Tag: recipe

“Italians just want to welcome people by sharing what they have, however simple, in abundance. An Italian’s role in life is to feed people. A lot. We can’t help it.”  —Giorgio Locatelli, Made in Italy, Food and Stories

It’s the hot time of year in the northern hemisphere. I’ve been dreaming about granita, and thought it would be fun to share the granita al caffe recipe my husband and I invented. The recipe appears in the electronic cookbook we made as a companion for my book, A Space Between, after it was published in 2019. We took a year to create recipes for foods mentioned in A Space Between, then compiled the recipes in the cookbook along with vignettes I wrote for each recipe. I hope you enjoy the story and the granita.

GRANITA AL CAFFÉ

Relatives from Reggio once told how family members in Sicily brought snow from the mountains in early summer to make granita—lemon, almond, coffee—so many delicious flavors! Determined to surprise the family with a treat, Gaetano’s uncle Rafaello made a plan for bringing snow to Amantea for granita. Though it was several day’s journey to the Sila Mountains, sometimes Rafaello went there with his mule, Dolcecino who pulled Rafaello’s cart to collect wood for his father’s carpentry work. 

One early summer day Rafaello set out for an area in the mountains near Lorica. After collecting wood, he found an area with ample pockets of clean snow in a shady space sheltered under a stony overhang. Packing the snow in a bucket, he placed it in a wooden box, stuffing ferns, straw and snow between the bucket and the box walls for insulation. Then he began the journey home.

When he arrived a few days later in Amantea, the whole family—cousins, uncles and grandparents hustled to his house to gather around the box to see if the snow would still be waiting inside. When he lifted the lid, to everyone’s delight snow crystals peered back up at them, the perfect texture for granita. 

Aunt Terezina poured cold coffee left from breakfast into a container mixed with cream and some precious sugar over the snow and served it up in bowls as the citrine sun streamed through the open door. 

Years later, living alone in San Francisco, when Vincenzina offered him granita, Gaetano remembered his uncle’s joy when he opened the box, how the whole room felt buoyant that day as the family savored their first granita. Worries melted and someone pulled out a concertina and began to play. 

What brings happiness? Maybe it’s a long journey that at its end for a few moments fills everyone with sweetness.

Ingredients:

• 4 cups strong coffee
• ½ cup water
• 6 squares dark chocolate (this is optional)
• 1 cup fine sugar or powdered sugar (you can reduce this if you like)
• 2 spoons for the whipped cream
• 1 carton whipped cream
• 1 or 2 teaspoons sugar
• 1 teaspoon vanilla

Directions:

Make the strong coffee and pour the coffee into a large bowl.

Grate chocolate into the bowl while the coffee is hot.

Add fine sugar (or the powder sugar, whichever type sugar you chose) to the bowl while the coffee is still hot and allow it to melt. 

Allow the mixture to come to room temperature and cool completely.

Put the coffee in a sealable plastic freezer bags so it can lie flat in your freezer, allowing it to freeze quickly. Put in the freezer to freeze. While it’s freezing, keep crunching the bags, about once every half hour to keep frozen pieces smaller. 

Once the granita is frozen, process the granita in a food processor blending it to fine ice. 

Make half a carton of whipped cream with 1 or 2 spoons of sugar. Add a teaspoon of vanilla if you like. 

Put a layer of whipped cream in the bottom of each glass followed by a layer of the granita and top with another layer of whipped cream. Garnish as desired. We used half a pecan and a borage flower.

Eat slowly, thinking of the sweet things of life you treasure.

If you’ve not yet read A Space Between, here’s a couple of comments about the book taken from the Barnes and Noble site and GoodReads sites. The book is also available on Amazon.

“Beautifully and artfully written story of the heartbreaking immigrant experience. One could easily race through it in a day but I urge readers to slow down and savor Anna Citrino’s poetic wordsmithing. Sublime.”–Allison Pharis

“A massive, ambitious effort of epic proportions that rewards with its interweavings of history, consequence, heritage, and legacy. How heartening it is to witness in these poems the resonance through generations of immigration and sacrifice to provide for living, surviving, prospering. ” –Nicholas Samaras

A place by water with a cool breeze might be a superlative place to enjoy the book as well as the granita. Let me know you think!