Food Archives - wash your language

One cup of family baking

November 22, 2018 by EmmaP Leave a Comment

It’s a slow family Saturday morning in Dublin. Our eldest daughter has offered to make one of our favourite breakfasts, waffles. Norwegian waffles.

We have a standard recipe (with its secret ingredient*) but I’ve never written it into my recipe book. Instead it’s bookmarked on the iPad at Norwegian food site Matprat.no. I could of course find one in English but this is more fun and reminds us of our old home in Oslo where we lived for 7 years. Our daughter traces down the list of ingredients and measurements with her finger.

And the questions start.

What does ss mean again? (it’s a sugar spoon/dessert spoon)
What’s 4dl? Is that the same as millilitres? (It’s 400 ml, use the measuring jug)
Should the flour be plain or self-raising? (plain)
Can you take over? (sigh)

I’ve lived in a lot of places over the last 20 years (the US, Canada, Norway, Italy, now Ireland) and in each one I’ve been preparing food for myself, the husband and eventually for our kids to eat. Not only does each country have its own cuisine, but also different cooking techniques, tools and measurements.

I am neither a serious foodie nor brilliant at numbers so I feel I’ve done quite well to adjust to all the different methods. I’m a decimal kind of girl. Grams, kilos and litres suit me fine, and the best cookbooks include them as well as pounds and ounces. I would have grown up with both. Moving to the US was my first wake-up call. The American use of cups and spoons for measuring is ingenious and it meant that for a few years I got by without buying a decent weighing scale. But when I’m on this side of the Atlantic and baking from my US days, I still get stuck when I see a recipe call for “2 sticks of butter” as that’s how they package (what they call) butter over there.

Liquid measurements are all over the place. There’s the British (and Canadian) 20oz and American liquid pint (16oz) and little-used dry pint (um, 1/8 of a dry gallon). This makes a difference when you’re working through a recipe like festive rum and liqueur eggnog from your Joy of Cooking, my first cookbook. I’ll just take a litre, or liter, thanks.

My husband is, thankfully, brilliant at numbers (and we’re training up our younger daughter for this level of mental maths) and he’s used to my panicked shouting over the years from the various kitchens we’ve had, for on-the-spot conversions. “How many grams will 6ozs be?” or “If I double the sugar is that 7/8s of a cup?” I have of course been able to Google conversions for the last 10 years but it’s just not the same.

Our usual moving box marked “Kitchen” carries most of the basic tools for international baking: my two basic weighing scales, (the nice digital one is only for good occasions), my trusty nested cup measurements (bought one rushed New York lunchtime away from the office) as well as the plain plastic baking bowls I somehow picked up at the convenience store next to our hotel in Hawaii. I’ve managed to keep the same brownie pan, long hand whisk and the little stone that keeps brown sugar moist in the jar. Electrical aids like blenders have come and gone as we moved from one country’s electrical system to another.

I’ve managed to master all types of cooker (gas, electric, induction or just temperamental), though I still struggle to remember that boiling an egg in sea-level Dublin takes less time than at my in-laws’ house 1km above sea level in Calgary. Or is it more time?

Now that I’m back in Ireland I love to hang around the baking aisles and enjoy the long-missed offerings like caster sugar, golden syrup, several types of brown sugar, self-raising flour, proper oats and other heavy things I couldn’t smuggle back abroad with Ryanair. And let’s not forget the butter! Nothing nowhere compares to the golden taste of Irish butter – the only foodstuff I’ll admit to bringing back to Italy.

There’s also that staple – bicarbonate of soda, poetically called bread soda in Ireland. When I first moved to Norway I needed to find some to make a batch of my (Darina Allen) scones. I was finally enlightened by a woman dressed in 19^th century peasant costume. She was doing a live demonstration in a smoke-filled hut at Oslo’s National Folk Park, baking lefse (a delicious potato-based pancake) and she explained that the stuff I really need was hjørnsalt, a traditional Norwegian raising agent which originally was the powder from a deer’s horn. I tried it out but then had to find something resembling like buttermilk to go with it – any Irish baker abroad will sympathise with that ongoing quest.

From country to country my favourite cookbooks have come with me, as well as the orange-coloured notebook I bought at the Bay in Toronto just after my eldest was born. In it I’ve been slowly recording the recipes that work best for us as a family, copied in by hand from books, websites, friends, aunts. And even more useful are the back pages where I’ve written down the party food menu for the kids’ birthdays in three countries: what a gift it’s been to see the names of the friends who came, kids and their parents. Memories we’ll keep for the next chapters – and recipes – in our lives.

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*And The secret waffle ingredient? A good pinch of ground kardemomme, or cardamom.

This story was published in the Irish Times on 20th November.

Cross your arms and eat your pastry

November 6, 2018 by EmmaP Leave a Comment

A Danish pastry shop is one of the world’s great wonders. Especially for travelling families.

Our 9 year old was tired and very grumpy. I knew if we kept walking through this part of Copenhagen we’d find a fantastic bakery. We kept walking. We turned a corner and there was the magical sign.

“See that, that’s the symbol of all Danish bakeries. Trust me, they’ll have goodies”.
“But that’s a pretzel, can I have a pretzel?”
“No they don’t really do those here, it’ll be sweet”
“Okay then”.

Day saved.

What we call a Danish pastry is a Wienerbrød in Denmark, named after the Viennese style of baking that came in during the 19th century. In 1850 the local bakers went on strike, and new bakers were brought from Vienna, along with their tasty, buttery, puffy pastry (with origins in Persia via Turkey and France). The Danes added their own jams, custard and chocolate to them and aren’t we lucky they did?

The shape is called a Kringle and one theory is that it comes from a 7th century monk who rewarded children with a doughy pretzel for saying their prayers. The crossed part represents folded arms and the three circles represent the Trinity.

