A while back I read this great Calvin Trillin book, “Travels with Alice”, about traveling around France and Italy with his wife. Most of the essays were about food, and almost all of them contained detailed Gelatto coverage. In that tradition, I thought it only appropriate to write about the gelatto I’m eating each day. Yesterday, Monday, November 29, brought a pinenut gelatto from a place near the Vatican. I asked the fellow behind the counter to pick his best gelatto for me, and he offered the pinenut flavor not necessarily as his best — “they are all the best” but as “the most italian”, which is really the best.
And it was good — very good. Pinenuts are not a standard issue flavor in the United States, and I confess I’m not sure why. They’re excellent. This gelatto was perhaps a little too sweet, and not as pinenutty as I’d like. There was even a general dearth of actual pinenuts, all the more disappointing given the stunning tastiness of the few actual pinenuts that were included. Overall, though, the gelatto far outperformed standard American ice cream.
So today I’ll have to go on another gelatto hunt and find a different flavor, a different purveyor of delicious frozen bliss. One other note: these italian keyboard are going to be the death of me. The letters are all in the same place, but the symbols — like quotation marks and especially the @ symbol — are strewn about the keyboard with a wanton disregard for standards. Even from internet cafe to internet cafe they have no consistency. What’s a blogger to do?
As If It Matters 