A kitchen in Rome

Rachel Roddy's recipe for charred spring onions with pancetta

They may be a Sicilian specialty, but cipollate catanesi are easy to enjoy anywhere – all you need is intense heat

Maybe it is because I know the chances of going to Sicily this summer are slim, but I keep playing bits of the trip in my head in the same way I used to listen to lines of songs on cassettes: the screeching rewind, snap-stop, replay. The ripping drive down the autostrada del sole, motorway of sun, to Naples; the overnight ferry to Palermo or Catania; the first thick coffee; the trip to the market to get a picnic for the journey to my partner’s family home. There is nothing special or unusual about a looping thought of getting away for a holiday; the evocation of heat, saltwater or cold beer.

At the moment, in Rome, the smells and tastes of Sicily are vivid to me, almost rudely so, amplified by my imagination, a cassette played through 120W amps, with distortion. The walk from Catania fish market back to the car park is always a smell-driven journey: it means passing under a bridge banked with rubbish, then past a man tending charcoal grills full of blackened pepper and onions. Writing this now, the smells of fermenting rubbish and scorched onions are as real and intrusive as the smell of the alcohol-bleach mixture my neighbour squeezes into the cracks on the communal staircase to kill “the virus”.

I think the virus my neighbour chases with a cloth is the reason for my amplified senses. I have not been alone, I don’t think, in my almost tick-like checking for symptoms in the past few months: cough and temperature, obviously, but also smell and taste. I reassure myself I am fine, having the most exaggerated sense of both: coffee, fish bones, flowers, bleach, the uncovered cheese, sour milk, the rubbish in our courtyard, strawberries, baked onions.

The man working the grill in Catania tends whole onions, baking them in their skins until they are completely charred on the outside. Inside, however, they are soft, with opaque layers that flump out when you peel away the outside, ready to be dressed with oil and red-wine vinegar. Other things found on Sicilian grills are le stigghiole – lamb’s intestines wound round spring onions then grilled over charcoal – and cipollate catanesi, pancetta wrapped around spring onions. Both are referred to as arrusti e mangia, roast and eat, and can be made just as easily in a garden or a kitchen.

Most spring onions have bulbs the size of an olive; they are ideal for this. If they are a passing-round snack, estimate three per person; if they are part of a larger grill spread, two. I don’t bother trimming the spring onions, leaving all the green intact, plus the little stringy root, which provides a handle of sorts and can be bitten off.

Simply wash the onions and pat them dry. For every onion, you need a thin rasher of pancetta, which is salt-cured pork belly. Streaky bacon works here, too. Wrap the rasher around the onion as if it were a ribbon round a maypole, so at a bias, covering the bottom two-thirds of the onion; this leaves the greenery sticking out at one end and half the fat bulb peeping out at the other. Rub with olive oil and it is ready to cook.

Most of the time, we cook this over white-hot charcoal in our small, bandy fornacella, which means we are on the flat concrete roof of my partner’s grandparents’ house in Sicily. I have also cooked them in an aluminium tray barbecue, in a friend’s pizza oven, on an iron griddle pan, in a frying pan, under the grill and in the oven. There are many options. Wherever you cook them, the heat needs to be intense (but not flaming), so the fatty pancetta melts then crisps, the slender onion cooks underneath and both ends char until black. A great part of the pleasure of onions and pancetta is the smell of the catching and the scorching, arrusti, then the mess of eating with your fingers, wherever you are or wherever that takes you.