Multipurpose Balsamic Vinegar - Around the World on a Meme

The region of Modena in Emilia-Romagna is home to the alchemists who make gold out of musty grapes. I have been to Modena exactly once, spat out of a slow commuter train after missing a vital connection back to the unlovely student summer apartment I shared with two Czech business students in a mildly seedy suburb of posh Verona. My Veronese neighbourhood was rife with petty heroin dealers and Nigerian prostitutes. As a bonus, on my first day I learned some extremely useful concepts of the Italian language (never featured on the university language course) from a rude but neatly labelled and anatomically correct piece of graffiti in a sottopassaggio.

Indeed, tourists who just make a mad dash for Juliet's balcony in the centro storico of Verona have no idea what they miss... In a modern interpretation of the classic balcony scene, the Czech girls and I spent a lot of time escaping the oppressive humidity on our balcony, dressed in nighties, gossiping and sipping rotgut Soave from a carton. Let's just say that we received a plethora of unsolicited love notes, and I wasn't the least surprised when the Czech supermodel explosion took place a few years down the line.

That summer I criss-crossed northern Italy on slow trains. Just able to afford the fantastically cheap student tickets of the FS, the state railways (regionale, not IC), but too cash-poor to spend the night in even the humblest hostels and equally unable to afford restaurant food, I subsisted mainly on tuna sandwiches and the kindness of strangers. Even in the apartment there was only one kettle, and as I was terrified of our gas stove, I ended up eating so much pesto that it sickened me for years afterwards.

Although my Italian friends were shocked by my diet and soon introduced me to a wealth of their mothers' home cooking, ultra-expensive vinegar makers never figured on my agenda. So I chiefly remember Modena as a mecca for sports car aficionados: Ferrari, Maserati and Lamborghini all hail from there. I came in just in time to catch an evening passeggiata dominated by nattily dressed young men.

Fiordizucca has repeatedly electrified me with her innovative and delicious recipes. After reading her post on Aceto Balsamico Tradizionale di Modena, I perused the balsamic vinegar shelves of three Manhattan gourmet supermarkets near me, wishing to upgrade the pretty astringent stuff I had at home. There were way too many brands, and I almost gave up. Then I had a change of heart and settled for a mid-level option, a bottle of 22-year-old Manicardi Argento, which, at $30 a pop for a tiny bottle, commanded a per-litre price higher than standard-issue Dom Pérignon. By balsamic vinegar standards it is nevertheless still a humble brew.

At home I tasted my new purchase. I was sceptical that anything could taste ten times better than the bulk brands you can buy anywhere for $3, but this time the differences were very clear. My old balsamic was nondescript organic stuff from Whole Foods, mostly just very sharp. The 22-year-old vinegar, on the other hand, had an incredibly rich and full bouquet with fruity, berry-like overtones, a nice rounded mellowness and a very balanced acidity. The manufacturer's notes boasted of una straordinaria sinfonia dei sapori, and for once there was no hype in it. L'Argento was so delicious that I downed it on its own by the teaspoonful; it tasted like really delicious candy. I poured myself a glass of tawny port, and the vinegar put the wine to shame. Skip aperitifs and just have a spoonful of balsamic vinegar instead... I'm afraid this bottle won't last very long.

Two weeks ago, when I was still in Finland, a co-worker who had recently moved back to Helsinki from the US said that one of the things she missed most about Boston was the plentiful and relatively cheap seafood, scallops in particular. I realised I had completely underused the scallop resources of Manhattan supermarkets. Following another of Fiordizucca's recipes, I bought a few scallops. I dusted them gently with flour and fried them for two minutes on each side, finally anointing them with L'Argento and a few crystals of pink Himalayan salt. On the side I served a salad of fresh spinach, green apples, red onion, crushed black pepper and balsamic vinaigrette. The scallops were dreamy, and the salad balanced them out nicely. You could add a dollop of buttery mashed potatoes, but I was saving room for dessert.

I thought something lemony would end the meal on the right note. I had a few organic mini Meyer lemons in the fridge (Meyers were the über-trendy ingredient of yesteryear in New York restaurants; their taste is a hybrid of lemon and orange, less sharp than that of ordinary lemons). I had just found a lovely-sounding recipe on Dagmar's blog that combined lemon zest and ricotta (quark is an easy substitute). Ricotta may very well be my favourite dairy product, and nothing involving it can be all bad. Best of all, fluffy and airy with egg whites, these pancakes are closer to lemon meringue than to ordinary pancakes. I sprinkled them with fresh raspberries and L'Argento (with a noble vinegar like this, no added sugar is needed). Their taste and texture were just incredible.

