Page 35 of My Lemon Grove Summer
‘Right, let’s start. We need to attach this to the table – Lennie, can you help me? And Zelda, can you flour the table? Tabitha, please go and find some lemons from the trees out there.’
‘I thought they were limes?’
‘No, the small green ones are verdello. Smaller than the ripe ones. We get them more in the summer or when the trees don’t have much water. The less water, the more verdello. But they have amazing smell and aroma.’
‘Are you sure I’m allowed in there? It seems to be all fenced off.’
‘Don’t worry, a few lemons won’t make any difference. No one will notice they’re gone,’ he says, attaching the pasta machine to the table with a final tight screw and shaking it for sturdiness.
‘I’ll switch off the electric fence,’ says Billy.
‘Buon!Good!’ Luca smiles at Billy, who nods and smiles back. ‘Now, to work . . . To start, we put the flour into a mound and make a well in the middle, then crack the eggs into the well. I brought eggs from the hens in my neighbour’s garden.’ He puts a box of them on the table.
‘We used to have hens,’ says Billy wistfully. ‘The eggs have a lovely flavour.’ And then he nips out without another word to help Tabitha.
‘Here, I brought these too, olives from my garden.’ Luca holds up a jar. ‘You can serve them with a drink. And cheese, with home-made onion marmalade. Oh, and tomatoes.’ He takes out a bunch still on the vine and hands them around for us to smell. ‘We can make a caprese salad. It has all the colours of the Italian flag, white, red and green. We have mozzarella for the white, and for the green we need basil. There will be some outside. Can you go and look?’ Ralph turns to go.
‘With the pasta, we will keep it simple, like the salad: a lemon and garlic sauce. I will show you how to make it. And then ice cream.’ He takes a tub of the lemon gelato out of the bag and smiles at me. ‘Simple food, but very special. Your guests will be happy, I’m sure.’
‘Thank you, Luca,’ I say, and once again I feel like my eyes are in some way locked onto his when I look at him. He smiles and I find myself blushing. I hurriedly push up my sleeves and start to rub the flour and eggs together as he has instructed. I have to stop feeling like this every time he speaks to me. It’s ridiculous! Well, that’s one good thing about the fact that we’re leaving here soon. I won’t have him distracting me when I want to put all my effort into being with Lennie.
‘Here, Luca, lemons!’ Tabitha arrives back in the kitchen slightly out of breath. ‘That fence isn’t easy to get over.’
‘Not lemons, verdello,’ he corrects her, and smiles. She smiles back.
‘Verdello.’
‘Magnifico!’ he announces, and takes them from her. ‘Grazie, perfecto!Now you sayprego,’ he tells her.
‘Prego!’
‘Now we are all speaking Italian,’ he beams. ‘Next we will try Sicilian.’
‘You mean there’s a whole different language just for Sicily?’ asks Barry.
‘And you speak English!’ says Sherise.
‘Of course! Why use just one when we can use all three?’ And he starts to explain the differences between the languages while we all cook together.
‘Ralph, here, open this wine.’ He pulls out two bottles. ‘Keep one for your guests; let’s open the other and have a glass. It comes from higher up the mountain, close to Mount Etna. The vines thrive on the sloping mountainside. And the earth is rich from the volcanic dust. It’s why our fruit is so good too. Only in Sicily do we have blood oranges, made so from Etna’s ash. It is rich in nutrients. That’s why we were known for our lemons,’ he says, handing round a verdello for us to smell.
‘Wereknown?’ Tabitha picks up on what he has said.
‘In Sicily we had lemons everywhere. It was discovered that citrus fruit stopped scurvy, and so when boats passed this way they would be filled with lemons to keep the sailors healthy. It’s how this island became so rich.’
‘And now?’ I ask.
‘And now, well, let’s just say that there are lots of places that sell lemons. Supermarkets want them at the lowest price, not always the best quality.’
As we prepare the food, we take sips of the glorious, rich red wine and pick at the glistening olives with crunchy raw carrot and fennel seeds. Eventually we stand back and look at our work. Sherise and I have laid the table outside, under the fig tree in the courtyard. Beyond that, the rooms are ready. We all smile and take our wine into the courtyard as the sun begins to drop in the sky.
‘Ready?’
‘Ready. Andgrazie,’ I say to Luca, clinking glasses. I look at Lennie, who holds his own glass up and joins in.
‘Grazie, Luca,’ he says. ‘We couldn’t have done this without you.’
‘It’s the least I could do,’ Luca says.
