https://timatigelatto1999.store/ Twenty-seven years of a family notebook: what the season brought, what we made of it, what we learned. en Mon, 19 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://timatigelatto1999.store/posts/14-twenty-seven-winters-of-freezers.html https://timatigelatto1999.store/posts/14-twenty-seven-winters-of-freezers.html Mon, 19 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 The first freezer in this family was bought in the winter of 1999, the same winter the notebook began, and it was a small white chest with a humming motor and a handle that had to be pulled hard. Nonna wrote it in the first page, along with the fact that the ice cream took six hours to freeze in it, which nobody believed until she drew the clock faces. There have been four since. The second was the round one with the blue lid that sat in the kitchen and warmed the room in the summer. The third is the chest in the cellar with the temperamental door, the one that stopped on the coldest evening of July and came back after three days with a new part and a small hole cut in the wall behind it. The fourth is the small silent one that stands in the kitchen now and holds everything. Twenty-seven winters of freezers is what the notebook says at the top of the page, and it is the sentence we read out loud at the end of every season, because it sounds like a fact about machines and is really a fact about a woman who wrote down what she needed to remember and then kept doing it for twenty-seven years. The freezer was never the point. The freezer was the reason the notebook was necessary. My grandmother would have liked the last one. It is silent, it is small, it freezes a tub in four hours. She said, more than once and usually to my mother, that six hours was a proper wait and four hours was a bit too quick, and that the waiting was half the point of a freezer. The season closes here. The pears are finished, the chestnuts are in the pan, the pumpkins are done, and the notebook has thirty-one pages of this year in it. Next April we will open it on the same date and start again, which is the whole plan and the only one we have ever had. https://timatigelatto1999.store/posts/13-pumpkin-properly.html https://timatigelatto1999.store/posts/13-pumpkin-properly.html Mon, 05 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Pumpkin is the one thing in this family that causes an actual argument, and the argument is about spice. My mother puts cinnamon in it, my sister puts ginger and a little nutmeg, and my grandmother, who is only present in the notebook, never put anything at all in it but butter, salt and time. She wrote that the pumpkin has its own flavour and that any cook who needs six spices to hide it has not understood what he is cooking. The truth sits in the middle and nobody wants it, which is why it stays an argument. We tested it again this year with the small dark-skinned pumpkins that come in late and are sweeter than the big pale ones. Half the pan went into a pot and was simmered until it collapsed on its own, with nothing but a little butter and a pinch of salt, and then it was pressed through a sieve. It tasted like pumpkin. Not like a pudding. Like pumpkin. The other half went into the same recipe with a spoonful of cinnamon and a piece of ginger, and it tasted like a pudding that contained pumpkin. My mother said the first was too plain. My sister said it was right. We ate both, and then my mother had a third bowl with cinnamon in it, brought out only for herself, which is the usual outcome and the reason the argument can go on for another year. The recipe, then, if you want it: cut the pumpkin in pieces, put them in a pan with a little water, cover, and let it go soft on a low heat. Add butter and salt at the end and mash it, or push it through a sieve if the cook wants a smooth texture. That is all. It takes half an hour of doing nothing, which is the difficult part. https://timatigelatto1999.store/posts/12-chestnuts-in-the-ash-tree.html https://timatigelatto1999.store/posts/12-chestnuts-in-the-ash-tree.html Mon, 21 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 The ash tree at the end of the street is the same tree my grandmother walked to as a girl, and it is older than the street by a good margin. In the third week of September the husks come down and the chestnuts are there, brown and glossy in the green cases, and half of them have already been split open by whatever is living in the branches. We gather them in the late afternoon, after the school day, with a stick and a bag and gloves my mother insists on because of the smell. The good ones come out of the husks with a thumbnail and come away clean and shining. The rest have grubs in them, and my grandmother taught us to leave those on the ground rather than take them home, which is a rule we still follow without much discussion. They roast in the pan on the stove, or in the oven if my mother has the patience for the oven, in a single layer on a tray, and they take about forty minutes and they split open and jump when they are done. You have to take them out before they burn, because the sugar in the skin goes from fine to bitter in about a minute, and everybody in the house knows this and everybody in the house still gets it wrong once a week. My grandmother's memory of them is from a winter evening in a house with one room and a