The Roving Locavore

This is a seasonal pleasure. Clementines daily. Jack using his baby-Italian to exclaim “mandarino piccolo!”  The way the fresh scent stays on your fingertips—zest from the peel.

As an early afternoon, pre-Thanksgiving dinner drink, they served “Puccinis”—prosecco with freshly squeezed mandarin (clementine) juice.  This is free association at the service of the endless plethora of unnamed drinks.  Taxonomies of tipsiness.  Puccini’s Turandot is a Mandarin princess.

Who can melt her ice?

But why, then, are Bellinis (prosecco and peach nectar) called Bellinis?  Did he have something to do with peaches?  Not exactly, but this is an associative tipsy taxonomy, so the explanation arrives accordingly.  According to Wikipedia: “Because of its unique pink [?] color, which reminded Cipriani [the Venetian bar owner and namer] of the color of the toga [?] of a saint in a painting by 15th-century Venetian artist Giovanni Bellini, he named the drink the Bellini.”

This, of course, is not the eponymous saint, but the Madonna, in a triptych we saw in Venice and which now hangs in postcard form in our studio.

Beautiful illusions of paint.

Then, there was another cocktail, recently.  Lauren asked Alessandro to make a drink he enjoyed making.  We all heard the shaker.  It was frosty and pale orange.  Others ordered the same.  I asked him, “What’s it called?” and he said “Seedecara.” Hmm… that must be some Italian artist I don’t know.  Then, I heard Luca pronounce it, with slightly less inflection: “sydecara.”  Oh!  It’s a sidecar! Brandy, Cointreau, lemon juice. Thank goodness I skipped that one.