The (Wet) Stones of Florence

June 3, 2017 by EmmaP Leave a Comment

Florence made world news this week when it was announced that the city is to start hosing down church steps with water to clear away the tourists who have a pesky habit of sitting down to eat a quick lunch.

This was big news around here, and most everyone thinks that the whole idea is ridiculous and won’t solve the problem, that after five minutes of Tuscan sun, the water will have evaporated. Even my 8 year old – when polled – was quick to point out that the city streets simply need more benches and other places where anyone (not just the nonni, or granddads) can sit in a civilised way.

“Operation anti camp-out“

Dario Nardella, the trying-hard-to-be-popular mayor, opened his “anti bivacco” campaign (from bivouac, referring to the camped-out picnickers) and declared that the steps of Santa Croce and Santa Spirito would be washed down once or twice a day, to push off the tourists. Won’t that be a waste of water, he was asked. “Well it’s part of the regular cleaning service’s supply” he replied, “and there’s no harm in giving the sacred steps a good clean while we’re at it”.

The underlying reason for this treating of tourists like cats, is that it’s not proper to sit on the church steps, a sacred place. It indicates “an increase among those who don’t respect our cultural heritage”, according to the mayor. Well, if you have 12 million people visiting each year, maybe you should take that more seriously and improve the city in many other ways. Italy’s ex-Prime Minister Matteo Renzi made a huge impact when he, as Florence’s mayor, pedestrianised a huge section of the city centre. That has been great for tourists, but the locals are still grumbling about it.

Street food?

Overcrowding and rubbish in Florence are more evident than ever. But why is this picnicking a problem now? In a city that has been “welcoming” visitors to admire its amazing cultural treasures for several centuries?

Five years ago a new city law permitted the opening of a greater number of sandwich shops, kebab joints and other food options for tourists who might not have time or funds to sit down and eat properly, paving the way to more street-consumed food. 300 extra businesses have opened in that time, mostly in the historic centre and most visibly around via dei Neri which runs between the back of the Uffizi and Santa Croce and where you can find/blame the NY Times top sandwich spot all’Antico Vinaio and its many imitators.

Pause and observe the Italian street scene. With the understandable exception of ice cream, you will not see Italians walking and eating at the same time. That’s what a cafe or restaurant is for, and where, not coincidentally, you are exposed to social interaction.

The city has regretted the proliferation of the street food issue, taking measures to curb it and clean up the city, to ensure that Florence does not lose its status as a UNESCO world heritage site. They recently banned the late-night sale of alcohol from places other than cafes and restaurants, and also famously refused McDonald’s to open beside the Duomo.

Grand tourists

A bigger question that comes to mind is – does this city actually welcome visitors? I would say not particularly well, and friends of mine (who know me to be of an overly tolerant nature) would be quicker to wax lyrical on the topic.

The good citizens of Florence have a reputation for intolerance, even within Italy. “The Parisians of Italy” someone once told me when I lived here as a student, referring to their snootiness and preference to stick to their own and be unhelpful. I don’t like to generalise, there are all sorts of people everywhere, but I’m not the only one with an opinion on this!

I’ll give you two examples.

Yesterday I was walking near the synagogue – a beautiful 19th building that doesn’t often make the top 10 tourist sites of Florence – and watched a young American couple approach the armed soldiers out front and ask in English “is this the synagogue”. A non-soldier with them answered gruffly – “over there, number 6”, nodding to the other side of the large gate, seeming to hope they might go away. He could have also told them that it wasn’t actually open, that if you stood on tiptop and looked over the gate you would see there was a wedding going on. But he let the tourists keep walking and read on their own the ‘closed’ sign on the door, and then walk away, considering their options on how best to complain about this online.

Last week I was on a bus and a woman called from the footpath to the driver in English, “does this go to the stazione?” “No”, he barked, and took off, exuding that feeling of annoyance from someone who doesn’t want to have to start speaking English beyond the limited amount that he knows. I think that this is what often causes the gruffness you see here, the lack of confidence to speak to people as well as you might want to – as well of course as the general intolerance of being asked questions, often rudely or in a language you don’t recognise.

The bus did of course go to the station and my guilt for not intervening followed me home up the hill. I speak Italian, imperfectly, but I find I am treated with more respect than most short-term visitors. And it’s worth mentioning that almost all the school parents I know are desperate for their kids to learn better English than they ever did, they recognise its usefulness.

Aside from language issues there is much lament among tourists, and residents, about the poor quality of public facilities in Florence, like bathrooms, water fountains, benches, easy access to information, museum opening hours, children’s activities, confusing websites. Even finding your way out of the Uffizi is still as complicated as it was 20 years ago, unless it’s closing time and they’ll happily show you out.

Hose ‘em down Dario!

Two days into the new hosing routine, is it working? I scanned the local media and there’s a mixed bag of opinion: it’s short-sighted, other measures are needed, it’s a waste of water, a bad image, and there are questionable rants online about handbag sellers and other “scourges” of the city. All agree that it’s daft, more benches are needed, as well as other options than the expensive cafes catering to tourists in the main piazzas.

One shop owner on via dei Neri claimed, somewhat jokingly, that the mayor had stolen his idea: he’s been throwing out buckets of water on the street for years to push off the annoying visitors sitting on the footpath. (Look closely and you’ll notice he’s selling tourist goods.)

La Nazione. The quote from the Prior of Santa Croce says that an intensive education programme is needed for school groups and visitors.

The local sandwich makers are trying to adapt, like this sign on one door asking customers to think about where to eat – with some inventive hashtags. They’ve also written it in English too, if the visitors can figure out what the “sagras of the churches might mean”.

Another sandwich shop on the street has jokingly put swimming rings on display as a “counter measure”.

Florence – they love the tourists, but they don’t really love them.