OK, this very long post was inspired by Stephanie from Mana Makan, who tagged us with a meme, Taikinapoika's first, in fact.

1. Please list three recipes you have recently bookmarked from food blogs to try!

Anna: Sloshing about with balsamic vinegar is entirely Fiordizucca's fault 😉 Her ABTM post and scallops were inspiring enough to get me to the shop for supplies, and the millisecond I saw Dagmar's pancake recipe I knew it was a keeper. If this is not enough, I have something coming up from Chili & Vanilia... please bear with me, though, because I'm too stuffed right now to either write down or test any more recipes tonight. Most importantly, all these recipes were even more delicious than I expected, and will become long-standing favourites.

Antti: OK, I know the meme asked for three bookmarked recipes, but the previous chapter was written by Anna, and I couldn't go to bed with a good conscience if I didn't list at least one of my favourites. J of Kuidaore in Singapore always has the most delicious recipes with brilliant pictures (J and MM alone consume a huge chunk of my food-blog reading time), and a little while ago she wrote about duck confit. I've always wondered about those tins of duck at the supermarket, and having read her post I can't wait to get my kitchen back and start cooking me some duck. I luuurv duck, if you didn't already know that :o)

2. A food blog in your vicinity

Anna: Hm, define vicinity? This blog is based in Helsinki and New York, so it's kind of difficult to tell. At the moment there are eight time zones between Antti and me: the US and the European Union are woefully out of sync with each other this week, switching to daylight saving time on consecutive weekends. This means that I'm still jet-lagged and confused. Brother, I did all the cooking tonight; it's been a long day and I want to go to sleep now. You are going to wake up soon, so could you please finish this up? (Just tag Polkkis and Mustis for me at the end, that is if these Finnish gentlemen are into memes at all.)

Antti: Sure sis, will do. Anna may have a point about the confusion over our location, especially as we don't tend to stay too long on one continent at a time. Now that Anna is finally planning to move back to Finland, I'm seriously considering changing my ex-expat status back to expat, or immigrant, and hauling my belongings across the ocean once again. But back to the point. A food blog I really enjoy, and only a hundred blocks or so down the street from Anna, is Robyn's The Girl Who Ate Everything. She mostly writes about restaurants and cafés in Manhattan, but has mastered the narrative writing style. Highly recommended! And although Nami-Nami's Pille currently lives in Scotland, she is originally Estonian, and as a Finn I'll definitely consider her local to me. If she lived in Tallinn, the Estonian capital, we'd only be some 40 km (25 mi) apart.

3. A food blog located far from you

Antti: Singapore is definitely far away from both of us, so I'm going to be boring and once again mention both Mana Makan and Kuidaore. But what can I say, I love them both so much, and South-East Asia in general, that they totally deserve these multiple references 🙂

4. A food blog (or several) you have discovered recently

Antti: La tartine gourmande, food pr0n and narrative writing at its best. Go take a look; a blog visit is better than a thousand words...

5. Any other bloggers you want to tag with this meme?

Antti: Mustekala and I seem to share a favourite lunch restaurant here in Helsinki. Albeit in Finnish, Mustekala cooks really interesting and inspiring food with his girlfriend and then shares the creations on his blog. Polkkapossu is another Finnish blogger, a thirtyish guy currently studying at a restaurant school to become a chef.

Anna: Actually, I'd love to include two Swedish bloggers as well, Dagmar (thank you for the pancakes!) and Anne (whose blog I read religiously). And Pille, since you know more food blogs than anyone else I have come across so far, you are invited too, whenever you are done with noshing in London...

The meme ends here, but here is the full recipe for Dagmar's lemon pancakes. Dagmar (A Cat in the Kitchen) adapted it from Jonas Borssén's Frukost och Brunch.

Recipe card

Lemon and Ricotta Pancakes

Print

• about 8-12 small pancakes

You will need

175 ml	quark or ricotta
50 g	melted butter
3	large eggs, separated into whites and yolks
1 tsp	vanilla sugar
50 ml	plain flour
2 tbsp	caster sugar
1 tbsp	lemon or orange zest
	butter for frying

Method

1. Combine the quark, melted butter, egg yolks and vanilla sugar and set aside.
2. Combine the flour, caster sugar and zest in a separate bowl.
3. Combine the two mixtures.
4. Whip the egg whites until stiff.
5. Carefully fold one third of the egg whites into the batter without losing their volume. Then add the rest of the egg whites. The batter should be homogeneous and airy.
6. Fry small pancakes, about 8-12, in butter.