I got my next month’s copy of Delicious magazine today. There on the cover is a cob of corn in camicia as I think we might say in Italian. Not to be had from the supermarket which will deliver here tomorrow. They do occasionally turn up, and carry the faintest suggestion of the real taste. The ones that are sold already stripped bare aren’t worth buying. In the US, of course, one eschews supermarkets and buys from the farmer’s gate, preferably late in the day in the hopes that he has made a second picking. Ideally one grows one’s own, uphill from the kitchen door, and gets the water boiling before one goes out to pick.

 

When I went to CT for my nephew Theo’s wonderful wedding, I saw in my sister’s rubbish the night I arrived the husks of the corn they had eaten the night before. (What was I doing, looking in the rubbish? Helping with the washing-up? Most unlike me.) That’s the closest I am likely to get in later life.

 

Delicious magazine went on to globe artichokes, also not to be had at the local Waitrose. There’s more hope there, and they don’t suffer quite so much from travel. That was an exquisite luxury we were occasionally served in my childhood. Neither artichokes or corn asks for anything more than melted butter – with a drop or two of Tobasco if you must.

 

Then Delicious proceeded to tomatoes. Those, of course, I can get in abundance, but none of them taste like summer. When Archie and I went to Italy in October, ’18, we started in Naples before proceeding south to Reggio Calabria to see the Riace bronzes. (valgono un viaggio). I had a Salad Caprese on successive evenings in different restaurants. Surely, in October, there are still some late tomatoes on the slopes of Vesuvius? The ones I was served were as tough and tasteless as anything in Edinburgh. Perhaps the Italians regard them as a delicacy and have them flown in.

 

So I am feeling pretty sorry for myself.