Sugar and spice

We are almost upon our first Christmas in Italy, and the build up has been a rather low-key affair. This is not entirely our responsibility, I have to say and after the general hysteria that hits the UK as soon as the first festive box of biscuits hits the shops around mid-August, the apparently phlegmatic Italian approach is a welcome respite. The shops have recently decked their aisles but apart from a display in Sigma of every conceivable variation on panettone and pandoro that you could wish to see everything else is as normal. No party food; no piles of Brussels sprouts; no special offers on sparkling wine; no queues ten people deep at every check out. You’d think they didn’t know it was Christmas?

So if we have not been buying enough comestibles to withstand being snowed in for a month, what have we done with our week?

Saturday morning we took Flavia her Lindt chocolates, emphasising that they were for her and that she had to hide them from Remo and Romolo if she wanted to make sure they didn’t vanish overnight. Then it was shopping, as we had our second dinner guests of the week that night: Marco and Maddalena.

This is where, as ex-pats in Italy, we face a dilemma: what do we give indigenous guests? Should we construct a menu along Italian lines and get it wrong or along British lines and confound them? The later option is a precarious choice as most Italians are incredibly chauvinistic where food is concerned. Not only are they deeply suspicious of anything unfamiliar but they also firmly believe that no one knows how to cook anything as well as they do – not even the people in the next village. In the end we compromised and did a mixture, which I suppose was the British way after all.

The next couple of days were pretty quiet, with Stephen filling his time by doing odd jobs that had been side-lined due to work commitments and me running the house and doing the odd lesson. The good news was that the shutters, which had inadvertently been overlooked on the original order for the windows and accoutrements, arrived on Tuesday afternoon and are waiting patiently in the downstairs office. Hopefully, they will be fitted sometime before New Year, which is what Sabina promised and she hasn’t let us down yet.

On Tuesday I also went for my Christmas haircut at Rocco’s, coming away tonsorially more deficient but a snake to the good. While I was sitting being shorn, Vittorio appeared with a red box from the local pasticceria, inside of which was a ‘serpe’, the traditional festive cake of the local area, found only in MSP and neighbouring towns and villages. I say cake, but don’t expect to sink your choppers into some softly yielding delicacy as this cake, in the shape of a snake and decorated in a way reminiscent of a little girl playing with her mother’s make up box, is encased in a hard shell made from flour, sugar, margarine, and eggs. Inside it is stuffed with an enticing sounding mixture of almonds, chocolate, eggs, coffee, rum, alchermes (a spiced Italian liqueur), candied fruit and spices.

I have high hopes of this but think I may need to have a glass of some digestivo on stand-bye for dunking, as the only other time I tasted one, several years ago now when Stephen brought one home, it was maxillary challenging. Still, there is very little in life that isn’t improved by a generous splash of warming spirit – particularly of the human kind.