Poached apricots in spiced syrup
Baked peaches with butter and almonds
Baked pears with Marsala and cinnamon
Kitty’s vanilla ice cream scented with citrus
Pine nut, rosemary, and sea salt caramel brittle
Rather-like-ricotta curd cheese
Ring cookies with wine and fennel seeds
I like the Roman attitude to sweet things. I like it that after a meal, especially a long one, sweetness is often provided by fruit or the spoonful of sugar you stir into your espresso, plus the knowledge that you’ll walk out for a gelato later. I love the way that, should a dessert be called for, it’s perfectly acceptable—encouraged even—to ask one of your guests to call in at one of Rome’s countless pasticcerie (pastry shops) to buy something that’s luscious and brassy in equal measure. It makes me smile that if you do make pudding, it may well wobble.
I like that in Rome, gelato is considered beyond the bounds of mealtimes and can be eaten whenever the heck you want, ideally while walking down the street. (The same could be said about cream cakes. I’ve never seen so many men eating cream cakes as I have since moving to Rome.) I adore the fact that sweets and festive food mark the year better than any calendar, and that cakes, tarts, and cookies are eaten for breakfast. Cookies, I should note, are also dipped in wine, a good thing in my book. It seems fitting that for the Romans, a spiced fruit cake for Christmas means as much as it does to the English.
The recipes in this section reflect this Roman attitude: fruit, some wobbly puddings, a breakfast cake that’s at home anywhere, cookies for dipping, a chocolate salami, and a spiced fruit cake painted yellow. As with the rest of the book, the recipes are inspired by, and I hope loyal to, Roman food traditions, but are also influenced by my English roots, by Vincenzo’s Sicilian ones and—perhaps most importantly—by how we like to eat.
My friend Ezio knows how to choose a good watermelon: the color, the bowling ball weight, the full B-flat when given a proper thud. He also knows how to cut one, which might sound like the most obvious thing in the world, but isn’t. After inserting the point of the knife he uses his significant body weight to lever it down, cracking as much as cutting, until the fruit splits and exposes two bright rounds of almost rudely red flesh. The same movement is used to cut one of the halves in two, then swifter cuts and cracks divide the fruit into craggy wedges that are passed around the table. Some people approach their wedge with a knife and fork, but most forgo any cutlery intervention and meet the crystalline flesh head on, spilling ruby-tinted juice and black seeds, leaving lips cold, chins glistening, and wrists a temptation for the wasps that hover nearby. Vincenzo is the only one at the table who squeezes lemon juice on the red flesh, because he is Sicilian and squeezes lemon over whatever he can.
There is, I think, no better place to observe the place and importance of fruit in an Italian meal than at the table with Ezio, Ruth, and their four kids. However long or short the meal, and whether there’s another dessert to come or not, fruit is always served. Sometimes it’s from their garden, sometimes not. Either way, it’s always served generously and with a sense of easy ceremony. In winter there’s what I used to consider the boring but reliable fruit: apples, pears, oranges, or clementines with bright green leaves. Ezio peels the fruit and passes the slices or segments around the table to those who can’t peel as niftily as him. The arrival of spring is marked by strawberries, and then, a little later with the heat of June, the first figs, pale green with white cracks, and if you’re lucky a teardrop of nectar at the tip of the stalk. Melons next: fragrant cantaloupe, or better still an almost-white galia melon to be carved into new moons, and soon after the stone fruit, as flushed as self-conscious teenagers: apricots, peaches, nespole, and plums. As summer progresses, the cherries darken from cerise to purple and arrive at the table in the biggest colander, to be grabbed by the handful, bitten into, and have their stones spat out from mouths to hollow fists. Ezio, the king of cherry eating, is the fastest. By late July the watermelons are humming like Pavarotti and provide abundant, careless refreshment, both sweet and thirst quenching. Autumn is marked by the arrival of grapes in huge bunches with vine handles, and soon after orange persimmons forewarn the return of winter, telling us that the fruit cycle at the Ferraro-Duffy table is about to begin again.
Choosing a partner to serve with the fruit is really no different from ordinary matchmaking in that you consider a suitable partner, introduce them at the table and then leave things be, or rather leave your guests to get on with it. A bowl of sugar and wedges of lemon for the strawberries, a lump of deep yellow Cheddar for a rough-skinned Russet apple, a piece of blue-veined cheese for the figs, a round of goat’s cheese for the grapes or cherries. There’s an Italian saying that goes something like “Don’t let the farmer know how good cheese is with pears.” I suppose this is because if we do tell him—although I suspect he already knows—he might not share his pears, or his cheese, depending on what sort of farmer he is. Anyway, in case you don’t know—which I think you probably do—pears pair extremely well with cheese. I particularly like a ripe Comice or Bosc, peeled, sliced, and eaten with craggy pieces of pecorino or Parmesan, the sweet, vinous flavor of the pear contrasting with the salty, granular cheese. What I like even more is pear, cheese, and a slice of what Vincenzo’s Sicilian family call cotognata, or quince paste.