WE DIDN’T GET BACK TO GIMIGLIANO until after nine that evening, but Giuseppe’s wife, Elena, had prepared a pesto alla Genovese served with linguine, as well as sliced potatoes fried with porcini mushrooms, and kept it waiting for us.Giuseppe and Elena’s middle son, Domenico, had just arrived home from the University of Calabria in Cosenza for the Easter holidays. He brought his girlfriend, Francesca, with him. They both were quiet, introspective, and both had long dark hair that fell to their shoulders. She was studying linguistics, and Domenico was studying ecology.
We all sat at the table. Elena poured a glass of their wine for me and sparkling water for everyone else. Giuseppe and his wife are among the handful of people in all of Italy who don’t usually drink wine with dinner. They prefer sparkling water, and they served their youngest son, Alessio, the orange soft drink generically called aranciata. In Calabria, and in Sicily as well, the aranciata is a darker red than elsewhere, since here soft drinks and orange juice are made from the heavier-tasting blood oranges.
After dinner, Giuseppe pushed back his chair, reached into the refrigerator, and produced a bottle of bright yellow limoncello, the sweet lemon liqueur served chilled after dinner. I felt my stomach warm with anticipation.
He filled my aperitivo glass. “We drink first; then we make the next batch. I know that in America you buy everything, but here we eat and drink what we make ourselves.” Not entirely true, of course, but the thought of making my own limoncello rather than paying twenty-five dollars for a bottle back home did thrill me.
“Don’t forget,” I insisted, “my grandfather did make sausages and soppressata and wine—”
“Yes, yes. But did he ever make limoncello?”
I shook my head.
“So we will make two batches. One for you—the usual way. And then I’ll give you instructions for Martha, with a little less alcohol,” he said roguishly. Elena, Domenico, and Francesca sat back and laughed as Giuseppe bestowed upon me his exacting formula for limoncello.
He took out small lemons from the fruit bowl and counted them out on the table—sixteen in all. “But you can use ten larger ones,” he said. From the cupboard he procured an empty three-liter bottle, a liter of 95 percent grain alcohol, and two bottles of water.
He grasped one of the lemons, and with a serrated steak knife he began peeling a thread of rind so thin that the white pulp was barely visible. “Lightly, lightly,” he instructed. In less than a minute he had peeled off a single long thread of rind.
“Perfetto,” he said, holding it aloft. He handed me a knife and a lemon—it was my turn—and I peeled what I thought was a perfectly thin piece of rind.
“Marco, be careful,” Giuseppe said, pointing to the tiniest bit of white pith on the back side of the rind. The pith would make the liqueur too bitter.
I had finished five by the time he peeled his eleventh, which he brandished as another example of a perfect peel. He proceeded to cut the rind into small pieces, stuffed them into an empty liter bottle,
then poured in the grain alcohol. He placed the liter of murky yellow liquid in the refrigerator.
“We’ll let this sit for about twenty days and every two or three days open the bottle and scrape away the pulp that has floated to the top.”
He explained the rest of the process, breaking down the ingredients for my stronger bottle and the less potent one, Martha’s, which would be cut with milk.
So it was that on our first night back in Gimigliano, we ate pesto, a dish from Genoa, and drank limoncello, which comes from the Amalfi coast. When my grandparents lived here, these dishes would have been just as foreign as a burger and fries.
Giuseppe sealed the bottle and gave the top an extra slap. “It will be ready by the time you leave,” he told me. “This will be your goodbye drink.”