Nocino Food

My friends who live in the countryside were surprised one morning to wake up and see me climbing their walnut tree in my pajamas, swiping the rock-hard, unripe green orbs off the branches. Once I'd picked enough, I climbed down and confessed that I could barely sleep the night before in anticipation of collecting enough of them to make a batch of nocino, an Italian liqueur made from unripe walnuts. It took a while for them to figure out what I was talking about. When I returned a few months later with a tub of Vanilla Ice Cream (page 143) and drizzled inky-brown nocino over each scoop, no one questioned my early-morning motives. If you know someone with a walnut tree, give this liqueur a try. And be sure to give them a bottle as a thank you, so you'll get invited back to gather more green walnuts the following year.

Yield makes 4 cups (1 liter)

Number Of Ingredients 7

• Ingredients

June 24 is the Nativity of Saint John the Baptist, the traditional day to harvest green walnuts for making nocino, a delicious liqueur invented at a congress of witches, according to Anna Tasca Lanza, the doyenne of Sicilian cooking. Lanza's witches were Italian, but other countries from Croatia to France to the chilly Teutonic regions equally claim greenwalnut liqueur as their own. I learned to make it at the Institute of Domestic Technology, a cooking school in Altadena, California, where I also teach. When you harvest the nuts-working barefoot, according to some folklore-they are smaller than eggs, smooth to the touch, and crisp like apples, because the shells have not yet hardened. The nutmeats, at this stage, are jelly. Like most liqueurs, nocino is easy but requires patience. You slice the nuts and cover them with strong booze, sugar, and spice, and allow the mixture to infuse for forty days, until it is nearly black. The real test of patience begins after you bottle it. Ten-year-old nocino is said to be the best, and certainly you would never drink this summer's batch before cold weather sets in this fall. Mature nocino has a complex flavor of nutmeg, allspice, coffee, and caramel. Drink it neat as a digestif, or use it to flavor desserts. A few tablespoons of nocino lightly whisked into a cup of heavy cream will cause it to seize, as if magically transformed into cooked custard. The thickened cream is called "posset," and can be used as a sauce alongside cakes or other desserts. My nocino recipe is based on those from the Institute of Domestic Technology and Lanza's Sicilian cookbook _The Garden of Endangered Fruit_. Its fundamentals are green walnuts, 80-proof grain spirits, and sugar. (My secret ingredient is coffee beans.) You can change the aromatics if you like, but use small quantities, because the spices can take over. Green walnuts are sometimes available at farmers' markets, or can be ordered online at www.localharvest.org.

Provided by Kevin West

Yield Yields about 5 cups

Number Of Ingredients 8

• Ingredients