Do as a I say, not as I do

Up where we live, away from the rubbish-strewn historic centre, I had lunch yesterday with a friend. We took out sandwiches from a local restaurant (which I will keep nameless, to avoid inviting more hordes) and we sat with others on the wall across the street, where cushions have been set out for the many daily customers. Almost all were Italian, not a tourist in sight, and as well as a full rubbish bin, there were quite a few paper wrappers and used cans strewn around the road and field over the wall. Just as at all the viewpoints up in the hills where the locals drive to in their mopeds for sunsets with friends and lovers.

At least we weren’t sitting on a church step. Then we’d be in double trouble.

If you’re interested in more food waste issues, check out my blog post on the slow rise of doggy bags in Italy.

Here are some of the news links about this story if you’re interested.

Guardian news story

Firenze Today video interviewing sandwich shop owners

La Nazione: The mayor watching the first spraying down

Nothing Phoney about Bologna

May 1, 2017 by EmmaP 2 Comments

On my first visit to Bologna, as a poor student visiting from Florence ca. 1993, I visited some Irish friends and we stayed up all night, walking the long, meandering streets eating and drinking. Before we knew it, morning had arrived and I left soon after, not having visited a single museum, church, shop or market. But Bologna left an impression as a lively, tasty, interesting, real city and in the last couple of years I’ve been trying to visit it some more.

Last weekend I brought the husband for the first time, the kids staying behind with friends, and we got to explore all those streets and alleys by bike (a rare treat for us). Below are some shots of places we did get to visit, a little sense of what we saw in about 24 hours! There’s an (unusually) excellent visitor website called Bologna Welcome with loads of tips and routes and this being a young and studenty city, you’ll find plenty of visual material on Instagram.

And the word Baloney? Bologna sausage in North America is pronounced baloney, a corruption of the original pronunciation. As a term for “fake” or “low quality” it came into use in New York in the 1920s, rhyming nicely with phoney.

Bologna seems to hold great esteem among Italians all over the country – which is quite an achievement – and has a few well-known nicknames.

La Dotta (the learned one) referring to its university which is the oldest in the world and still fills the city with students, making it a very lively city with a sense of modern life living with history you don’t get in many “museum piece” Italian cities.

La Grassa (the fat one) as it’s famous even in Italy for its fantastic cuisine, offering Bolognaise sauce to the world, as well as tortellini in broth. You can’t go too wrong with the restaurant offerings here.

La Rossa (the red one) as most rooftops and porticoes are a lovely red but referring also to the strongly communist direction the city has mosty followed since the war.

These days Bologna is only an astonishing 30 minutes by train from Florence. As the rail hub for central Italy, I spent many long regional trips in and out of it 20 years ago but now it’s all fast trains and underground platforms. We’d almost forgotten that its train station was the target of an horrific terrorist bombing in August 1980, probably by neo-fascists, in which 85 people were killed. Italy’s often bloody recent history is something you’re never too far from, living here.

I spotted this in the window of a student bar/squat. A mafia version of Monopoly.

Bologna’s history is as long and interesting as any Italian city and even though it seems so close to Tuscany, it is as separate from Tuscan history as you can get, as the city was aligned with the Papal states rather than any of that Medici crowd.

The most famous landmark in Bologna is the wonderful Neptune statue by Giambologna, but it’s covered up for renovations at the moment – that’s it to the left of this cafe.

The historic centre is one of the largest in Europe and feels very circular, partly as there is no obvious river running through it. There are many towers to see, some of which you can climb. These two leaning beauties are known as the Due Torri, a serious landmark if ever I saw one.

The porticoes cover about 38 km of the city streets, and I’ve heard that the locals don’t usually carry umbrellas.

Food is really the thing in Bologna.

There are any number of fantastic trattorie, restaurants, aperitivo bars. This place is a heaven for eating well. You’ll find plenty of info online about local dishes, recommendations.

We found the Mercato di Mezzo very handy – a small renovated covered market in the middle of things, and I have to admit that the pizza we had at RossoPomodoro (“Neapolitan style with the heart of Bologna”) was probably the best I’ve ever had in Italy! Just look at that beautiful oven!

I don’t usually take photos of my food, but this was exceptional! A white slow-risen pizza with little sweet yellow tomatoes (datterini gialli) and slivers of hard ricotta. Actually we just really need to get to Naples.

And we had extraordinary gelato at this little place we stumbled on, Galliera49 . We joined the queue once we noticed all the locals patiently standing around.

The main piazza is dominated by the Basilica of San Petronio – its size is a surprise when you walk in and then you learn it was meant to be as large as St Peter’s in Rome, until the building money started being diverted to building the university instead (or maybe for St Peter’s itself). The church asks visitors for €3 to pay for a paper wristband to allow you to take photos, a good idea for basic fund raising.

The chapel of frescoes by Giovanni da Modena (the €3 entrance is completely worth it for this chapel alone) contains some of the most amazing and scary images of hell: amazing what they got away with all those years ago.

My husband is a bit of an astrology nut and was entranced by the sundial running through the church – turns out it’s the longest in the world and was built in the 17th century by Cassini, famous these days for being the name of a space probe heading towards Saturn, even having a Google Doodle made in its honour. And it works! We waited until 13 minutes past 1 (we had no kids with us) and got to see the beam of sun projected through the small hole in the roof hit the meridian. Great excitement!

We also visited Santo Stefano – a charming church complex made up of several churches from different periods and which was definitely the busiest tourist attraction that day.

The Town Hall, just off the main piazza, seemed mostly busier with people grabbing free wi-fi than visiting anything interesting, but we had a poke around this charming spot and stumbled on a show of drawings by the great Italian artist, illustrator and theatre designer Luzzati.

I taken by this impressively high-profile plaque outside the town hall in memory of the many Italian women who die every year, victims of domestic violence.

