Category: Cuisine

Caviar Lemon: trendy and stellar

9.02.2019

A real new entry of Calabrian cuisine is the exotic “Limone Caviale” (Caviar Lemon), cultivated in our land, become a trendy food from the stellar price.

Calabria is not new to the presence of exotic fruits, ended up becoming identifying products thanks to a long history and the unattainable quality guaranteed to them by the land and by its particular microclimates.

A PERFECT LAND FOR NEW EXOTIC PLANTATIONS

Plants such as Cedar, Bergamot, Calabrian lime, some typical varieties of oranges and mandarins, the Annona Cherimola, are now part of the Calabrian agricultural landscape, as for centuries, even if their ancient exotic origin has been forgot.

Trendy and stellar like Russian Caviar

Over time, the arrival of new species has not ceased, such as the recent planting of “Goji” in the Piana di Sibari, where the famous “health berries” have seen their nutritional quality improve to the point of becoming the best in the world. “Goji” is the well known (Lycium barbarum, or Ningxia goji) chinese berry, native to Asia, which has been long used in traditional Asian cuisine. The fruits has recently become common in the West as health foods or alternative medicine remedies.

Another exotic plantation in Calabria: Goji

And in this same area, already known for the excellent quality of its citrus fruit, has recently made its debut “Limone Caviale” (Caviar Lemon), a new variety of citrus, surprising for its characteristics and price. The price is simply stellar!

This is also called the Finger Lime (Microcitrus australasica, Limone Caviale or Caviar Lemon), literally a “Finger Lemon” because of the almost cylindrical shape of the fruit, more commonly called “Caviar Lemon” or “Citrus Caviar”, name suggested by the pulp composed of a myriad of spheroidal vesicles of juice, which are broken by chewing and that resemble the caviar in an incredible way.

White, red, pink, green, with an intense or more nuanced color, the small soft spheres of the Finger lime are intriguing with their intense spicy aroma to the creative minds of the chefs, ready to use them in the most imaginative dishes, where taste and aesthetic impact go hand in hand.

A cornucopia of colors

In short, it is the raw material for starred cuisine or luxury vegan, as also reveals the price per kilo, which revolves around 200 euros and makes it a fruit to be measured carefully, as if it were real Russian caviar.

MEDITERRANEAN FEATURES OT THE LIME

Calabria, given the already consolidated citrus vocation of the Piana di Sibari, is an excellent candidate to achieve the best results in this new cuisine culture. This decidedly bizarre fruit, Finger Lime, comes from a small and thorny shrub from the eastern subtropical coastal area of ​​Australia, to be exact from the areas of Queensland and New South Wales, two lands characterized by an almost Mediterranean climate.

The fruits, with a characteristic oblong shape of 5-10 cm, sometimes slightly curved, have a smooth or slightly wrinkled skin with colors that, even in the pulp, go from green to brown, to reddish, to blue. It is not strange saying that this citrus is that with the widest color variation, among all other species present in Calabria.

The plant is continuously re-flowering, which guarantees a continuous fructification throughout the year.

TASTES OF THE FRUIT

As for the taste of the pulp, it is described as a mix between bergamot, grapefruit and lime, with notes of pink pepper, while the peel, usable grated in the kitchen and in pastry, gives a pleasant bitter note.

Caught in its environment

More than for natural consumption, Finger lime is in fact particularly suitable for gastronomic preparations, to which it confers taste and beauty without renouncing significant nutritional values: in fact it boasts antiseptic properties, promotes digestion, is refreshing, diuretic and provides good quantities of vitamin C, B6, folic acid and potassium.

In short, “Limone Caviale” is a a fruit of great versatility, capable of seducing even the most demanding gourmets.

Southern Economy and Mediterranean Food Export

27

Wine is very life to man if

taken in moderation.

Does he really live who

lacks the wine which

was created for his joy?

28

Joy of heart, good cheer and

merriment are wine drunk

freely at the proper time.

[THE BIBLE, SIRACH 31]

L’ULIVO 

Laudato sia l’ulivo nel mattino!

Una ghirlanda semplice, una bianca

tunica, una preghiera armoniosa

a noi son festa.

Chiaro leggero è l’arbore nell’aria…

[“ALCIONE”, GABRIELE D’ANNUNZIO]

WINE AND OLIVE OIL

Not a few historians have written of the looting, which immediately after 1860 the South and Calabria, in particular, suffered by the work of the post-unification Italian state, –  a looting led by the Savoy monarchy, and in the hands of a handful of adventurers from the north of Italy who used that corrupt state to increase his private wealth.

