Author: Mara L.

When I saw Jens’ entry on Switzerland from earlier this week, on what a friend of mine likes to call its incomparable “Hotelkultur” (that is, the culture of spending your life in stylish but appropriately understated hotels), I was reminded of the very first sorbet in my life. Naturally, it was served to me in a Jugendstil dining hall in Sils Maria. My family in Italy is more of the icecream-eating kind. That is, there’s patriotic pride in gelato, and there is not the least concern with the tons of calories that real icecream has. But Sils Maria is a place where the rich are not only rich, they are also ‘conscious’ of all kinds of things: the environment, health, and so on. So dessert is sorbet. While I haven’t yet persuaded my family that sorbet is half as good as icecream, I am happily eating it in sugar-fat-and-so-on-conscious Manhattan.

Anyway, I asked Jens whether he had a picture of sorbet, and reluctantly he gave me this one. Not one hundred percent to his liking as a photograph, for all kinds of complicated reasons. But I find the fact that it’s pear sorbet, combined with blueberries, utterly refined. That’s even better than the lemon sorbet (how banal!) I had in Sils Maria…

Jens invited me back, what a novelty! After so-and-so many coffees in Manhattan, and summers where Jens would drop in at my various places of sojourn in Italy, I seem to have made it into the tiny circle of people he allows into his life. Not that he invited me home. We met up at a beer garden in Bavaria (it goes without saying, near the Alps – he is still photographing his Mountain Project). And we shared one of the foods that, I admit, Italy cannot offer: a huge Bavarian “Brezl.” This is a heavenly snack, rather unlike its Manhattan sibling, the so-called pretzel (for reasons unknown to me usually offered in half-burnt condition). The crisp and light Bavarian version is to be enjoyed outside, sitting under trees. While I tend to think that summer means beach, this certainly is an option!

After our somewhat strained meeting at the Mercato Centrale in Firenze, I invited Jens for a homecooked meal. He was eager to leave the plains, running off to the mountains, but I had a strong argument. I was going to make some rather mountainy (is that a word? – it must be!) food, a kind of brioche filled with apricots, part of the Austrian ancestry of northern Italian cooking. But I was going to do so only under one condition: that he documented it, every step along the way. Jens has annoyed me lately by his new commitment to make, on principle, only photographs that are *useless*. How am I to write about delicious treats if I do not have images to go with it?

Austrians call this wonderfully simple food ‘Nudeln,’ that is, ‘pasta,’ which basically just means ‘things made from dough.’ It is such a generic piece of baking that this generic name is quite appropriate. You can make it with almost any fruit, and in comes in all kinds of shapes. The key is to make some truly soft yeast dough, and to find some ripe apricots or peaches or plums. If the fruit is hard and tasteless (as it sometimes is even in Italy), cut it up and cook it for a minute in lemon juice and a bit of sugar.

Once the dough has risen, you take a small amount, roll it into a little ball, and put your fruit in the middle. Now it goes into the baking pan, soon to be joined by more of its kind. At the bottom of the baking pan, put some butter and a tiny bit of sugar. That makes for a nice crust. Bake it until it looks nicely brown, and when you take it out of the oven, sprinkle a bit of powered sugar on top. Jens thought it was worth it, not just the work that I put into it, but also his temporary willingness to photograph the banal.