Eating Up Italy: Voyages on a Vespa. Matthew Fort

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      FOR THE FILLING

      100G PLAIN FLOUR

      MILK

      1 PINCH OF GROUND CINNAMON

      1 PIECE OF THINLY PARED LEMON ZEST

      100G SUGAR

      200G RICOTTA (PREFERABLY SHEEP’S)

      250G CANDIED FRUIT, INCLUDING CEDRO AND PUMPKIN (SUBSTITUTE LEMON OR GRAPEFRUIT FOR THE CEDRO, AN OBSCURE MEMBER OF THE CITRUS FAMILY)

      Separate the egg yolks from the whites. Boil the milk in a saucepan and add the cornflour. Cook over a gentle heat, stirring, until the cornflour has been thoroughly amalgamated and the milk has thickened. Let it cool down slightly before beating in the egg yolks. Add the orange flower water and mandarino. Fold the crema into the ricotta mixture. Beat the egg whites until they are stiff, and fold them into the mixture.

      Roll out the pastry and use to line a 30cm flan dish. Pour in the ricotta mixture. Bake at 190°C/Gas 5 for 1 hour. Serve cold.

      FOR THE CREMA

      3 EGGS

      200ML MILK

      1 TEASPOON CORNFLOUR

      2 TABLESPOONS ORANGE FLOWER WATER

      2 TABLESPOONS MANDARINO LIQUEUR

      2

      KING PIG

      REGGIO DI CALABRIA – VIBO VALENTIA – PIZZO – PIANAPOLI

      Soppressata

      The soppressata was fine grained and the colour of roses and spicy and sweet, with aniseed coiling through it.

      2

      KING PIG

      REGGIO DI CALABRIA – VIBO VALENTIA – PIZZO – PIANAPOLI

      I thanked the Lord that, by the time I finally opened up the throttle on 50cc of raging power on my Vespa and wobbled off through the heart of Reggio with a combination of blind bravado, blind terror and blind relief, it was 1.30 p.m., and the roads were almost clear. The Calabresi maintained the extremely civilised habit of lunching properly every day. From about noon to 1 p.m. the roads were filled with traffic, and everything closed down as people headed for home or a restaurant for lunch.

      Your average Italian Vespa rip would have been kitted out in trainers, jeans, shirt and maybe, just, a helmet. Wearing a helmet had recently become compulsory, but it was treated more as a fashion accessory than cranium protection. But as far as I was concerned, comfort came before cutting a dash. I was dressed in heavy-duty brown shoes, heavy-duty green cords, T-shirt, shirt, a rather macho lightweight charcoal motorcycle jacket with pockets in all sorts of unlikely places, black leather gloves and a white helmet like the basinet of a knight of the Middle Ages. There was no way that anyone was going to identify me as an Italian. This was unlikely anyway, as I had no intention of travelling faster than fifty kilometres per hour, a preposterously stately pace by Italian standards.

      I envied the Calabresi their complete mastery of their machines. They seemed to have no fear of hurtling down roads at speeds which I thought suicidal, or zooming up them while carrying on an animated conversation with their pillion passenger over their shoulder. They could hover like hawks, absolutely stationary, without putting their feet on the ground, just revving their engines to maintain their stability while they nattered away to one another for a minute or two before swooping away into a gap in the traffic or flow of pedestrians. Man, or woman, and machine were fused into a single unit, apparently with a shared nervous system. Perhaps they were simply born with an instinctive ability. I was not.

      With a tentative skitter and then a wild leap like an agitated kangaroo, it was up, up and away, finally, at last, at very long last. The open road lay before me, new horizons rushed to meet me, a sense of adventure embraced me. It was ‘the blithesome step forward … out of the old life into the new’, as the Wayfaring Rat put it in The Wind in the Willows.

      The sun shone for the first time. The road ran along the edge of the coast. To my right the land rose steeply to the thickly wooded slopes of the Aspromonte. To my left the sea twinkled below. I saw a traditional swordfishing boat, with its disproportionately high mast at least twenty metres tall with a crow’s nest at the top, from which to spy out for fish, and its long, needle prow, thirty metres at least, from which to harpoon them. It was a detail from another age.

      I roared up hill and drifted down dale. I sped round the odd pothole. I didn’t feel frightened. I didn’t panic. I didn’t feel out of control. I didn’t feel that I couldn’t cope. The scooter made a noise like a demented gnat, particularly going uphill. So long as the demented gnat sound didn’t drive me bonkers, and the machine could take the strain, everything would be fine.

      Just beyond Nicotera, I sat in an olive grove and lunched on bread, salami, tomatoes and pecorino. The grove was full of borage, butterflies and light. The air was warm and fragrant. This was all right, I thought, liberty, lunch and loafing.

      I looked out over the town back towards the Golfo di Gioia beyond. From up here the coastline was still seductively beautiful and romantic, in spite of haphazard development and container ports. Tankers, container ships and tramp steamers lay anchored in the bay of Gioia Tauro, larger versions of the Phoenician and Roman galleys, and the later Venetian and Genoese merchant ships that had once anchored there. The movement of boats is dictated by history. Present trade follows the pattern of past trade. Ships sail to and from the same safe havens, and follow the same invisible paths, century by century.

      The occasional car ground past on the road. My scooter was still, its demented gnat noise stopped for a while. Its continuous state of high-pitched excitement, particularly going uphill, put me in mind of a then well-known DJ and media personality known as Ginger, and so Ginger it became. I grew dozy and stretched out on the ground.

      Presently I was accosted by a toothless gnome in a peaked cap. He was the brother of the owner of the olive grove, he said, and just wanted to check that there wasn’t a dead body on family property, as if dead bodies were quite a regular occurrence.

      I explained that I was having a picnic.

      ‘Ai, mangia,’ he said in a singing tone, giving a little chopping movement with his hand against his tummy. ‘Va bene. Buon appetito.’

      Presently I roused myself from my reveries, and took myself across the hilly neck of the Capo Vaticano, past olive and citrus groves and herds of sheep minded by shepherds with dogs the size of wolves, towards Vibo Valentia and Pizzo.

      While Calabria is rich enough in history, much of it soaked in blood, it seemed to be short on cultural artefacts and remains. War and earthquakes had destroyed most of them. However, Vibo Valentia – Hipponium to the Greeks, an ‘illustre et nobile municipium’, according to Cicero – had, it seemed, been spared the general wastage and was packed with churches and pictures of note.

      There was, said the guides, the church of San Leoluca with ‘extremely fine stucco work’, ‘a superb marble group of the Madonna between St John the Evangelist and the Magdalene (notice the bas-reliefs around the bases)’ and a Madonna and Child attributed to Girolamo Santacroce. There was the thirteenth-century church of Rosario with a ‘strange baroque pulpit’, and the СКАЧАТЬ