Arancini Period BOrigin theory CVerified

Arancini are Sicily's famous saffron-tinted rice, pressed into a ball or a cone, stuffed with mozzarella and the like, and fried in a breadcrumb coating. The name comes from the Sicilian aranciu, orange, in its diminutive form: the shape and color recall the fruit.

Rice reached Sicily during the period of Arab rule that began in the ninth century, brought with Islamic agriculture and its irrigation, and saffron traveled the same route; before that arrival, in the ninth through eleventh centuries, no rice dish of this kind existed on the island. That marks the earliest the dish could have come about, not the moment the fried, breaded form was finished. On when today's form took shape, views diverge. One common account traces a rice-pressing dish back to the Arab period. The architectural historian Annette Condello, by contrast, places the current form — especially the classic filled with tomato-and-meat ragù — in eighteenth-century southern Italy, seeing it as a shrunken version of the towering rice timbale made by French cooks in the Bourbon-era Baroque kitchen. The tomato-filled type appears after New World tomatoes settled into European kitchens in the 1700s, which fits that dating. In the written record, Giuseppe Biundi's Sicilian-Italian Dictionary of 1857 lists arancinu as a rice sweet, showing the dish existed by the mid-nineteenth century at the latest.

The first thing that snags you about arancini is the name. In Catania, in eastern Sicily, it is masculine — arancino, plural arancini — and shaped into a cone. In Palermo, in the west, it is feminine — arancina, plural arancine — and rolled into a sphere. The same dish is called by different genders across the island.

Standard Italian grammar has a convention of opposing the masculine name of a tree to the feminine name of its fruit, and from that some hold arancina, after the orange fruit, to be correct. But the Accademia della Crusca, the authority on the Italian language, accepts both forms as valid. This is regional usage, it concludes, not a matter of one being wrong — and it declines to rule for either side.

The timing is undecided too. The lower bound set by the arrival of rice, in the ninth through eleventh centuries, holds firm, but the Arab-period origin and the eighteenth-century Baroque origin stand side by side. The 1857 attestation gives a firm foothold in the record, yet where before that the present form took shape remains an open question. Named and dated without a verdict, this rice croquette is loved in the east and the west each in its own way.