Worth a visit is the Museum of Contemporary Art (MAMbo), a dynamic centre housed in an old flour factory which attracts interesting exhibitions, like last year’s David Bowie show from the V&A. Excellent cafe and bookshop too. Good for an aperitivo.

Other art spots include the Palazzo Albergati which had a wonderful Breughel show last year and has a Mirò exhibition until this September. I’ll just have to go back for that!

My Morning Cuppa

April 24, 2017 by EmmaP Leave a Comment

It was lovely to see the Irish Times publish my story last weekend about daily habit of drinking Irish tea. The exact same brand of tea, for over 20 years.

Photo taken in Dublin and sent to me via WhatsApp before being treated in Instagram

The story started as a way to work out why I still drink the same tea, carrying it back with me in my suitcase or having my Dad post it on from Dublin. In whatever foreign country I’ve been living in.

Order it online and you get it nicely bubble-wrapped

Tea is a big drink in Ireland, with a history that’s similar but a bit different to that of England. There was an interesting article about it in the Times a few years ago – how the Second World War changed habits and routes.

This tattered, old tea-cosy was knitted about 20 years ago by my auntie Meldy. My mum also attempted to make one from the same pattern but it took her 2 years (and would probably take me about 5). The cosy rang a bell with an Irish friend who saw the picture, she also has one made by her Aunt, also a Loreto nun. So we figure this is a Loreto pattern and probably adorns teapots around the world. Anyway, it keeps the tea warm.

I have a few other tea cosies – maybe their history deserves its own blog post. Stay tuned!

Olive Harvest

December 2, 2016 by EmmaP

An unexpected, and amazing, part of our experience of our time in Italy has been to live among the olive trees of Tuscany. You see them everywhere. Wise, solid and often ancient they stand firm through all weathers. They are the real natives of this gorgeous place.

The olive tree is treated with amazing respect by the people around us: for centuries they used their skin, juice, leaves, branches, bark and roots. Nowadays the main product is the oil, which is still the fuel of Tuscan life – the basis of daily cuisine and tourism, and an aid for ailments.

At school, a birthday is marked not by cake but by pane e olio (bread and oil) shared with the whole class: something my two kids are slowly adjusting to.

The freshly-pressed oil of harvest time (October-November) is the most precious of all, ideally from your own garden. People prefer to make their own oil, enough to last the whole year, and most families have land with trees planted somewhere in the area, or they source it from a family member or friend/colleague. It’s a let-down to buy your good oil from the frantoio or market, or at worst the supermarket. Always in the background is the fear of pests or memories of the catastrophic winter of 1985 when most of the trees in Tuscany were destroyed during a deep freeze.

We have olive trees in our (rented) garden and though there was no harvest this year due to an infestation we were really fortunate to join in last year’s communal work to pick the olives. This was an amazing chance for our kids to see the whole process and be a part of this incredibly strong tradition and lifestyle.

Over the course of two weekends we got together with the neighbours we somehow rarely see and with great cheer we laboured to pick the olives by hand. (Some big farms use machines to pick them but by hand is still considered the best way).

With five other families we worked to prune the trees, pick the olives, sort them and them haul them off to the local oil press where they were quickly turned into oil to be consumed right away. The pressing part was not romantic, it’s all done by machinery now but going there with your olives and coming home with your own, tasty oil is the best part of the experience.

Olive trees and boxes — Our front garden – we filled up about 40 of these boxes

During the painstaking picking process we chatted with our neighbours, got to know each other better, picked up some useful swear terms and on the last day had a potluck lunch in the garden with plenty of wine, cake and some dancing. It was not unlike a Norwegian dugnad – that twice-annual get-together with the neighbours you steadfastly ignore to clean the street or paint the walls and drink beer.

From the 40 trees in our common garden each family came away with about 8 litres of delicious cloudy, tangy oil – which we could happily certify as being organic and fair trade. Each tree yields about a litre of oil. Our trees were only planted 30 or 40 years ago but already they show some of the amazing character of those ancient trees: they’re starting to split off into two parts, merging into the general landscape of the garden. Promising to live longer than any of us.

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I took these photos during last year’s communal harvest in our garden.

Olives are ready to pick when they’re green and purple/black – they are horribly bitter if you taste them directly off the tree. They need to be either pressed for oil or cured in salt water for 6 months.

Ladder — One by one the trees are pruned and the branches fall on the ground for the kids to pick

Picking by hand — The olives are best picked by hand – sometimes including child labour.

Nets under trees — Special nets are laid out in a circle around each tree, making sure to catch every single olive that is knocked off or picked.

Raking — Using a plastic rake to pull the olives off.

Cutting the branches — Climbing up to cut the branches. This seems to be the most-coveted job and we know of an 85-year-old-man who still does it.

Nets — Setting out the nets under the trees

Luciano — Waiting for our turn at the press, it was a busy day

Press — No quaint methods here, all noisy machinery

olivedrawings — Our younger daughter had a day of picking olives with the whole of first grade. Great material for a project and she definitely understood the process better than I did.

Final oil — The fresh oil is sent home in large plastic containers. We found some large metal containers in our garage, probably last used by our landlady several years ago. The neighbours instructed us to wash them out with water and a little soap, nothing else.

And how did it taste? Buonissimo!

Windows of Wine

November 18, 2016 by EmmaP

Some people say that of all Italian cities, Florence is the least interesting from the outside. That all its treasures and intrigue are to be found inside – in the churches, museums, libraries and palazzi. Walking around the historic centre it does indeed seem quite grey on the outside, its narrow streets go on for blocks as they wind around walled-in palazzi, villas and convents, offering few of the smaller squares and parks you’d find in Rome. These monumental buildings and walls are broken up by immense gates and forbidding doorways.