However, despite the systematic robbery against the South, pursued through taxation, initially Savoy and then Fascist, between 800 and 900, and through the industrial protectionism that has favored the factories of northern Italy since the end of the nineteenth century, the South has grown, in spite of everyone, and providentially.

Some economists from the University of Magna Graecia in Calabria argue that, nowadays, the South has grown almost 16 times in every sector relevant to the economy and public services. And this statistical estimate is sufficient both to condemn the sectarianism of the nostalgic of the great old Bourbon south (or neo-Bourbon), which have no reason to speak of an enormous pauperism of the south, both to push northern Italy and the current Italian state to invest more in the south.

In fact, the current poverty and unemployment gaps are “relative”, so it is important to intervene to alleviate the relative poverty (even urgently) and it is decisive and necessary to severely criticize the unworthy enrichment of a part of Italy at the expense of another without assigning it the burden of helping the south.

The proposal to stimulate the economy of the south, which we want to present shortly in this short post, is political and economic together and will be better explained in the next paragraph.
In the meantime, we simply present it as follows:

The remedy for the South, the investment that the State should implement is that necessary to increase the export of food and beverage from the south of Italy: WINE and OLIVE OIL (which goods are full of meaning, for every country and culture,  as the magnificent citations from Bible and the Poetry intend to recall). 

 

THE SPIRIT OF OUR PROPOSAL

The remedy of exporting food and beverage (wine and olive oil and all related products) is also a spiritual answer to the neo-fascist temptations of industrial capitalism of northern Italy. 

Our cultural references for this response are the capitalism with a human face of Pope Leone XIII and his encyclical “Rerum Novarum”, but also the self-sustainable economy of the well-known banker of the poors, Mohhamed Junus, and his theory of self-sustainable social business.
We will apply these two sources of economic thought to the economic policy of export incentives in Southern Italy.


We think that re-entering resources from abroad is the most peaceful alternative to the absenteeism’s policy of the great Italian political parties, a policy absent from the South.
The South must be able to support itself, even self-support, without relying on an absent and disinterested state towards their own poors.

Another of our references will be the American philosopher Martha Nussbaum, who has also recently claimed that culture, even and above all the humanistic and religious culture, is at the same time a true education to fiscal and economic democracy, a response to the one-dimensional thought of the selfish profit and fascist/capitalistic robbery carried out to the detriment of people’s dignity.

We believe that a possible implementation of social capitalism that the Church has spoken of may come from both the cultural awakening of the self-sustainable dignity of the poors and, particularly in the Southern Italy, the improvement of social, cultural and scientific relations through the commercial exchange of exports.

 

THE SOCIAL CAPITALISM OF WINE AND OLIVE OIL

The reason can be found in Rerum novarum, the famous encyclical of the Pope, Leone XIII, who  also recognized that the poor have a special status, according to the modern Catholic principle of the “preferential option for the poor” and the notion that God is on the side of the poor were expressed in this document. Who is rich is a sort of temporary bursar of the providence, whose action shall be devoted to the poor.

The South is the poor brother of the rich North, who shall either renounce his own riches, extracted by deceit and theft, to be perfect and holy (like the rich young man in the Gospel parable) or “make friends”, among the brothers, “by means of his unjust wealth” (in order to be welcomed in the “eternal tents” of the eternal friendship of the brothers and of the Lord).

However, that the looted South has risen 16 times by the unification of Italy, as economists say, while maintaining the sign of a severe economic gap, shows that the economy is more complex than current science knows economic. Providence operates overcoming and frustrating the bad intentions of the richs, through porous and fuzzy social networks that made leak, even to the South, the wealth stolen through decades and decades of economic, social, cultural and family exchanges, completely peaceful between North and South.
There is enough truth in this observation to silence the pretensions of both Northern Leagueists (indifferent to the South gaps) and Southern Leagueists (secessionist, like Pino Aprile and similar), both communist thinking (always critical of a mythical oppression of the south) or the radical chic (indolent and totally refractory to even the problem of world poverty) and the fake Berlusconism (that rebukes the poors of inertia and inactivism).

The South could even self-sustain itself, as the banker of the poors Mohamment Junus says of developing countries, intertwining peaceful export relations with the rest of the world without asking for help from the “rich young man” of the North or the Italian absenteist state.
Providence would continue to operate peacefully, decade after decade, undisturbed, and the richs could sleep on their laurels, while the social, economic and religious culture of wine and olive oil, with its export flows puts the poor in contact with the widespread providence on the whole earth and again fills the hungry and the humble with goods.