joearay@gmail.com / +1 206 446 2425


imageimage

Friday, February 16, 2007

Sucking Lemons with the Pros

Here in southern Sicily, lemon and orange groves seem to line every road, but the idea of a lemon tasting I was invited to sounded rather masochistic. It made me think of a puckered-up version of that old National Geographic picture with the line of women in lab coats sniffing men’s underarms.

Plus, a lemon’s a lemon, right?

Not so, thinks Dr. Giuseppe Cicero who works for Italy as a sensorial analyst and food-quality controller.

Cicero’s lemon tasting directly followed a tasting of renowned Modican chocolate and the two couldn’t have elicited more different reactions. He wheeled several hospital carts’ worth of lemons on numbered plastic plates out to his tasters. These local food professionals taste with Cicero weekly. They clearly enjoyed the chocolate, but their bodies were definitely at odds with the idea of straight lemon.

Far from the physical restraint normally seen at wine tastings, here the tasters recoiled, puckered, shuddered, occasionally giggled, and generally tended to look like they were having way less fun than they did with the chocolate.

Clearly, they were pushing themselves toward their task for the good of humanity. But what good?

“We’re looking for both common characteristics and what differentiates them,” said Cicero. “Tomatoes and carrots come from the earth and they speak of the earth. They have a primal link to their territory. We want to transfer these sensations to the people who eat them.”

In wine terms, he sounded like a sommelier who was trying to make a bottle sound better than it was, so I asked for my own plates of lemons.

Like his tasters, I had trouble pulling a plate full of lemons toward me, but then a funny thing happened.

On a good day, when I poke my nose in a glass of wine, I can pick out a few key elements; something really good will actually give me goose bumps or a flicker of emotion.

Here, the smell of lemons, of all things, triggered memories and feelings, and each type of lemon brought something different.

I tasted them, and puckered and shuddered like everyone else in the room, but, without really thinking about it, how each lemon should be used in cooking came to me, no question - clear as day. One was for vinaigrette, another, with a deeper flavor, for broiled scallops, the third was made to go in seltzer water or to flavor desserts, and number four was made for…squid.

If only wine pairings came to me this easily.

I tell Cicero all this and he blames man.

“Winemaking has a huge amount of human intervention and these [lemons and other fruits and vegetables] have none. It’s a direct link to the elements of the tree and around it.”

“We’re trying to get people to think of the importance of what they put in their mouths,” he said. “We want them to say, ‘This comes from my land.’”

Speak of the earth, indeed

This is Joe Ray reporting from the Motherland.



Twitter Facebook Delicious Digg | More