You can turn almost anything into a sorbet, granita or gelato, providing you add enough sugar. The sugar content also aids in forming crystals, the textural difference between a sorbet and a granita. Add dairy and this quickly becomes gelato, or ice cream. Many upon reading this will cite the differences between the three desserts in texture, but the more you have of these in Italy, you see that it's about tendency versus a hard and fast rule. Some gelato has no dairy. Many sorbets do. About the only thing that is steadfast is that gelato is gelato because of the paddle with which it's served. Sorbet usually involves a melon baller. Granita tends to be more scaley in texture, and rarely has any dairy in it, but often, on it.
But put good, natural, cold things into an ice cream machine and no matter what, you'll love what comes out.
200 grams of sugar
1/8 litre of blood orange juice
Half a bottle of primitivo del salento, or other heavy, fruity red wine.
A cup of water.
Special equipment, ice cream maker.
Heat water to a boil and dissolve the sugar. Chill. Add blood orange juice and red wine and chill in freezer until a cap forms. Place in ice cream machine and follow manufacturers instructions.
Variations:
This is unlimited. Try straight fruit juice with a shot of Campari, vermouth or grappa. Or your lemons the next time you make limoncello. You can also add jelly or preserves instead of same amount of sugar, changing the texture and really bumping up the flavour. Providing everything is cold enough when going into the machine, it’s virtually impossible to botch. Even if it doesn’t set up completely, it’ll still be great. Just don’t tell anyone what your goal was. They’ll love it just the same.
Introduction
If you lean in and really listen to the Baron, you’d swear he was getting drunk. I’ve seen the transformation before, when textbook Italian starts to ebb into marble-mouthed dialect, the linguistic synapse of a storyteller traveling back in time. First it was only a word of dialect here and there as we discussed the dishes of his childhood, but the last hour has had me squinting and hanging onto his every word, the way you might really grip the steering wheel while driving through a really thick fog.
‘Before there was so little, so very, very little’, he says, he eyes beginning to tear. ‘We always had just enough but those in the community struggled in ways that I think would be difficult to really imagine today. Unless you know real hunger, I mean real, real hunger- and for years at time- I don’t think the food down here is readily obvious. At least not from outside looking in anyway.’
I pour myself some more wine and disagree with him, at least in theory. I run a cooking school here in the Salento and those that come love the food of the region, for its pure flavours, never needing any of the back story to access the dishes on their own merit. The Baron falls silent for a moment and cocks his head to the side and eats a forkful of his Cecamariti, the way you might half-heartedly attempt to study a picture of your own mother, trying to forget who she is.
‘It’s good’, he says. ‘But I don’t think I can really taste it without also tasting the doorway back.’ He smacks his lips and takes another bite, holding his head low, as if he were in church.
I’ve decided to start my blog about the food of the Salento with the Baron because I believe that you, the reader, believe that the traditional food of the South of Italy is still being made by the poor, the uneducated, the rural and those that many of us would be tempted to call ‘peasants’. ‘Every morning in Italy, all the little old ladies wake up and begin to make everything fresh from scratch’.
The opposite is more often the truth.
Traditional food in Italy is the process of flip-flopping, where the real luxury today is finding the time to make things from scratch for those you love. Traditional food is being kept alive by those that know enough to love it, that understand that there is always something more to any dish, beyond a list of its ingredients. And that was what was really happening inside the Baron's mouth as he chewed.
mercoledì 30 aprile 2008
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