Look a little closer at the elements breaking up the wall space and you will start to see – as I did only this year – a little hole next to some of the doors. It might have a pointed arch, and it might be blocked up or have a little wooden door. It’s a small window, just large enough for someone to pass a bottle of wine through it. Which is actually what these windows were built to do.

Built into the wall to allow the purchase of a glass or bottle of wine, these windows date back to the time of the grand Duchy during the 1500s and were in use mostly until the 1800s. Enterprising Florentine families who had a vineyard in the country and plenty of chianti or vernaccia to spare, would sell it directly from their home to thirsty city-dwellers. There are about 150 of these wine windows around Florence and about 30 more in a few other towns and cities nearby. But otherwise they are not found anywhere else in Italy.

Customers would bring their empty bottle (often a traditional fiasco), hand over the money and receive a full bottle of quality wine. The wine window would be located close to the cantina (wine cellar) and so the servants could conduct the transaction easily without needing to let anyone into the fortress-home. A document from 1591 lists the price of a full bottle*: 1 lira, 6 denari and 8 soldi (the old Italian shillings and pence system).

Even though some of them are still used today – to hold a plate of doorbells or sometimes still as a window – many locals don’t even know their history. An association to study and try to preserve them, Buchette del Vino, was set up only last year and they are busy working to find and preserve them all. Just before writing this, I found one of the Fiesole ones right at the bottom of our road, having passed it hundreds of times!

They are usually called buchette del vino – a buca or buco means a hole, and buchetta is a little hole. But this being a city of poets they have some other great names, indicating a very local history: finestrini (little windows), nicchie (niches), porticielli (little gates), tabernacoli (tabernacles) and best of all porte del paradiso (gates of paradise).

One wine window is in the wall of famous gelateria Vivoli, near Santa Croce and it was only discovered after the Florence flood of 1966 when some of the wall stucco was washed away. More on that in this article in the Florentine. And a local secret agent during the War, Rodolfo Siviero – sometimes called the James Bond of the art world – made full use of the partially-hidden wine hole in his river-front home to help save numerous, presumably smaller, works of art. The windows have been rarely depicted in images, but this 1920s painting by Florentine artist Ortone Rosai includes one.

Some windows still have their “original” wooden door or knocker, many are filled in and some are used to nice effect by the ever-enterprising local street artists of Florence. At least I think so:

The association has a map marking all the wine windows of Florence and area and also some interesting documents, like an amazing photo of a delivery of wine bottles or the 1772 decree by the Grand Duchy to allow the sale of wine in all locations in the city. They can also organise guided tours, something new for your next trip to Florence?

These windows could surely tell a few stories and, more poignantly, they call to mind the setup these days in Naples where doors have holes cut into them to allow for easier exchange of drugs. The same concept: an anonymous, zero-miles transaction, skipping the middle man.

* Note: Much of the info is taken from the Buchette del Vino website and an article in La Repubblica on 26 November 2016.

Doggy bag? Sì, grazie!

October 20, 2016 by EmmaP

We live in Florence and so we’ve had visitors come to stay. As you’d expect we usually take them out to eat and sometimes – after a serious 3 or 4-course affair – someone might declare they’re full and suggest they bring home the leftovers. “How do I ask for a doggy bag?” “Umm… well”, I reply. “It’s not really what you, um, do here”. So they order some more wine and keep picking at their steak and grilled fennel. Which I assure them wouldn’t taste the same tomorrow anyway.

In Italy you eat what is on your plate. There is an unspoken understanding between the chef and you: that she/he knows how much you should eat of a certain dish to satisfy your taste and that you should know yourself how much you can handle today. There is still a strong current of resusing unused food in traditional recipes – like in Tuscany where old bread is used for the next day’s Ribollita soup (my preferred comfort food) or Panzanella, bread salad.

*Lunch at the Mercato Centrale, Florence*

But recently Italians have started to admit they can’t always finish up their meals and are trying – with the help of the government – to embrace a new concept. The doggy bag.

The name – doggy bag – is thought to originate in wartime America where responsible citizens were encouraged to feed their pets only with table scraps, taking them home in wrapped up wax paper bags marked with “Bones for Bowser”. Diners soon starting asking for it for themselves and the concept stuck. This is from an interesting Smithsonian article I found.

doggie-bag-resized-600 — *Courtesy of Tuscantraveler.com*

While it’s easy to ask for a doggy bag in an American or Canadian restaurant it’s just not common in many parts of “Europe”. Taking care of your leftovers is popular with thrifty and conscientious hipsters as well as graphic designers, and big-shot English chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall leads a campaign called Too Good to Waste, an effort to persuade nicer British establishments to offer doggy boxes. They have a cute slogan: Be a lover, not a leaver.

But the issue goes well beyond individual diners and into the much wider global issues of food and waste management. The FAO has estimated that 40% – that’s 40% – of food produced in Europe goes to waste. France passed some fairly tough laws last year which punish producers who do not deal with the issue. The Italians decided instead to take the kinder track, to instead provide incentives and improve ease of use. Perhaps they were encouraged by the interest taken in the issue by Francesco, everyone’s favourite pope.

In August this year the Italian senate unanimously passed into law a bunch of measures to start dealing with food waste. Aiming to reduce the estimated 5 million tons of food thrown away every year, the measures include ways for companies and farmers to more easily donate unused food to charity by setting realistic rules about sell-by dates and food safety and liability issues.

But of most interest was the inclusion of an initiative to encourage ordinary Italians to break the habit and consider it normal to take their unfinished food home rather than let it go to waste. A budget of one million euros was set aside for a government initiative to persuade people to start using doggy bags – so far it’s hard to see exactly what has been done but it sounds good.

The under-secretary responsible, Barbara Degani, declared “the family bag is a semantic upgrade of the famous doggy bag, allowing us to take the concept out of the ghetto of our imaginary modesty and ask for one at the end of a good meal. The choice to not waste must be the new way of life. So asking for a FB (family bag) is a marker of virtuous behaviour.”

