How good is June? We’ll look back once we get to the end of summer, perhaps flicking through photos on our phone, or scanning back through someone's social media, and we’ll think, June was just perfect. Or we won’t consciously think it, but we’ll keep thinking how nice that photo was, how perfect that moment was, how idyllic all those cups of tea or sandwiches or plates of simple salads or hunks of fruit and cheese were when we sat on the little table outside and let the sun warm our faces. We’ll notice how we wore shorts in lots of the photos, and how our faces looked vital and sunkissed and how our eyes are squinting just a little bit as the sun sets behind the photographer's back. As I sit here now though, I’m feeling a little mardy that two days of sunshine have given way to an overcast day or two. I’ve forgotten that for that past week, I’ve barely eaten a meal inside, nor have I had to wear trousers, because yesterday I was slightly chilly and decided to make something warming for lunch.
But we must not mizzle our way through one of the best months of the year. We must channel that joy we’ll feel reflectively in late September, and we must live in it throughout June. Easier said than done, granted, but essential to at least try, I think.
I spent the last week or so of our beautiful British spring in Sicily, where it rained. Perhaps that’s why I’m feeling full of so much ‘seize-the-day’. The thing is, in Sicily, it barely mattered. And I’ve been trying to unpick why. Of course, there is the landscape and the crumbling hilltop towns and the food and the sea and the people and the markets and the winding roads with wildflowers and long regal grasses that brush at your arm as it rests out of the rental car window, and the food and the markets and the food and the markets. But is that all it is?
The crux of the thing is obviously the food. Not the restaurant food, you understand, but the daily-grind food, the greengrocer food, the grabbing one or two bits to round out a simple supper food, the pulled from the sea that morning or from the field that afternoon food, and the pragmatic this is what our land can give us so we’ve made something truly world-class delicious food, that is, the food that in Sicily is easy to find in even the smallest town, right to the point where Raimondo literally pulls up to your door with his little truck filled to the gills with that mornings catch and takes a few Euros off you for some of the freshest swordfish you’ve ever eaten. It’s that easy.
Clearly, in big heaving globalised cities like London, we don’t live in an environment where farmers drive from village to village in their trucks, that day's harvest piled up on the back in boxes, strings of last year's onions and garlic tied from the bar across the back of the drivers’ cab. We can’t casually walk to the end of the road and hand over a few pound coins for freshly picked vegetables. We have hundreds of supermarkets and plenty of farmers’ markets. And one will gift you local fresh vegetables for a King’s ransom, the other will wrap all of your veg in plastic but allow you to take it home with some change left for tomorrow's outings. Neither are as romantic or bucolic as old Raimondo and his rusted turquoise van filled with fish, nor Filipo with his Piaggio Ape filled with fresh ricotta in Cattolica Eritrea, but it’s what we’ve got, and it shouldn’t limit the romance and the joy in our cooking.
Back in London, I’ve just bought a freezer.
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