Flying into Amalfi for lemons and scarpetta
Ciao Amalfi, Amalfi airport, a bitter sweet festival in Liguria and a look the tangy seasonality of forced rhubarb
Hello Lemonistas!
In this issue of The Lemon Grove we look at the beautifull town of Amalfi in southern Italy. A glamorous destination for the jet set, lemon lovers and for enjoying amazing land- and townscapes. Here we meet our tour guide Laura, a US expat and lover of all thing Amalfi. Then we reveal how the newly refurbished Amalfi airport will deliver you closer to the region and within pip spitting distance of the lemon groves of Sorrrento and the Amalfi peninsula. Then we finish off with a look at forced rhubarb and an article I’ve written for www.ckbk.com.
Later this week look out for a special editon about the annual lemon festival in the southern French seaside town of Menton.
Ciao Amalfi
So, while I was in Amalfi, I met up with US-expat Laura, a writer, photogrpaher and who loves sharing her love of the area through Ciao Amalfi. Follow Laura on Instagram @ciaoamalfi. Click below to listen in to our conversation about life, Delizia al Limone (Lemon Delight) pastry, and living in atown often swamped with tourists. Pictured below is a delicious Delizia al Limone, a dome-shaped dessert made with a sponge base (drizzled with Limoncello), filled with Chantilly cream and covered with a lemon glaze. This one was enjoyed in the shadow of the world famous Amalfi Cathedral, and was a treat for the gods.
At this time of year, Amalfi lemons are ripening in the warming sun of southern Italy as the residents and growers prepare for millions of tourists to visit the area famed for pastel-coloured villages clinging to cliffs connected by winding roads busy with red Fiat 500s and blue, pink and green Vespas. It’s my kind of place.
Scarpetta in Amalfi
Scarpetta is an Italian word that translates to ‘little shoe’ and describes the mopping up of sauce from your finished plate, or from the pot if your Nonna will let you! Here I am doing the scarpetta on a plate with a remains of spaghetti flavoured with lemon zest, and a glass of white wine made with fiano grapes grown locally in Campania.
Citrus love at Ligure Finale
Sweet mandarins, juicy but sour lemons, and giant citrons are the main attractions at a fabulous citrus festival in the Ligurian coastal town Ligure Finale, just a few kilometres west of Savona, one of north-west Italy’s historical and picturesque city ports. The festival takes place in early February and is a highlight of the region’s citrus farming community.
Sticking with the citrus theme, Savona itself is synonymous with the smaller, green chinotto, a bittersweet, herbaceous fruit that caught the attention of an intrepid sea captain who bought the first fruits from China in around 1500. Today, the stubby trees, heavy with their fruits, bring hundreds of visitors to the annual festival celebrating the range of citrus fruits grown in the terraced fields reaching northwards on steep hills that dominate towns such as Ligure Finale. The fruit is popularly made into the eponymous Chinotto soda drink.
Festival season
Other citrus festivals in the region can be enjoyed in Menton, just over the border in France (February), Monterosso (one of the Cinque Terre villages, May) and a ferry ride from Genoa to Muravera, Sardinia (April).
Helen Atlee’s must-read book ‘The Land Where Lemons Grow’, is an engaging and informative history of citrus and, in particular, lemons in Italy. Helen specifically mentions the Ligurian festival and the family running one of the market’s most popular stalls, the Parodi family. Moreover, Atlee describes the chinotto as the runt of the litter of the citrus family.
Amalfi airport prepares for citrus tourists
Getting to the Amalfi Coast is about to get a whole lot easier, putting those dream coastal towns and gravity-defying lemon groves in closer touch with the region’s 5m annual visitors. Lying an hour’s drive south of Naples in southern Italy, the Amalfi Coast includes towns such as Sorrento, Positano and Ravello Amalfi and pastel-coloured houses clinging to the rocky coastline.
Salerno Costa d’Amalfi Airport is being refurbished and opening as a commercial airport with passenger flights starting this July. Up to 6 million passengers will flow through the airport by 2030.
Many international arrivals land at Naples airport, a bustling and severely overcrowded space. After flying with budget airlines and dealing with officious passport control and baggage pickup, I feel my journey can finally start.
When I visited a year ago, it took a train and time-consuming, bumpy, winding bus journey to get to my AirBnB in Sorrento di Piano.
It’s an important arrival and departure point for Italy’s islands, such as Capri, Ischia and Procida. The airport is also being redeveloped with the plan to add a further 1m passengers.
Salerno Costa d’Amalfi Airport was built nearly 100 years ago and has since seen action as a military airport, flying school, and firefighting centre.
I’m not sure which commerical airlines will be flying there, but it’s worth keeping a lookout for a direct flight to the southern Italian warmth and romance of lemon country.
Forced rhubarb brings a seasonal tang to the dining table
(This is a shortened version of an article I’ve written for ckbk.com and its Consuming Passions series recently published on the CKBK website. Read the full article here, although it might be behind a paywall).
Shopping trips to my local farm shop become more frequent in early January as I seek out shafts of pink light amongst the muddy brown root vegetables. Potatoes, parsnips and turnips all feature in my regular recipe repertoire. However after weeks of earnest, albeit seasonal fare, I'm searching lip-puckering tartness.
I find this refreshing taste in the vivid pink of forced rhubarb that shines so brightly for just a few weeks. Forced rhubarb's versatility is part of its charm, as it works well with savoury recipes for fatty fish, oily fish, sweet crumbles, and sorbets. As the season progresses, I move from simmering smallish pieces in a saucepan with sugar and a splash of water or orange juice until it breaks down into a thick compote to seeking a burst of extra flavour with a generous pinch of cinnamon or ginger for extra tang.
Grown in the dark Â
My interest in forced rhubarb was piqued in the early 1980s while studying Mining Engineering at Leeds University, in the English county of Yorkshire, home to the forced rhubarb growers. The 'Rhubarb Triangle' region lies between Wakefield, Morley and Rothwell. It is the centre for its forced rhubarb production, dating back to the late 1800s when cheap coal supplies were used to heat the forcing sheds. During one long hot university summer, work experience saw me underground at Rothwell coalmine. Assigned to the environmental team, I spent many hours chatting to career miners about their lives, football teams and gardens.Â
Many feed their families with their produce grown on allotments. Others recalled how friends and families also worked in the darkness of the forcing sheds. Â
Such is their historical value to the region that forced rhubarb from Yorkshire has Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) status.Â
How to buy and prepare
Look out for stalks of bright pink with pale green leaves still attached. Keep the leaves attached for as long as possible to preserve firmness. Forced rhubarb needs little preparation aside from removing leaves and washing and trimming off the top and bottom before cutting to shape. Also, be careful, as rhubarb leaves are poisonous and should be thrown away.
For my full article, see ckbk.com
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