Joe Ray

Tuesday, May 20, 2008

An offer I couldn’t refuse

“Quoting “The Godfather” always works,” said Francesco within a few hours of my arrival in Sicily.

I’d been back in The Motherland for less than 24 hours when Francesco’s uncle Guido unintentionally convinced me to re-open my blog for the two weeks I’m here.

It was an offer I could not refuse.

I arrived at Guido and his wife Pinuccia’s Sunday barbecue laden with the groceries for my apartment. Pinuccia (pronounced “pin-noo-cha”), noted my nasty looking store-bought garlic, and handed me a small paper bag with a handful of heady-smelling aglio. “Here. Try these,” she said discreetly. “They’re from my garden. They’re more flavorful.”

Meanwhile, home-cured olives made the rounds. Served from a one-liter honey jar, they are slightly crunchy with a pleasant, lasting bitterness.

While thin steaks and sausages cooked on the grill in the fireplace, Francesco’s mother sautéed chicken cutlets covered in a mixture of egg, parsley, nutmeg, oregano and “a little red wine.” She handed me a bite on a fork – simple and perfect.

Walking over, a smirking Francesco said, “Just like KFC, right?”

Right.

At the table, it’s a loud, pretense-free Sicilian family free for all. There seem to be more conversations than people, with everyone munching, talking and reaching across the table for a little more. Presiding over all, Guido grabs the tail end of the salad and eats it straight from the bowl.

Sated, he takes me for a tour of his garden that has furnished everything from Pinuccia’s garlic to the mulberries and loquats that ended our meal. He shows off his lettuce and peppers before pulling some lemons from a tree and sticking them in a bag for me. It’s five times more than I could possibly eat in two weeks.

Then he walks up to the mulberry tree. It is bursting with the ripe fruit, known here as gelsi, and there are already hundreds that have given up the ghost and dropped to the ground.

“Here, I’ll give you some,” he says, scooting toward the house to grab a recipient. I imagine a 20-minute picking process and more fruit than I know what to do with, but my protests fall on deaf ears. He emerges moments later, grinning, umbrella in hand.

I laugh out loud. It’s perfect. Guido walks under the tree, inverts the open umbrella, pokes the handle up into the branches and gives it a vigorous shake.

Thup, thup, thup. Thupthupthupthupthup.

The berries rain into the umbrella’s bowl and he has a couple pounds’ worth within twenty seconds. He tips the whole thing sideways and empties the contents into a bag which he hands to me.

How could I refuse?

I’m home.

—-

A non-food p.s.

This afternoon, I went to an effete yet gregarious little barber here in Ispica for a haircut and a shave with a straight-edged razor. When he’s finished trimming, he sprays herbal-smelling cologne over my face and neck, leaving me feeling spiffy and masculine. He then pulls out the local version of a styptic pencil.

“It’s like salt,” he cautions. “It will sting a little,”

He doesn’t just dab it on my tiny cuts, he wipes the broad side of the pencil across my entire chin.

I scream like a baby.

“That’s like the pain a virgin feels,” says the little man.

Clearly I’ve misunderstood.

I ask again and this time he explains by thrusting his hips into the air and using some other rather unmistakable gestures.

Welcome home, indeed.

This is Joe Ray reporting from the Motherland.

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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.

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