It was a gift she brought back in her luggage from Turkey. And the jar was tiny, not much bigger than those individual marmalade jars that hotels serve at breakfast. Sitting in front of me, she rolled a wet, ripe strawberry into the sandy contents and held it to my mouth until she convinced me to bite into it. I was astounded.
I convinced the jar to last an entire year, rationing it, bringing it out only for special occasions. Or for special people. What surprised me each time was that no one seemed to find the contents nearly as magical.
When I went to visit her in Turkey I bought 6 more jars, bringing them back to Italy. In Sicily I’d dredge astoundingly-ripe white peaches and sprinkle it into warm milk when the temperature dropped in Umbria.
It took me only twenty years to figure out that I could make the stuff myself. Much of that was income though, as I didn’t have any until I was 30 and graduated university for the last time. But eventually I started to buy vanilla pods from the purveyors for pasticcerie (pastry shops), which downgraded the pods from ‘hideously expensive' to just ‘expensive’.
As a school we now fly through the stuff, which I always make a year in advance. Students were extra impressed last year, as through the magic of Covid, our vanilla sugar at three years was that much more intense.
The fifteen kilos that I’m making today cost three hundred Euro for the vanilla pods- Tahitian (the other two major growing zones are Madagascar and Mexico) and another sixty-five Euro for the sugar. I also make one five kilo jar by also grinding stick cinnamon into it, which is not always wanted but when it is, it is.
One thing that has changed over the years is the sugar itself: we now use unrefined sugar derived from beetroot (beets). It makes the sugar seem more wholesome, brown and ashy, recalling the colour of the world’s best beaches.
Yesterday I saw the first strawberries of the year in the market here in Puglia. Tomorrow I’ll bring some home and sit in silence. The flavours will be berry and sugar and vanilla, but also of a much younger man dazzled by the tan barefoot beauty of young Turkish woman… as she held the sandy berry against my lips, and simply insisted.
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WOAH! This might be the sexiest thing you ever wrote...TB