Ancient Gardesana Fish Dish: The Rich History of Sisàm and Its Roots

Today considered a rustic and popular dish, it was once served in noble courts. The sisàm, unfortunately increasingly absent from the lakeside tables, is one of the monuments of Gardesana cuisine. It is wrong to associate it, as many do, with the locality of Cisano: the similarity between the dialectal name of the town and that of the recipe is coincidental.

The sisàm, as Pino Crescini taught in the Vocabolario dei pescatori di Garda, derives from the vulgar Latin incisamen, which means chopped food. The onions, a fundamental ingredient along with dried alborelle, are roughly sliced.

To stew fish and onions, oil and vinegar are used. In Brenzone, a pinch of sugar and sometimes spices are also added. That making a good sisàm required sugar was asserted by Francesco Gaioni, known as Belòti, a professional fisherman from Castelletto, who passed away a few years ago. Belòti claimed that sugar was needed to “remove the acidity” from the dish.

Origin and ingredients of the sisàm

This is plausible: in cuisine, sugar is often used to soften acidic flavors. But the sweet-and-sour combination (vinegar and sugar) suggests an ancient origin for the dish. In particular, sugar could have replaced honey, the historic sweetener, in modern times.

An additional intriguing clue to the possible historicity comes from another Brenzone fisherman: Franco Zamboni, known as Pechino. His version of sisàm is included in the booklet Pesci, pesca e cucina del lago di Garda and involves the use of cloves.

The combination of sweet and sour along with spices points to medieval cuisine. A confirmation of the old age of sisàm comes from a handwritten recipe book of the Venetian area, probably from the 14th century, preserved at the Casanatense Library in Rome. It contains a recipe for “cisame de pesse quale tu voy”: essentially corresponding to the sisàm still used on Garda.

This recipe involves onion, vinegar, honey, and spices, similar to Brenzone, although it is applied not only to alborelle but to any kind of fish. On the lake, the gastronomic use of cisame could have arrived centuries ago from Venice, where it has now disappeared.

The recipe may have remained unchanged in Brenzone due to the long isolation of this place (the Gardesana road only reached it in the 1920s). cisame also appears in the Libro Novo by Cristofaro di Messisbugo, a steward and court administrator at the Este court in the first half of the 1500s.

Writing about a dinner held in 1529, he mentions among the dishes served a Gardesana product: the carpione, incidentally covered with cisame. This rare salmonid is known to live only in the waters of Garda: who brought it to Ferrara?

We can attempt to answer: it was probably the two Venetian ambassadors present at the table. Because Venice used Garda carpioni as diplomatic gifts for European courts. Far from being a poor dish, the sisàm has noble origins. It’s a pity that its use is gradually declining in homes and restaurants around the lake.