Back to Italy (9) – Remnants with Doisneau and Yerka

What will remain of all this? Even after more than one month from the end of these rendezvous, even if life in Edinburgh went on pretty fast and well (and many other experiences had stratified themselves on top of the Italian small Tour), the holiday in the homeland left a durable furrow in my memory. To phrase it in a more poetical way: in the concrete jungle that entangles individual existences, there is still space for a sort of marvel, which ploughs through our recognitions of naked events and surprises us as red poppies from a cement rifts:

Poppy in the concrete loneliness

I am pretty much obsessed by poppies. This is a fake crispy poppy I made for a friend:

My first (and perhaps last) attempt with the decoupage technique:
old lady preaching to a kitten,
the poppy,
a random chick!

Poppies possibly evoke an imaginary of sensual beauty, carelessness
and reduction of the Self: in May when Nature seems so powerful
the struggle of the Winter appears distant 

The image of the poppy in the concrete is also a visual portrait of the efforts a couple has to suffer (and undergo) because of a distance. The absence of the beloved person is more understandable for the reason, less workable for the heart. This summer I was deeply surprised to find another plat, which reminded me of poppies: a tomato plant in Blackwood crescent, a side road in the Newington area. I always wondered if this part of Edinburgh once was a lush forest: Blackwood is a pretty shadowy name. However, what attracted my attention was that the tomato plant, perhaps stemmed from a casually dropped (or more likely spitted) seed had been able to survive for weeks. Then the zealous effort of some garbage operator mowed it out:

Before the first yellow blossom could reveal themselves,
unfortunately the unkind sickle of tidy-streets weeded it out!

I had to put down in black and white this epiphany, because all the time I passed next to that spot, I was stressing my flatmate Frederick with this tearful stream of reminiscences: I could not accept the fact that an emotional-plant was gone forever. Similarly, what I have understood from this trip to Italy is perhaps banal: I was possibly used to pay too much attention to the places, I was complaining too much that the abandonment of a place meant also the loss of what that place gave me. Now, instead, I came across a different pattern of appreciation. I understood that sites and moments are there somewhere, and are interacting with me. Yet the people determine the most important factor: especially what they mean to us. Moreover, affection takes different shapes, as Robert Doisneau have been so able to immortalize: 

Brothers' affection 

Musician's affection

Lovers' affection

At the same time, being the filter - which screens all these solicitations and stimuli - makes me actually the real hotchpotch where all the mental processes spring up: so my perception of the voyage or of the distance is mainly buried in the sensibility of my mind, not solely in the actual happenings. The new perspective is not that of having lost a chance, but on the contrary that of having the opportunity to live each new moment differently, with a re-built awareness: we - the person I love and I - perhaps suspended some moments as a mist in the air, but there is still space to the hope of catching up again from the former instant. Only death does not allow a U turn:

An image of sidereal distance.

All the rest are just distant locations, yet distant in relationship to what we think is the centre of our sentimental life: otherwise, as the Cheshire cat points out “you’ll surely get somewhere” if it does not matter where you wish to get:

Cheshire cat's smile..."as you can see, I am not all there!"

In the end, I was always trying to compensate the Italian environment momentary loss with mechanical gratifications – as chocolate for example or expensive goods. Enacting according to this manner, I was actually only postponing the moment of resilience. Writing the blog, on the contrary, helped me to keep those memories vibrant, to let them stay with me, to go through the lost tastes and chats and kisses and make of them a living monument of my highest spirits. So, as an instance, if I take into consideration unexpected treasures, I have to account both the artichoke and the melon blossom:

Melon blossom, yellow coloured.

While the melon blossom was a real plant: the artichoke is actually a bread artichoke, a Sicilian recipe, which imitates the vegetable. You lay an incredibly thin round pastry, almost transparent as a veil, then you stuff it with provolone cheese, oregano, black pepper and extra-virgin olive oil, subsequently you fold it as a winged book then you roll it onto itself on the shorter side, like a duvet. Finally, you make a cross cut on the top, so that the layers will open up during the cooking time. This is the mouth-watering result:

Alluring, elegant, tasty and crunchy...somehow greasy, but
in a good sense.

Here are the ingredients for two bread artichokes.

Ingredients:

• 500 gr semolina (durum wheat), Waitrose sells it at 89p;
• 240 ml warm tab water;
• 2 teaspoons of dried yeast;
• 20 ml extra-virgin olive oil;
• elbow grease!

Tesco Finest* Extra-virgin olive oil, from the Iblean region Sicily,
intense, lightly peppery, and sweet as a dream,
it does cost a bit (6,99£), but it is worth trying:
(soon I will devote a page to extra-virgin olive oils)

Similar procedure for something even more tantalizing: you can call them saccottini (bundles) or tommasini (from the Ancient Greek témno, to cut) or rolls and they are conceptually close to a pain au chocolat, but filled with sausage and ricotta cheese. You can make them big, but I prefer them as morsels, so they immediately become finger food and they move from a rural food identity to a more glamorous and thrilling modernity. The pastry has to be rolled out as thin as possible, them you dig out the sausage from its tube, you distribute it on the pastry along with ricotta (previously mixed up with some alt, some grated Parmigiano and black pepper) and you drizzle the all with extra-virgin olive oil. Then you roll up the pastry with its filling and you cut this newborn snake into two centimetres sections, and then you dispose them onto an oven plate, and you let them bake until they will be medium brown. 

THIS IS THE PROCESS for Tommasini making:

1. roll out;
2. distribute the filling
(sausage and ricotta);
3. roll up;
4. cut the roll like you would do with sushi.

THIS IS THE FINAL RESULT:

This were probably 3x2 centimeters (1 inch),
they basically are savory pains au chocolat:
check The Ordinary cook (blog)
http://theordinarycook.co.uk/2011/01/23/croissants-and-pain-au-chocolat/

This E.T. pain au chocolat gives the idea!

In the end, these last nine posts that summarized my Italian holiday are over and they ferried me onto a now shore. Solidly again in Edinburgh, I kept making experiments, confronting myself with new ingredients and new suggestions. I feel myself as a roamer of tastes, cautious as a cat in a brand new setting…

LIKE THIS CAT, MAKING A COLAZIONE ITALIANA

http://www.fotoseite.petuhoff.com/inhalt/colazione.php

OR

Jacek Yerka, Between the hell and heaven, Poland, 1952...
...an example of
magical realism.
I kinda like this idea of human existence as a form of cooking Purgatory,
a sort of uncertainty suspended between bliss and damnation.
Yerka's inspirations are
Jan van Eyck, Jeronimus Bosh, Rober Campin,
and surrealist like Magritte.