LEMONS from Al on farms battling big companies
in a war over taste and tradition. Farmers say the corporations are
committing sacrilege by adding flavorings and artificial ingredients.
The competition also has sparked poetic debates over what region produces
the best lemons. Most believe it is here, along the coast of Sorrento,
where ages ago Ulysses and his sailors were enraptured by the music
of sirens in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius.
"Our lemons are the finest," said Fiorella Di Palma, a qualitycontrol
expert for the Piemme company's limoncello production. "It is characteristic
of this land's rich nutrients. The Sorrento lemon has a richer aroma
and is more succulent than lemons grown in Sicily and on the Amalfi
coast"
company's limoncello production. "It is characteristic of this
land's rich nutrients. The Sorrento lemon has a richer aroma and is
more succulent than lemons grown in Sicily and on the Amalfi coast."
In pastel- and curry-colored hotels here, and along the pebbled coves
where fishing skiffs break the quiet sea, everyone from the priest to
the tailor to the Mafia boss says lemons are "the gold of Sorrento."
Even the ladies in the San Francesco Rosary Society, who light candles
and pray in the dusk, uncork homemade bottles of limoncello when the
devotions and the chores are done.
Italians sip limoncello as an after-dinner digestive. It is a familiar
ritual: A waiter pulls a frost-coated bottle from a freezer and pours
the pale, yellow syrup into a tiny glass. The citrus scent rises through
the nose. The first sip is fire and ice, a burst of 32 percent alcohol
quickly subdued by the smooth, lightly sugared tang of lemon.
"Why is it big?" said Vinaccia, a mustached man with a gentle
face who, like Ulysses, sailed the seas for years - in his case, on
an oil freighter - before returning home and getting into the lemon
business. "For one thing, women like it a lot. It's really a combination:
the smell, the freshness, even the name -it's a pretty name.
"It helps people enjoy life. Life is made of small, great moments,
and sitting down at a meal with limoncello is one of them."
Limoncello's ancestor was known as rosoli, a brew of alcohol, flowers,
and fruits made by farmers in the early 1900s. Rosali's popularity grew
among the locals, especially after World War II, when Italians improvised
around shortages of whiskey, food and money. Lemon groves were treasured,
and every grandmother kept the secret family rosoli recipe tucked in
her apron.
"Rosoli gave the farmers a moment of tranquillity at the end of
a day," said Filippo PiriIlo, a sage in the limoncello business.
"Bottles used to be put in Christmas baskets given to local hotels.
It caught on with tourists and spread over Italy.
"I was the first to bottle and market limoncelIo in the early 1980s,"
Pirillo said. "I gave some bottles to a little shop next to the
Capannina restaurant on Capri, and, - boom, it took off. We went from
being craftsmen to -running a small factory."
A quaint story. But, as is customary in Italy, there are more versions
to a story than there are lemons on a tree.
"Limoncello was born here," Vincent Canale told the Italy
Daily newspaper. The Canale family brews Limoncello di Capri and has
grown sour about Pirillo's claims. "My grandmother had a hotel,
and she used to make it . ... We copied her recipe and started selling
bottles in our shop here on Via Roma."
Guess what? Giuseppe Polio's grandmother had a recipe, too.
Pollio and his mother, father, and wife have nurtured that recipe into
a small business that produces 15,000 bottles a year of one of Sorrento's
finest versions of Iimoncello. The family's groves shade the hillside;
centuries ago - before Napoleon, world wars and creeping modernity -
friars harvested these same groves.
The Pollio brand name is Il Convento, and the family sells bottles out
of the cool, dim basement of the cobwebbed 15th century San Francesco
Church. A thin, handsome man with bushy black hair, Polilo said he wanted
to keep up tradition. He pulled a lemon from a tree and held it to his
nose. The key to limoncello, he said, is soaking the rind in 96 percent
alcohol to extract the oil from the tiny sacks hidden in the skin. That
is the lemon's greatest worth; the rest is tossed away.
Pollio won't let a mechanical peeler near his lemons. Instead, his wife,
Tifiana, and his cousin, Michele Romano, slip on white caps and sit
around a stainlesssteel vat, peeling lemons by hand as the scent drifts
beyond the white-tiled walls and into the morning sun, where Pollio's
mother, Laura, clears weeds with a scythe.
As Tifiana peels, her foot rocks the stroller holding her sleeping 6-month-old
son, Antonio.
"We've perfected the recipe," said Polio, one of about 200
members in the Solagri consortium. "Nature has made” our
lemons beautiful. Mount Vesuvius protects them by blocking the cold
air from the north . ... You must understand, the perfect lemon is not
about aesthetics. It's when you hold it and the scent rises and there
is a balance between the acidity, the sugar and the oil."
|
