Rosolio
This is a master recipe, capable of going in many, many directions, although it’s likely that most foreigners know only Limoncello, a single variant. Precise amounts aren’t given because it depends on the size of your batch, and the strength of your alcohol. But make this once and you’ll never refer to this page again.
Flavour agent, Fruit essence, in this case organic lemon peels, minus the pith (the white just under the peel). Organic is even more important here, as growers never intend for you to consume the peel and tend to blast them with chemicals. Peeled stone fruits work well, orange peel, cinnamon sticks, prunes, cherries and basil leaves, all thrive under the same treatment.
Alcohol, preferably derived from fruit. The stronger the better. If vodka is the purest form of alcohol available, your simple syrup will need to be much sweeter.
Sugar, don’t be alarmed by how much. Like all things consumed cold, you need to up the sugar just to taste it. And portions tend to be small.
Water
Spices, optional. Here the addition of a spice (a clove or two, a few peppercorns) should never be more than a subtle, more complex aftertaste. Less is more.
Place flavour agent in a large tight-lidded jar. For a litre of pure alcohol, 24 lemons are ideal (save the juice for pickling, for making icy granita or to make fresh-squeezed lemonade (limonata)).
Cover with alcohol and add spice, if using. Seal and place in a dark place.
After 21 days, strain liquor into bottles, filling ¼ full, for pure alcohol (for diluted alcohol such as vodka, calculate overall content for 25%, to avoid freezing). Seal jars. Keep flavouring agent in jar and seal, apart. (You can use the flavouring agent as a chemical-free fire starter, rather than charcoal lighter or newspapers, such as throwing some lemons peels on the grill to start the fire, without any chemical starters, and for free).
Calculate difference in water ( i.e. if using pure alcohol, you’d need 3 litres of water, of 75% of total). Heat in pot and add sugar. A rule of thumb is that it needs to be sweeter than you’d think, and that a kilo of sugar for four litres is a good starting point). Generally speaking, the more ‘savoury’ your flavouring agent, the less sugar is preferred. Chill syrup completely once dissolved.
Top of litre bottles with chilled syrup. Return three bottles to dark closet and place one bottle in freezer, with a set of services glasses. Many say that the final mix needs time to mellow so you can compare tonight’s bottles against those from the closet.
Resist seconds. The sugar and alcohol produce wicked hangovers.
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.
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