The idea of the family bag is going to take some time to trickle down and will need a push to get people used to the idea. It is a big change. This week there was a news story, for World Food Day, about a “nudging” experiment carried out in a Milanese restaurant. The diners were each left a two-coloured token on their place setting when the meal started. The token was meant to be a neutral way of indicating their interest in taking home what they could not eat. It was left on the table with the green side up, indicating the diner would be happy to have a doggy bag. They had to make a conscious change to red to decline the service. Apparently they were successfully nudged into taking the food home.

We are used to taking extra food home, especially with kids, but we haven’t done it much here apart from the occasional pizza. On a recent IKEA trip, we discovered in their restaurant they have a stack of flatpack doggy boxes. Like any other product it needed assembling and was a bit smaller than expected. I still find it odd to see Italians lunching on meatballs and daim cake (even if the restaurant does sell wine by the glass) but this might give them some ideas in the food recycling department.

Troppo buono per essere spreccato, the boxes declare – too good to chuck away. Trust the Scandinavians to start getting the message across.

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The Real Scoop on Gelato

July 6, 2016 by EmmaP

A Japanese friend who has lived in Italy for about 15 years remembers the oddest thing she noticed when she first moved here – a man walking down the street eating an ice cream.

When you live here for a while, you develop a different relationship with gelato from that of your tourist days. As a visitor to Italy gelato is a treat to be savoured – only here can you eat the genuine article, like an original cappuccino. But over the long-term eating gelato – especially during the hot months – becomes part of your routine, indeed your daily nourishment. I could almost use the word “diet” as our own family doctor recently “recommended it” my younger daughter’s sore tummy.

We have a favourite gelateria in Florence, Badiani. We discovered it by chance on our very first August night in the city, staying at a cheap Airbnb flat a few blocks from the stadium. We arrived into this oven on the night of a Fiorentina/AC Milan match and the kids were as perplexed by the noise of helicopters and bright lights as we were by the civilised purple-clad fans chatting and relaxing outside the local wine bars. Good old Google maps pointed us to a gelateria at the other corner of our block and it turned out to be not only our favourite place since then but one of the best, and least- touristy, in the city.

I am not really a big ice-cream person, perhaps due to eating too much of it during the (J1) summer I spent serving ice-cream in Boston, at the well-known local spot Emack and Bolio’s: my one claim to fame was that I served Mark Wahlberg (then known as Marky Mark).

But living here now, especially with children, I enjoy the taste and flavours of gelato in a way I never did before, with so much more satisfaction. Living here as a (clueless) student I went to the same few places over and over and had no sense of good taste – though to be fair, one of them was Vivoli, still wowing customers today. But I think the scene has improved hugely during those 20 years and gelato eaters have become more demanding.

When you get to a point in the day where you’re hot or tired or in need of a pick-me-up, the smallest sized cone will be enough to completely refresh you, as well as your palate. Eating more than 3 scoops on a large cone – that’s starting to overdo it a bit. And not what the locals would always do.

So here are some tips from me on how to eat gelato like a local.

Gelato versus Ice cream
The main difference is that American-style ice cream uses more eggs and cream and is heavier. Italian gelato – which means frozen, so it can actually refer to all types of sweet cold stuff – uses more milk than cream, contains fewer preservatives (if any) so it was probably made very recently, might have a lighter colour and it has fewer and fresher ingredients. It could still have a lot of sugar, depending on the place, but as long as you know … that’s up to you.

You’ll notice the gelato is not always scooped up into a ball and it’s not hard and icy but soft and nearly melted. The best servers will churn it gently with an oblong metal spoon before being gently piling it into your cup or cone.

Choose your gelateria
A shop devoted to selling gelato is called a gelateria (plural = gelaterie) but a cafe or bar might advertise themselves as such too, and they may serve high-quality gelato.

Look for a sign declaring Produzione Propria – which basically means “we make it ourselves”. (In some cases that might mean they made it from a packet, but you’ll learn to spot the difference.)

Avoid the gelaterie that displays their gelato piled up really high, and with bright colours – especially noticeable for pistachio and banana. If it’s from a pre-made gelato mix you might see a little sign displaying the logo of the dairy company alongside the flavours. But some days you’re desperate and you can’t really go too far wrong!

The best gelaterie keep their gelato in steel containers, even sometimes hidden away so you have to choose from the list of flavours on the board and you can always ask to taste them. Quantity of flavours is not always a marker of quality – some of the best and most local places offer just a few flavours. And that usually suits the local clientele just fine.

Choose your price and pay
First choose what size and price you want, pay for it at the cash desk and take the receipt (lo scontrino) to the counter and start choosing from the wonderful array. So if you want a €2 cone or cup you would ask for un cono/una coppetta da due euro.

In some places it’s okay to choose your gelato first and pay after, but this system is helpful as you don’t have to worry about paying extra to sit down, if there are seats, and you don’t have to dig around for change while holding a melting ice-cream.

Cup (una coppetta) or Cone (un cono)?
Eating from a cone is a more sensory experience and can make it last longer. Good, say, if you’re really hungry or driving a car! As for a cup, you could quibble about the wastefulness of the plastic spoon and paper cup, with no obvious method of recycling nearby. But Italians seem to go for either, depending on their mood.

The smallest size (about €2 or less) will usually be enough for you and in most gelaterie you can fit two flavours (gusti) for that. You tend to order by size and then work out with the server how many flavours you want. It’s not so much about the scoops and size, it’s actually more about the marrying of the right flavours.

If they haven’t given you a little spoon (un cucchiaino) it’s polite to ask for one unless you (or your child) can easily access the dispenser.

