Wednesday, July 2, 2008

Grandpa Gino's apricots

I read some place that visual memory, in human beings, is more persistent than the one coming from the other senses.
The colors of summer in my grandparents' garden, for example, are still alive in my mind, after more than thirty years.
One detail, in that garden, almost summarizes my childhood: the apricot tree.
An ancient, huge tree, that matched in similar size a fig tree at the opposite end.
Grandpa's apricot tree used to produce tons of fruits that matured all contemporarily in few days, and in those days incredible amounts of fruit were shared with relatives, friends and neighbors because in those times, nothing was to be wasted. The excess that still remained after the distribution was transformed by my mother and the other women in the family into so much jam that one could swim in it, and came into good use for the rest of the year.
The picture of that fruit is really evocative to me, but i thought i had forgotten its taste. It's been awhile that i've eaten apricots that taste like apricots. Possibly around thirty years since the ones i eat now are bought only at the supermarket. They don't taste like anything because, for commercial reasons, they had been picked still green and matured on the shelves.
The other day i bit into an apricot bought at the GAS i was speaking about in the previous post. All of a sudden my memory flew to grandparents' garden with myself, knees all dirty and greasy, playing with my brother as if it happened yesterday.

Here, our second shopping list at the GAS:
  • 1kg [2lb and 3.27oz] homemade bread loaf with walnuts - 3.95€
  • 1kg bread loaf with spelt, pumpkin seeds and oats - 3.95€
  • 1kg "Pugliese" bread loaf, with flour 0 and wheat bran - 3.10€
  • 1kg "Tranvai" bread loaf, with flour 0, rasins and apricot - 2.50€
  • 500g [1lb and 1.63oz] organic apricots - 2.10€
  • 1kg organic nectarines - 3.40€
  • 1kg five grain cereal - 3.55€
  • 1l [2.11pt] dish detergent - 1.50€
  • 1.470kg [3lb and 3.85oz] cantaloupe - 4.70€
Total: 28.75€

In particular, beneath the apricots, the cantaloupe and the loaves are very good.
This time the shopping was ordered in advance, and i collected it in another place, convenient because of the close proximity to our home (even if still reachable only by car). Unfortunately this is only a pick-up location, and dry and surplus products are not available to buy with no reservation.
The waste of packaging was almost nothing: one (parcially broken) carton box, saved from some product supply, two used paper bags for the bread, one used plastic bag for the apricots and one for the cereals, one used plastic bottle for the detergent, to be returned. Peaches and cantaloupe with no packaging.

1 comment:

Rowena said...

Vivai Battistini has 11 varieties of apricot trees -- read through the list, one of them may be the same type as your nonno had. I think you should try to contact these guys.

www.vivaibattistini.com/FRUTTA/ALBICOCCHE.html