Recipe: Blood Orange Salad with Prosecco Anise Syrup
I believe my father’s relationship to the family kitchen was typical for an Italian man. There seem to be three ways Italian men, and I include Italian-Americans, involve themselves in the creation of family meals: They take over the entire dinner preparation in a intense, chef-like manner, locking out the rest of the family; they assert a dictatorial attitude about all things that come out of the kitchen, without actually cooking anything themselves (this kind of man will often do some food shopping just to make sure his wife is cooking with top-notch stuff—a very Roman approach); or they completely take over one aspect of food preparation and make it exclusively theirs, such as grilling, or preparing coffee in a fetishy way. My own father took the one aspect route. He put himself in charge of buying and preparing all the fruit that came into the house. How and why this came about, I can’t say, but he certainly picked up some of it from his father, who made a huge deal of squeezing and sniffing supermarket fruits, especially melons, and approving or rejecting their ripeness before allowing them into his home. It may also have been a vestige of the Southern Italian farming and foraging life endured by our near ancestors, in which no prickly pear was left unexamined.
For my father, fruit was a way of life, almost as central to his existence as his golf clubs. He was enamored of all tropical fruits—pineapples, guavas, mangoes, papayas, kumquats—and he fashioned them into elaborate, well-chilled fruit salads in big glass bowls. In summer he busied himself peeling and slicing peaches and dousing them with red wine or occasionally white wine, or sometimes a splash of grappa. Strawberries or blueberries got tossed with grappa and a little sugar and sprigs of mint. Pears and apples he always served with cheese, after dinner or sometimes at lunch. He’d set out wedges of cantaloupe wrapped in prosciutto to start a meal, or more often just cantaloupe sprinkled with salt, a trick he learned from his melon-crazed Puglian father. Cantaloupe also got cut in half and filled with vanilla ice cream, a perfect flavor combination, or, if we had it on hand, with sweet white wine, creating a kind of wine bowl. I absolutely loved that. Pineapple was his top all-time favorite fruit, and he’d slice it and drizzle it with sugar and rum. Bananas got a similar treatment, but he finished them with Kahlua. These were exotic and memorable desserts.
Another specialty of his was what we now call the smoothie. He usually made that with milk, ice cubes, sugar or honey, sometimes a little vanilla ice cream, and his fruit of choice, most often one of his beloved tropical fruits such as mango. Everything went into the blender, and it emerged as a fluffy pastel foam. I went through a nervous stomach era in my teenage years, and my father’s remedy for it was always one of his smoothies, often banana, which he insisted would soothe my perpetually churning gut. It helped more than the Maalox—I’ll have to give him that—but not as much as the Valium that I eventually got a prescription for.
He was a big believer in the health benefits of grapefruit, and he made a big deal about having grapefruit forks in their proper place in the cutlery drawer. (How many people even know what a grapefruit fork is anymore?) Oranges and nectarines he’d just slice up and present on a fancy platter, or work into a citrus fruit salad bowl. When he went to Florida for the winter he always sent me bags of sweet, nipple-topped Honeybell oranges in January. I really loved them, and now I miss them, since I have to order them myself and often forget. Their season is very short. It’s right now, in fact. I’m going to order some as soon as I post this blog.
After dinner in winter he’d bring tangerines to the table, along with whole nuts and a nutcracker and a bottle of Sambuca. That was a lovely cold weather ritual and a fun mess, with peels and shells all over the place. And to the astonishment of family and friends, he’d cut lemons in half and eat them like orange slices. I believe that’s a Southern Italian custom, having become one, I’m certain, only because their lemons are sweeter and more flavorful than ours. I think he used to sprinkle them with sugar. And then there was the juicing ritual. I can see him working in the kitchen at his hand-cranked citrus juicer with a crate’s worth of hollowed-out orange or grapefruit halves strewn all around him. I never saw him more content, almost Buddha-like.
In memory of my father, I’ve created this blood orange salad to celebrate the New Year. I’ve fashioned it in his style, with a little booze included. It’s something I know he would have loved.
Happy New Year’s to you.
A note about blood oranges: Moro and Tarocco blood oranges, both originally from Sicily, are now grown in California, Texas, and Arizona. I used to find imported Sicilian ones. They were very expensive but richly flavored. Since Sunkist started producing them here, I don’t see the imported ones much any more, but local blood oranges can be very good, and they’re the same varieties grown in Sicily, usually Moro and Tarocco. The Moro is acidic and can sometimes taste like baby aspirin, but in a good way. Tarocco is sweeter. The blood color of these oranges varies from fruit to fruit. Some are just barely tinged with red; others are startling dark, burgundy. If you can find Taroccos, use them for this salad.