Taste it first
It’s fine to ask for a taste while you decide, though asking for 4 or 5 might be pushing it. You can say posso assaggiare? (can I try?) or posso gustare? (can I taste?).

Choose your flavours carefully
Flavours that go well together are usually grouped together, in Italian they’d say they marry well (questi gusti si sposono bene).

So for example you shouldn’t really mix cream-based and fruit-based. Why? Because the textures are different; the flavours might clash; one of them is more melted than the other; or just because the server says you shouldn’t really have the mango and coffee together. Indeed I was once refused my chosen combination at our favourite place – I had to bow to their sense of propriety, though they could have been a little less stern about it!

KEY FLAVOURS
Remember, try to combine flavours that sit close together in the cabinet.

The Chocolates
It can be very dark (fondente) or more milky (cioccolato al latte or just cioccolato) or you might find it mixed with orange (arancia) or something spicy (messicano, con chilli etc).

Vanilla
I grew up with vanilla being the standard neutral ice cream you get (if you haven’t really deserved something fancier after that day’s dinner) but in Italy it’s not always on the menu. When you do find it – it’s called vaniglia – in a good gelateria, it will really taste of vanilla.

The Creams
These are the plainer, more neutral flavours, to complement a stronger chocolate or nut. But they can be magnificent in their simplicity. You have crema (often like a bakery cream), panna (more like whipping cream) and the simple Fior di latte (milk). This last is worth ordering just to be able to enunciate such a beautiful name.

A Florentine speciality is Buontalenti, named after the local lad (well, actually an architect to Grand Duke Cosimo) who, many claim, brought gelato into the modern world around 1600. It’s a lovely creamy, milky flavour and a delicious secondary choice.

Straciatella
A simple choice, this is a creamy gelato with chocolate chips. Almost as refreshing as my own favourite, menta (mint usually with chocolate chips).

Pistacchio
Be prepared for a new taste sensation. Pistacchio nuts are the pride of Sicily and they make wonderfully smooth gelato with varying degrees of nuttiness. A good gelateria will offer several styles of pistacchio and my favourite is (of course) Pistacchio da Bronte – named after the small Sicilian town, which eventually became a variant, through the father of those Yorkshire writers, of my own surname, Prunty.

Note that in Italy it’s pronounced the other way, with a hard “c” – Pistakkio.

Other Nuts
I’m not a nut person but my kids assure me you can’t go too wrong with nutty flavours as a primary or counterpoint to chocolate. Hazelnut (nocciola) is common though as it’s an expensive ingredient it’s worth looking for a good-quality and pure version. For a more chocolate-based flavour you’ll find nutella is a common ingredient, as well as Bacio – from the (acquired) taste of the Italian chocolate brand.

The Fruits
A good gelateria follows seasonal pattern of fruits. Some wonderful words to learn here: fragola (strawberry), melone (melon), lampone (raspberry), frutti di bosco (mixed berries), anguria or cocomero (watermelon), arancia (orange), pesca (peach), ciliegia (cherry), fico (fig).

Limone (lemon) is usually year-round and almost a category on its own, with an amazing ability to bring down your temperature and a good measure of the quality of the gelateria.

Semi-freddo and others
This is your section with flavours like Tiramisu or Zuppa Inglese (trifle) which are more like semi-frozen puddingy desserts, not quite ice-cream. Nice if you’re hungry as well as hot.

Some interesting colours are produced from sesame (sesame side gelato, which is gray/purple and considered healthy), liquirizia (licorice, green/brown, let me know if you try it), and a friend swears he once had tabacco (tobacco).

You can also find flavours like riso (rice) and cheese-flavoured gelato like mascarpone, or my current favourite which is ricotta e fichi (ricotta and fig).

Gluten-free and Vegan
Many fruit flavours actually have dairy in them (you can tell by how much the colours of each fruit seem more fruity or more creamy). But more and more gelaterie offer gluten-free or vegan flavours and will usually advertise them. Or you can just ask.

And the best gelato in Florence?
Gelato is good all over Italy though Florence (luckily for us) is considered one of the top spots.

This wasn’t meant to be a guide, but how can I not make a few suggestions?

Downtown the perennial favourites which you’ll find in many guides are Vivoli, Carabè, Perche Nò and La Carraia. I quite like the big multinationals Grom and Venchi, though I prefer the former as they’re all about freshness and have a great location beside the Duomo. Near San Marco there’s the nice Sicilian place Arà è Sicilia that does amazing granitas and on the other side of town at the bottom gate of the Boboli Gardens, at Porta Romana, there’s the friendly and health-conscious Gelateria Yoguteria Porta Romana. But in our house, the favourite by far, even if I find them a little snooty, is Badiani – close to the football stadium and well-off the tourist track but buzzing with well-heeled locals and flat-footed football fans long into the evening. My preferred option for friendliness is further back along the road to the centre, Cavini’s – cheap and fresh and friendly. (In Fiesole I previously recommended Ferro Battuto but as of June 2017 it has not reopened. Best to stick with Le Cure for a gelato nearby.)

How to order like a local
Similar to the art of ordering at a busy cafe, it’s an education to observe how the regulars procure their scoop of the day. Here’s how:

After greeting a few people in the door you drop your coins of exact change in the cashier’s bowl and wander over to the display. You probably already want the same thing you’ve had the last couple of weeks – and many people go for just one flavour in their cup – but maybe you go for something new. You catch the eye of the next server who scoops up your choice in 10 seconds, you’re out the door, hovering to eat it while you chat to another regular. And you’re gone, back to work or your shopping errands or your car, in less than 4 minutes. Or if this is evening-passeggiata time you might linger to chat for another hour. Just play it by ear.

Some other links:

More on gelato in Florence from Emiko Davies
A little history
More on flavours

Happy scooping!

