Pasta with cauliflower, anchovies, and toasted breadcrumbs

Sicilian cooking is Arab cooking wearing an Italian jacket, and no dish gives the game away faster than this one.

Pasta with cauliflower, in Palermo, is called pasta chi vruoccoli arriminati, which needs translating twice. Vruoccoli means cauliflower, not broccoli, because Sicilian dialect and standard Italian have never agreed about which vegetable is which. Arriminati means stirred, from the stirring the cauliflower takes as it collapses into the sauce. And the sauce itself contains saffron, raisins, pine nuts and anchovies, a combination that arrived with the Arab rule of Sicily in the ninth century and simply never left.

The sweet and savoury business is what people find strange the first time. Raisins in a pasta sauce reads like an error. It is not. They plump in the cooking, go soft and dark, and sit against the salt of the anchovy in a way that makes the whole plate more interesting than the sum of its parts. Sicily has been doing this for a thousand years and is not open to persuasion.

The version here is stripped back to what a small kitchen can manage on a weeknight: cauliflower, anchovies, garlic, chilli, breadcrumbs. Saffron is glorious and expensive, raisins and pine nuts are in the variations, and none of them are the reason the dish works.

The reason it works is that cauliflower, cooked well past the point where most people stop, stops being a vegetable and becomes a sauce. Boil the florets in the pasta water until they are on the edge of falling apart, then crush them in the pan with a spoon. That is the entire technique, and it is why a head of cauliflower costing one euro fifty can carry a dinner.

Breadcrumbs at the table, as always in the south, doing the work of cheese.