'Tis the season

A faithful reader has urged me to take a break from extolling our thrilling new bathroom and instead provide some insights regarding the local food scene. "How about some posts on seasonal food, or is the food similar all year round?" this reader wants to know. "How much is local, and how much imported, and do people care?"

Produce here seems to be much more seasonal than in California, which means there's less variety but much of it seems fresher. Carrots, celery, peppers, fennel, zucchini, and eggplants are always available, and so are bananas and lemons. But I started seeing romaine lettuce for the first time a few weeks ago--evidently is doesn't grow well earlier in the year--and the plums and apricots that were abundant last summer have been replaced by oranges, mandarins, clementines, and persimmons. People do seem to care about sourcing, since markets show whether produce, meat, and other foods are from Italy or from other countries--Spain, France, Morocco.

The produce at our local supermarket.

Certain foods are seasonal in that they're associated with the holidays. Chestnuts, walnuts, and other nuts started appearing at all the markets a few weeks ago, and everyone was offering special deals on seafood, which people eat on Christmas Eve and I believe on New Year's Eve as well. But the seasonal food that's been most noticeable is panettone and its variants, along with all the other sweets that are part of the Christmas season here. (And it is the Christmas season; other winter holidays go mostly unmentioned in this still very Catholic country.)

Latteria 55's windows were full of variations on panettone

Panettone is a sweet yeast bread studded with candied fruits and nuts, and we've gone through several, ranging from a delicious and rather pricey one from the Latteria downstairs to a discount panettone that really wasn't worth eating.  

So were the aisles at Paladini, a gourmet emporium.

Other seasonal delicacies are less popular and more niche. Two examples are those slabs of sweetened chestnut paste that we tried last year (and feel no need to try again) and pannerone, a cheese native to Lodi, a town about an hour northwest of here. 

I saw a slab of pannerone on the counter at the Latteria and found it very appealing, with its creamy texture and profusion of tender little dimples. 

After ogling it for a week or two, I finally bought some. But when I got it home and tried it I was sure it had gone off. I'd purchased a small piece wrapped in plastic, rather than a chunk off the big wheel. Could my piece have been sitting around too long? Because it tasted not just cheesy but weirdly bitter. 

The next time we were in the shop I asked for a taste off the big wheel, and it had the same slightly alarming flavor as the piece I'd already bought. "It's bitter," the lady behind the counter told me. "You eat it with pears, or honey. It's seasonal, only in winter." 

Americans don't like bitter flavors; to us it signals danger, spoilage, poison. But Italians love amarezza--their word for "bitterness" even sounds a little like amore, right? Look at their array of bitter aperitifs and their enthusiasm for escarole, cima di rape, and other bitter greens. 

A quick online search revealed that pannerone is bitter because it's made without salt and with extra rennet. I also learned that very little pannerone is made, which indicates that even most Italians perhaps find it a bit much. I've tried eating it with pears and with Danny's apricot jam from last summer. Paired with something sweet the cheese is edible but still not what I'd call delicious. I'm not surprised that panettone is vastly more popular than pannerone. 

Another sweet that's big at this time of year is torrone, Italian nougat, made with honey, egg whites, and nuts. One of the booths at the tiny (and frankly rather disappointing) Christmas mercatino in our piazza was devoted to Sicilian candies, including multiple kinds of soft torrone.  

The torrone are those big brown, white, and green lumps on the upper right.

The local version uses the same ingredients, but whereas the Sicilian torrone looks sort of like half-dried cement, local torrone is so shiny and white it could be mistaken for some kind of textured plastic construction material, and so hard it's a challenge to break it into pieces, let alone chew it. It's also stunningly sweet and, after the first bite, quite addictive.

This is from a case at Caffe Madeleine, but torrone was being sold all over.

Yet even though there were lots of seasonal specialties, mostly the Fidentini kept eating the same things they always eat. Anolini, little cheese-filled pasta rounds served in meat broth, are traditional holiday fare, but they're also traditional the rest of the year. Ditto the fizzy wines, the pig's ankles stuffed with pork sausage, the Parma ham, the puffy fried bread called torta fritta. 

Ditto also a relatively new arrival, but one that's been embraced wholeheartedly: pizza. Our favorite pizza take-out keeps making the same pies, regardless of the time of year, but in December they delighted us with a different holiday box every time we showed up. This one was my favorite.

 In the words of another faithful reader, "Pizza on earth."