Wash your Language is a blog about real life and language, by an Irish-Canadian exploring the change in pace in Italy after years in Norway. I offer web copyediting and proofreading as well as translation from Norwegian to English and Italian to English. Read more.

The Food is Beautiful

May 17, 2016 by EmmaP

You’re moving to Italy, they cried. Think of all the wonderful food you’ll eat every day! Your kids will learn to eat well, you can shop for fresh, amazing, natural and colourful food at the market everyday and absorb ancient secret recipes for the healthiest food on the planet! Washed down by good wine which will be cheaper than water!

It sounds good doesn’t it?

And yes, the whole food side of things is wonderful now we live in Italy and it’s fascinating to observe how it is completely integrated into daily life. In fact, I’m holding myself back from gushing too much – my Norwegian readers will understand just how amazing it is after years in the barren aisles of Rema, Coop and Kiwi, forced to buy overpriced, low-choice foodstuffs. Eating out with our kids in Oslo was something we could rarely afford to do and we often travelled home from a trip abroad with a bag full of basic groceries (cheese, ham, even soap) that was cheaper abroad; even from Denmark or Germany.

I was never ready for this food at the Norwegian supermarket.

But like any element of life in a new country, you begin to see more complexity. This is also true when you start eating like a local.

When we first arrived, we behaved like tourists (well, Norwegian tourists) who relish the thought of living amidst all this good stuff.

Here we were in Tuscany at the end of summer and markets and restaurants overflowing with tomatoes, aubergines, greens, beans, watermelon, and oranges. Into autumn we got to taste the fresh red wine (vino novo), the type that’s not even corked and goes fizz in your mouth. We ate well and started to explore the local flavours, encouraging our kids to try new foods. On their first day of pre-school camp they had clearly clued into the behaviour of their new peers. What did they give you for lunch, we asked them. Oh just rabbit lasagne.

We soon realized how food is part of the conversation. Every conversation, in fact. In other places the default topic is the weather or real estate. In Italy it’s food, among strangers, friends and especially family. It makes sense, there’s so much to say, so you can see how it’s treated with great respect and interest.

A Scottish friend who’s lived here many years told me how she first found it so dull, all this chat at the office lunch table about olive varieties or fillings for tortellini or the new pizzeria up the road, but after a while she got into it and finds many reasons to talk about it. And we’re heading that way too.

Italians love to talk and that’s what cellphones were designed for. (Smart phones are still mostly used as conversational devices here, often shoved up the side of your moped helmet just before you put it on and buzz off down the road). On the bus, walking down the street, if you tune in to someone talking on their phone, you’ll almost certainly hear it’s about food: “can you pick up some of that and we’ll serve it with the rice, enough for 8” or “how did you make that filling, it was delicious” or just “where did you book for lunch on Sunday?”

Any visitor to Italy has enjoyed the typical three-course meal imbibed over a lazy hour or two, often with friends: pasta or rice followed by fish or meat and dessert and coffee, with wine and water. It’s a wonderful way to eat when you’re on holiday, if you’re keen to try lots of new flavours in a new region. You can find strongly-held traditions when it comes to what should be eaten when, with what sauce, and in what season. When you’re living and cooking here, you find your own way to cook up all those ingredients from the market, start working through the shelves of pasta: spaghetti number 3, spaghetti number 1 or fresh pici (my new favourite). And I even tried out making pasta – so far just once.

So we kept eating, but then I was posting fewer posts online of amazing pasta dishes, gelato or just the simple lunches I rustled up at home. We do sometimes make the trip to shop at the market – always an enjoyable experience – but it’s easier to get to a supermarket every day. Just as millions of Italians do. And d’you know what? Not every Italian is an expert cook – cooking classes are popular everywhere and people do buy frozen pizza!

Then after a while, you realise you’re not crazy about the unsalted butter or unsalted bread and you start to crave some hearty Norwegian wholegrain spelt. Or, much as you appreciate the fantastic artichokes appearing week after week, you never really master a way to cook them. You don’t really fancy eating tripe for lunch, famous as it is meant to be.

And then you finally admit to yourself, that really you wouldn’t mind a curry. If you manage to find the ingredients at the supermarket, keeping your head down while you browse the corner section with international foods. Or how about some rhubarb! I can’t find that in Tuscany.

At home with the kids I often cook a normal (i.e. Irish/Norwegian) dinner of meat and two veg and recently it was a bizarre treat to cook up an old-fashioned macaroni and cheese for the kids – I barely remembered how to do it and to me the taste was an instant return to New York, and a little place off Union Square that served up single tureens of steaming, cheesy mac & cheese.

Another issue is food quality and knowing what you’re buying. Even where we live, out towards the countryside, it’s not easy to find organic meat or the best quality eggs. I’ve only begun to read about Italy’s huge industrial food industries and realise the farmers markets we have found really need more customers, like for this delicious local red wine. The woman who produced it had to remind us to pour out the top oil coating before drinking the wine. Olive oil, the original wine preservative.

I’m still excited by most of my shopping experiences – like this handy box of basil I found in the frozen section. And I’m still trying to figure out the best ways to use an ingredients like fabulous sage (salvia) which grows profusely in our garden and yet the Coop sells a tiny packet in plastic for €1.26. I know, I should be ashamed of myself! At least I’m getting to learn more how to cook through meeting great people.

The kids – are they learning to eat well? It’s hard to tell. They have developed a new relationship to food through eating new things and being served three-course hot lunches at school. But they’re also young and – here’s a revelation – Italian kids are picky too, and they don’t always get the best choices in food. Yes, even in Italy! More on that in another blog post.

Eating here is a wonderful experience, and all that you could imagine. It’s hard to admit it’s not perfect, many friends (and not just serious foodies) would give their eye teeth to live where we do. Believe me, we are grateful for it and the opportunity to learn how it can be such an integral part of the culture we’re living in – a bigger part than it has been for me before.