Prickly pear jam 280 g

The prickly pear (Opuntia ficus-indica) is a perennial succulent of the cactus family, native to Mexico and Central America, brought to Europe by the Spanish conquistadores in the mid-16th century; technically it counts as an invasive plant, since it tends to take the place of native vegetation. Its ability to survive is extraordinary even on dry, stony and poor soils: it withstands temperatures above 40 °C and also occasional frosts down to -8 °C. Not even a lack of water weakens it, as it can draw moisture from the air alone. Thanks to these qualities, by the end of the 17th century the prickly pear had found its ideal home among the lava rocks of the Etna plain and in the sunny countryside around Enna, lining the old drove roads (“trazzere”) and marking the boundaries between fields.

According to a legend collected by the great Sicilian ethnologist Giuseppe Pitrè, the prickly pear once bore poisonous fruit, and the Turks planted it in Sicily intending to slaughter “baptised flesh”; that was when Jesus worked a miracle and made its flesh sweet and edible. Another lovely story explains the origin of the “scuzzulato” or “bastardone”, the late-fruiting prickly pear whose flowers are cut off. It seems the practice began after a quarrel between two farmers: the first, jealous of his neighbour’s fruit, roughly cut off all the flowers on his neighbour’s plants to harm him; instead the plants fruited all the same, and their fruit was even finer and sweeter.

Today Sicily is the world’s second-largest producer of prickly pears after Mexico. Of the varieties grown in the Rocca di Cerere Geopark, the most common is the yellow one, sweet and soft; the red has sweet, crumbly flesh with few seeds; the most prized is the white, whose greenish skin might suggest an unripe fruit but which hides deliciously sugary, crisp flesh.