Blood Orange Salad with Prosecco Anise Syrup
(Serves 4 as a dessert or as a palate cleanser between courses)
1½ cups prosecco (you can use slightly flat leftover prosecco if you have it on hand)
1 tablespoon limoncello
2 whole star anise
½ cup sugar6 blood oranges
A handful of nice-looking small basil leaves
Pour the prosecco and limoncello into a small saucepan. Add the star anise and the sugar, and give it a stir. Boil over medium-high heat until it’s reduced by half. You should see large bubbles forming on the surface when it’s just done, an indication that you’ve got a nice syrup. Place the pot in the refrigerator until well chilled and thickened. It should have the consistency of loose honey.
Peel and slice the oranges into thin rounds. Lay them out in a slightly overlapping circular pattern on a pretty serving platter (one that’s slightly banked at the edges is best, as it can catch the syrup). Drizzle the prosecco syrup over the top, and decorate with the basil leaves.
How Gorgeous !!
I wish I was making New Years Eve dinner tonight – this would be on the table. Also it would be a perfect variation of the fruit I served Christmas Eve — your lovely orange salad with mint, olives, black pepper, Ravida olive oil, red onions, a splash of the orange flower water you gave me on your last visit to Paris (thanks darling !)
My french guest was shocked and intrigued by the Christmas eve dish, and pleasantly seduced as well. I adore converting those flavor-fearing parisians.
I’ll have to whip this one up as the post festivity doldrums set in these upcoming weeks.
Coming from an italian-american mother and german father, there was a slightly different dynamic in our family kitchen.
Dad’s specialties were infinite variations on rice pudding, and rather good if crude cobblers. Mom generally let him do the grocery shopping. Yet she took perverse hold of the kitchen reigns when he’d get back from the Shop Rite with bargain cheeses. Among screaches and insults, she would hurl his bargain brands out into the back yard. I remember finding one outcast hidden under a tree, days later, frozen under a light snowfall, after one particularly appalling purchase.
A most lovely New Year to you & your family
Marieta
That salad looks really good…I’ll eat in memory of your father as well!
I’m not sure how much the three modes of Italian men in the kitchen rings true, but it sounds a little more like a general male characteristic than an Italian one. Of course, Italian men do bring it all masculine characteristics to their good and bad extremes. The “chef-like manner” may be a little colored by your going out to eat big meals at other homes and maybe sells short the guys who do the quotidian and unglamorous food prep! Anyway…I inherited my own imperious ways in the kitchen from my mother.
Our own family’s relation to fruit was colored by the fact that Grandpa Mastellone used to drive a truck from the fruit markets around the city. Nobody was an expert. We would all weigh in on how good a particular piece of fruit was and talk about other particularly good pieces of fruit we had had.
Hello Marieta,
Sounds like your Christmas Eve dinner went very well. I’m wondering if you ever managed to get your hands on some scallops, and if so, what you did with them?
Happy New Year to you.
It’s snowing in Manhattan, a very silvery, fine, gentle snow.
Ciao,
Erica
Hey George,
I didn’t know Grandpa Mastellone drove a fruit truck. That’s very interesting.
Happy New Year to you and family.
Erica
Erica !
Yes I did get ahold of some lovely scallopes, at that over-the-top grocery store La Grande Epicerie at the Bon Marché
Oh yeah, I was gonna cook em like you suggested – with anchovy butter. Yet my many forays from highly reputable street market fishmongers, to any and all grocery stores yielded nothing. Oh, except a suspect oil packed version, about which I cannot yet comment. to be announced at a later date when I roll up the lid. Yeah, I bought one. Still packed.
So I did it so simply, and it was adored. Saint Jacques with the corail (roe? coral?)
Sauteed in butter and great olive oil, 2 minutes one side, one the next. With a little garlic. Then a touch of lemon and parsley. The best salt from brittany and my best pepper. Basta cosi.
With that I had made fennel bulbs & jerusalum artichokes, cooked together, plus some seared porcini mushrooms; as many as I could afford — that being one big assed one– in nice oil. My guest loved the hissing sound of this preparation. Plus a little parsley. In fact, I used the parsley for all the dishes. It was working well and overtime. All in all, much success.
Really, there are no anchovies in Paris !! There was a real italian pizza maker down the road from my work, and he would make pissaladiere without anchovies because he did not accept the quality of what is available. Whas’up ? Me I don’t eat them, but I want to be able to give them to my loved ones !! Don’t fret your pretty little head about all that though, being so far away and all. I’ll check it out for you darlin’ and rectify this situation.
Sorry to report the pizza maker on the rue Cherche Midi had to vacate to make way for more fancy clothes boutiques – I’m not against, but he was the first and only real italian pizza (&pasta) maker I stumbled upon in Parigi
Bisous —- M/ta
When I mentioned to a friend the tradition of a large Italian family that lived close by in my Brooklyn neighborhood, of fixing a pitcher of red wine with cut up peaches on warm Sunday afternoons, she responded that it was not an Italian custom of Italy but a New York Italian custom. Since the family was made up of Italian immigrants and first generation Italian Americans I would assume this custom would have been authentically Italian. I have tried to verify this myself but cannot come to any definitive conclusion. I would appreciate your response.
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