Ligurian Cuisine: Tarta di Limone

Mother’s Day is upon us.  Although my mother has passed on, she’s with me everyday, and especially every time I step in the kitchen.  Even as a small child, often I was right there by her side, stirring this or pouring that.  I knew cup and teaspoon and tablespoon measures before I could read. My mother also showed me how to measure spoonfuls by the open palm, that-looks-about-right method.  One of her specialties was Lemon cake.  Gracious, I can still taste that lemony flavor that permeated my childhood dreams.  I was a championship bowl licker.

So, when I got to Cinque Terre and found out we would be making Tarta di Lemone with our hostess, Daniella, I found myself convulsed with inner turmoil.  You know the feeling: this can’t be as good as my mother’s, but I have to be nice to my hostess.  No need to fret, and one check of Daniella’s recipe will tell you why.  My mother’s was made with real lemons and no shortcuts.  No cake mix. No lemon curd from a can, or squirts of lemon juice from a plastic bottle.  Ditto in Daniella’s kitchen!  With just the heavenly aroma, you can instantly tell a cake made with fresh ingredients. Oh, my goodness!

So let’s get back to Cinque Terre and the task at hand.  Tarta di Lemone.  A quick check of the recipe and ingredients tells the story.

This cake goes together like a dream…a dream of my mother’s kitchen!

Preheat oven to 325

baking time 50 minutes

In a small bowl mix together:

1 cup flour

1 tsp baking powder

half tsp salt

In a small bowl mix together:

¼ cup yogurt (or milk)

1 tsp vanilla

In a medium bowl cream together: (I used a handheld, electric mixer)

1 stick butter (softened)

¾ cup sugar plus 2 T

zest of 2 lemons

Add 2 eggs one at a time and mix well after each.

Alternating, add the flour and yogurt mixtures to the butter/sugar mixture, then add 2 T fresh lemon juice.  (About one lemon’s worth)  Mix well.  You’ll have a light, fluffy batter.

Put the batter in a buttered/floured loaf pan and bake until a knife comes out clean.  Note: in my oven, the cake needed about seven minutes longer to bake. Let the cake cool 10 minutes then invert onto a rack. 

Slice the cake and pair it with berries and whipped cream.  And, don’t you dare use a can of pre-whipped cream…or sin of sins, Cool Fluff!

In this recipe, the cake’s deep lemon flavor isn’t overpowered by sugar and I like to keep it that way.  No icing.  Let the whipped cream and berries do their work of enhancing and adding depth to the flavor. Your only other job is to have a glass of milk close at hand…make that a quart!

Come on now!  Mother’s Day is only a day or two away!  Let’s be kind to our childhood memories!  Daniella sure helped me refresh mine!

Cinque Terre, Part III

I’ve given you an overview of fabulous Cinque Terre. http://stroudallover.blogspot.de/2017/04/on-to-cinque-terre-part-i.html

AND told you about the delights of Ligurian cuisine. http://stroudallover.blogspot.de/2017/04/lunch-with-daniela-cinque-terre-part-ii.html

NOW, it’s time to spread our map, hop on a ferryboat and checkout the five villages and another one that doesn’t make up the Cinque Terre, but nevertheless is a jewel of a stop.

Getting around.  Lots of choices.  TAXI (expensive from town to town).  TRAIN (convenient and inexpensive BUT make sure you buy the right ticket or you’ll be fined up to $55 per person). WALKING (least expensive, but it’s a long walk!)  BOAT (my fave!  $25 for an all day, hop-on-hop-off trip in a spotlessly clean, first class ferryboat)

Lots of reasons taking the BOAT is my fave.  In addition to the excitement of glimpsing all of Cinque Terre from the water, is the supreme convenience of being able to look around, shop, eat, and climb back on board to do the same at the next village.  Boats run on a frequent schedule, so you seldom have to wait until you’re bored and stamping your feet in frustration.  Lastly, I like the ferryboat because it’s so inexpensive.  Convenient, beautiful. cheap!  The trifecta!

Lets talk briefly about the five, no wait, six towns!  Check out the map.  We’ll start from the largest and most northern town, Monterosso which is where we stayed.  Lots of shopping and lots of restaurants, but let’s not forget it’s also a vibrant, functioning town with small food stands, grocery stores, tiny shops, outdoor cafés, and a market square that really is a market place with fresh produce, cheeses, meats, flowers and so much more.  You’ll have to check with locals to find out the times and dates.

I love the back streets, where small, non-tourist shops offer local goods, such as dried herbs, wines, flavored salts, olives, cheeses, and cooking utensils the locals use.  Don’t you love to have friends over for dinner, or just wine and cheese and as they swoon over your lavishly laden serving bowls and platters, you hear:  Wow, those dishes are charming!  Where did you get them?

Then the snob in you comes bouncing out like a jolly joker:  Got those on our last trip to Cinque Terre.  It’s where I buy all my serving dishes…and you see these olive wood serving spoons?  Franco Bianchi made them for me in his small atelier in Monterosso.  He’s such a caro amico.

But, now it’s time to hop on the boat for a splendid cruise on the briny and a visit to the rest of Cinque Terre.  I’m not going to go into detail about each village, since they are all similar to what I’ve just described.  History, endless shopping, seaside dining on the freshest of local seafood, washed down by local wines.  Best of all are the friendliest people you’ll ever meet, not only the merchants, but the people on the street or sitting next to you in outdoor cafés, many of whom speak English and who are happy to engage in conversations and tell you about their town.

Only one town cannot be reached by ferry boat.  Corniglia is high on a bluff and sad to say, we did not visit.  Best to walk or go by train, or so I’m told.

