rounds (they can also be baked) in a book by food writer Mariù Salvatori de Zuliani.
Classical and modern, sweet and savoury, simple and fancy: the many kinds of cicchetti in Cinnamon & Salt represent the multifaceted nature of Venice itself.
In the Foreward to the book, Rosa Salzberg, an Associate Professor of Italian Renaissance History, writes of Venice having "a great deal to teach us about the pleasures of a life lived on foot ... about sustaining strong community traditions and neighbourhood ties while also staying open to the world; about stopping to appreciate quotidian rituals and rhythms and finding beauty in the every day".
Davies, too, sees the city this way.
“Historically, of course, that was always something that I think set Venice apart from so many other great cities in the world. It was a very open city. All sorts of people passed through it, but when you think about it, even today, that's still what Venice is. You know, it really is quite a small city, with a sort of smaller population each year. But millions of people from all over the world come through Venice. Enjoy Venice. See it. So, it still is sort of this city that is open to the world.”
For now, Davies has been enjoying a different part of the world. Plans to visit Australia were put on hold during the height of the pandemic, but she and her family have finally made it. After a busy time in Victoria for the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival, and a few weeks in Canberra visiting family and friends, her final stop will be a visit to Sydney to film for The Cook Up with Adam Liaw. “That will be really fun!” she says.
Cinnamon & Salt captures the beauty of Venice. Source: Hardie Grant Books / Emiko Davies
Images from Cinnamon & Salt by Emiko Davies (Hardie Grant Books, RRP $40). Available in stores nationally.
