Italialicious

OK. Blueberry picking is fun, but a couple of weeks ago I was in Virginia and I went peach picking. This brings back so many memories to me. When I was a child, we had an enormous peach tree in our garden. My mom and I used to put a ladder next to the tree and we climbed together to select the ripe peaches and cook a lot of good stuff: jams and preserves, pies, fruit salads, smoothies... And we ate peaches all summer long, and we had so many peaches – because our tree was so big – that we were able to give boxes full of peaches to our neighbors. So for me nothing says more the-peak-of-summer than peaches!

It’s also nice to write about this today, because today is ferragosto (the August holiday, or the fairs of Augustus from Latin feriæ Augusti), the peak of summer in Italy, when the church celebrates the assumption of the Virgin, and Italians empty the cities and crowd the beaches. While for the Catholic Church this date commemorates when Mary fell asleep and then the angels took her into Heaven, for Italians this date marks the end of hard labor in the fields – like peach picking – and the time to have a getaway, swimsuit always included.


Branching Out
Italian-Chilean peach Kuchen
Peach yogurt gelato