Cinque Terre is not just for daylight adventures. If you’re up to it and plan ahead, there are also evening dinner cruises, but they fill up fast.  We wanted to take such a tour with Angelo, but when I called, he was solidly booked four days in advance.  We were there in April and I suspect in the high tourist season it’s even worse.

One town I promised to mention that is not included when the guidebooks talk about Cinque Terre, is Porto Venere.  It is also a World Heritage Site.  Yes, the ferryboat does stop here, or if you’re just passing through, you can also get there by car.  Coming in by ferryboat, the first thing you notice is the ancient church of St Peter (1198 AD) on the cliff approaching the harbor.  But the town dates back to the first century B.C.  And in fact, the ancient church was built on the site of an earlier Christian church, which was itself built over a Roman temple dedicated to the goddess Venus.  So many conquers, so many layers of history.  Roman, Byzantine, Genoese, French. Italian.  The harbor has seen more passing of empires and city-states than I can even begin to explain.

Ok, so what did I do besides wonder and wander in Porto Venere?  The next street, which parallels the promenade along the harbor front, is a tiny cobblestone alley, so narrow you can literally jump from a store or restaurant on one side to another shop on the opposite side!  My quest was to find an Italian linen shirt.  Sure I had found them in other shops in the other towns, but at ridiculous expense.  I was willing to pay more than I normally would, but not enough to keep me awake at night, mumbling “Oh, my god, what did I do?” 

In this tiny alley, I found what I was looking for, a boutique for men, and the shop clerk was the perfect, dark haired Italian beauty.  As soon as I walked through the doorway, I knew I was going to buy a shirt.  Men are such simple fools. As it turned out, she was as charming as she was beautiful.  I tried on a shirt.   She put me in front of a large mirror and we both looked it over.  “It looks ok,” she said, but I could tell her heart wasn’t in it.  I dearly wanted her heart to be in it.

Then she searched and found a smaller size.  I stood in front of the mirror again.  Now she smiled. “Molto bene!”  I couldn’t have said it better myself.  I walked away with the perfect shirt at the perfect price, purchased from the perfect shop clerk.  Win-Win-And Dazzled.  That night I mumbled, “Oh, my god, where did my youth go?”

Lunch was on the harbor front.  Calamari.  Salad.  Delicious bread. Fried fish.  Winnnnnnne!  Should we order another bottle?  Was that a serious question? asks one of my lunch companions.

So we tarried at table, in the sunshine of a brilliant day, soaking in the atmosphere of an ancient port, while our Italian waiter brought us platters of sumptuous fare and kept our cups running over.

With great effort, we made our way back to the ferryboat, for a ride back to Monterosso and the promise of an adventurous evening.

Yes, I could live in Cinque Terre.  The question was, can I bear to leave?  Matter of fact, I think I could use another linen shirt…

The Aviators by Winston Groom

As with his book The Generals (http://stroudallover.blogspot.de/2017/03/the-generals-patton-macarthur-marshall.html), Winston Groom takes three historic figures, Rickenbacker, Lindbergh, and Doolittle, and amplifies their lives.  First question:  What the heck do you mean by amplify???

Easy answer.  Most of us, especially those of us who have cut through the air on laughter’s silvered wings, know the names and probably at least one big event in each of these men’s lives:  Rickenbacker was the highest scoring American World War I ace, 1918; In 1927 Lindbergh became the first man to fly solo across the Atlantic from New York to Paris; And, in 1942, less than four months after Pearl Harbor, Doolittle led the famous raid on Tokyo.

Eddie Rickenbacker standing beside his Nieuport 28 

Charles Lindbergh in front of The Spirit of Saint Louis

Lt Col (at the time) Jimmy Doolittle with his Tokyo Raiders

Did you know all three men received the Medal of Honor?  How about the other things that make them stand head and shoulders above the crowd? And what were their contributions to aviation?  The answers are both complex and surprising.

To begin, Groom sets the stage by exploring the times they lived in.  All three saw a plethora of technological advances that took them from the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk (1903), all the way to jets and streaking across both oceans in the comfort of huge commercial airliners.  But that’s far from all.  In their lifetimes, they saw the rise of the common use of the telephone, the radio, the automobile, and the common use of electricity and indoor plumbing in American homes.  Take a moment and consider if even our ‘miracles’ of technology have had a greater impact on daily life.

But, Groom delves deeper, goes farther and tells the often glorious and sometimes horrifying details of these men’s lives.  Before the First World War, Eddie Rickenbacker was a famous racecar driver, in World War II, he barely survived 24 days at sea in a life raft.  Lindbergh suffered the kidnapping death of his first son and flew combat missions in World War II, while Doolittle was an air racer and held both a master’s and PhD from MIT.  And, those are just a few of the highlights of their fascinating lives.  All of them promoted aviation around the globe and were called upon time and again to carry out diplomatic missions and work closely with industry.

When I heard about famous people in long-ago history classes, the names and events seemed so one-dimensional. I always pondered what the figures were really like and what led up to the big events.  Was a life just built around one historic occasion?  Whom did they love?  How did they act when the press wasn’t standing by and snapping photos?  Were they really larger than life, or just normal people cast surreptitiously into the limelight?

In an ever interesting narrative, Winston Groom carries the reader into the varied and very human lives of these giants of aviation.  The conclusion is irrefutable.  None of the three were simply thrown onto the stage of history, nor did they stagger blindly into the public eye.  Their stories are spellbinding from the beginning, as Winston Groom takes you from the dawn of aviation to the jet age.  It’s a fabulous ride.

If you’ve ever been in a cockpit, pulling the stick, pushing up the throttles, fighting off fatigue, dodging bullets, you’ll be in your element with this book.  And if you haven’t?  You’re going to get a heart stopping glimpse of exactly what these men did and what they overcame to stand so tall.