What actually arrives at a Sicilian table, in order

Somebody at the far end of the table will tell you, kindly, that the food is nearly finished. They will be wrong, and they will know they are wrong. There is a pause of ten minutes, the plates go, and then the pasta arrives, and the pasta is the third act of five. This is the single most useful thing to understand about eating here. A Sicilian meal is not a large amount of food served at once. It is a sequence, each part modest, delivered over three or four hours, with conversation carrying the gaps. Guests who eat everything in the first half hour do not survive it.

It begins with things that do not need cooking at the moment they are served. Caponata, aubergine cooked down with celery, capers and vinegar, sweet and sharp at once and better cold than warm. Olives from the family's own trees, usually green and cracked. Tuma, a young sheep cheese, mild and very slightly squeaky. Panelle, chickpea flour fried in squares, if you are anywhere near Palermo. Sardines, whether or not you thought you liked sardines. Bread that is yellow inside because it is made with durum wheat, and oil poured over it without measurement. That is the first course, and it is already more than most visitors expect to eat in a whole evening.

Then pasta, and only one. This is where the region declares itself. Pasta alla Norma is aubergine fried properly, tomato, basil and salted ricotta grated over the top, and it belongs to Catania. Busiate with pesto alla trapanese, almonds and raw tomato and garlic, belongs to the west. Around Agrigento you are as likely to be given something with wild fennel and sardines, or a plain tomato sauce that has been on the stove since eleven in the morning. The portion is smaller than the equivalent in a London restaurant, and deliberately so. Something is coming after it, and then something after that.

The second course is fish on the coast and meat inland, and it is plainer than what came before: grilled, with lemon, and nothing on top of it. Vegetables arrive in their own dishes rather than on your plate. Then fruit, which is not a substitute for dessert but the thing that precedes it: melon in July, prickly pear in autumn, oranges from December. Then the sweet, which in a private house is usually almond biscuits and a glass of something amber. Cassata and cannoli are real and excellent, and they tend to appear at organised celebrations rather than at a Tuesday family table. Coffee last, standing up, small and fast.

The timing matters as much as the food. Dinner in August does not begin until nine and can still be going at one in the morning. Claire and Rob ate at long tables under the olive trees at Moresca Farm, with hay bales for seating, after vows timed to the last light. The meal ran the way meals run here: slowly, with people standing up and changing seats between courses, and nobody calling an end to it. If you are bringing guests from Britain or the United States, tell them in advance. The instinct to eat at seven and be finished by nine is the only real obstacle, and it goes away by the second evening.

Two more things worth knowing. Breakfast here is not a meal in the sense you are used to: a coffee taken standing at a bar, a pastry, and in summer a granita with brioche, which is crushed ice of almond, coffee or mulberry eaten with sweet bread at eight in the morning and is entirely reasonable behaviour. And the middle of the day still belongs to lunch. Between one and four the small towns close, and a restaurant that fed forty people at half past one will not make you a sandwich at three. Plan errands around that. The rest of the day arranges itself once you accept it.

If food matters to you, say so early, because it changes the shape of everything: where you eat, who cooks, whether the table sits under trees or on a terrace above the sea, and how long after the ceremony the first plate lands. Moresca Farm, our one private estate, is where a long table works best, and it is always arranged separately rather than as part of anything standard. The detail is at /locations/moresca-farm. Start with a conversation about how you want the evening to feel and how late you want it to run, and the practical decisions follow from there without much argument.