Couscous carlofortino

The island of San Pietro, in the Sulcis area, can only be reached by sea: the ferry from Calasetta or Portovesme drops travellers in Carloforte, the island's only inhabited centre, where the language spoken in the street is not Sardinian but a variant of old Genoese. This linguistic anomaly is the most immediate trace of a history that has crossed three continents and three centuries: in 1738, a group of fishermen of Ligurian origin — already settled for generations on the Tunisian islet of Tabarca, in the service of the Genoese Lomellini family for coral harvesting — obtained permission from Carlo Emanuele III, King of Sardinia, to colonise the uninhabited island, which they named after the sovereign. They brought with them their dialect, their surnames, their fishing techniques and, filtered through two centuries of coexistence with North African culture, a cuisine unlike anything else in Sardinia.

Cascà sits at the centre of this cuisine. The name comes directly from Arabic, and the preparation shares its basic technique with Maghrebi couscous: durum wheat semolina is moistened and worked by hand in circular movements until it forms irregular granules, then steamed in a couscoussier. Here, however, Tabarchino tradition brought about a substantial transformation. The prevailing seasoning is not meat, as in continental North African couscous, but a fish broth — grouper, scorpionfish, octopus — enriched with seasonal vegetables: cabbage, carrots, chickpeas, courgettes. One local source notes that in home cooking the vegetables have historically carried at least as much weight as the fish, evidence of a popular cuisine that adapted the recipe to whatever was available at the time. The semolina is then moistened with this broth and served with the fish and vegetables arranged on top, in a presentation that preserves the logic of the Mediterranean one-dish meal.

What sets cascà apart from a simple culinary borrowing is the continuity of its transmission. In Carloforte, this is not a recipe recovered or reconstructed for the sake of identity: it has remained in the domestic repertoire of Tabarchino families across generations, practised in homes long before it ever appeared in restaurants. The Carloforte community — which today numbers around six thousand people and maintains a fairly marked internal cultural cohesion — has preserved food practices alongside language as part of a coherent system, not as relics set apart from their context. The Tabarchino dialect, recognised as a linguistic minority, and cascà belong to the same order of things: signs of an identity built elsewhere and then rooted on a Sardinian island that, for precise historical reasons, still looks toward the western Mediterranean.