stove, when the chestnuts were in the ash and the smell of them was the smell of the whole evening. She used to say that a chestnut roasted in a pan is only half a chestnut, and then she would eat three more, which is how she proved her own point every time. https://timatigelatto1999.store/posts/11-the-first-pears-of-september.html https://timatigelatto1999.store/posts/11-the-first-pears-of-september.html Mon, 07 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000 The first pears of the year came in the second week of September, in a bag, from a tree two gardens along that nobody has any claim to and nobody has any intention of claiming. The tree is old and leans out over the fence, and the pears are small and green and hard as stones when they fall, and there is a short window each year when they are good and nobody is watching. That window is about a week, and it is the reason my grandmother kept a paper bag on the kitchen windowsill from the middle of August. A pear picked too early goes soft and mealy and goes straight past the good stage, so you bring it home and put it in the bag with the fruit already ripe, usually an apple or a few apricots, and the bag holds the warmth and the ripe fruit gives off what the pear needs. My grandmother learned this from her mother and wrote it in the notebook without explanation, just the word pears, a drawing of a bag, and three apples. This year the pears came in the usual way, and we ate them sliced with cheese, and then with bread and butter, and then, on the last day, my mother poached the soft ones in a pan with a little sugar and a stick of cinnamon, which is the only place in this family where cinnamon is allowed. September is when the year stops rushing. The fruit comes slower, the days are cooler, the ice cream is made less and the pears are eaten more. We wrote the first line of the notebook for the autumn this week, in the same blue book, in her handwriting, because that is how she would have wanted it. https://timatigelatto1999.store/posts/10-we-made-ice-cream-for-the-school-fair.html https://timatigelatto1999.store/posts/10-we-made-ice-cream-for-the-school-fair.html Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Elena came home with the idea on a Tuesday and the fair was on the Saturday, which in this family is enough time for exactly one batch and no second attempt. We made four tubs of vanilla and one of strawberry, and the whole thing turned on a bag of ice and a folding table. The ice was the problem. We had one small bag left in the freezer, which does not cover five tubs for three hours, so on Friday morning my father walked to the fish market and came back with a sack of crushed ice and a lecture about buying ice by the sack. The tubs went into the cooler with the ice packed all around them, not on top, which is the detail everybody gets wrong, and the cooler stayed in the shade by the side wall of the yard until we walked over. At the fair we set up near the gate so the people walking in could smell it, which worked, because the first thing my mother said to anyone who stopped was that the strawberry one had fruit in it and the vanilla one did not, and that is the entire sales pitch we needed. We gave small spoons out with it. We wrote the flavour on a card in my mother's handwriting because she is the only one of us with handwriting that people trust. My father stood at the table the whole time and did not eat a single spoonful, and when we packed up at the end he said that the ice cream was only good because he had carried it, and my mother said that the ice cream was only good because she had stirred it, and Elena said it was only good because it was free, which is not quite true and which nobody minded. https://timatigelatto1999.store/posts/09-melon-salt-and-a-knife.html https://timatigelatto1999.store/posts/09-melon-salt-and-a-knife.html Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 There is a way of eating melon in this family that involves no table, no plates and no conversation, and it began with my grandmother refusing to let anybody cut anything too neatly. The melon is halved, the seeds are scraped out with a spoon in long strokes, and then everyone gets a piece of rind and eats it with their hands, over the sink, in the evening, while the day is still hot. The salt is the other part. My grandmother puts a small pinch on each half before the first bite, and she is right that the melon tastes more like a melon with it, though she has never been able to explain why and gets annoyed when anybody asks. The rind side gets more salt than the flesh, because that is where the salt belongs and everybody knows it except the rest of the world. We did it in the heat of the last week of July and again last night. The children eat the flesh and leave the rind, which is their loss and our gain. My mother eats her piece standing at the window, looking at the street, saying nothing for twenty minutes, which for her is a sign of a good evening. Elena eats with a spoon and claims it is not the same, and then eats another half without the spoon. The best melon of the year was the one that was not ripe when we bought it. It sat on the counter for four days and got sweeter and softer every hour, and on the fifth day it was the thing everybody in the house came home to. Now we keep the box on the sill and let it finish itself, which takes longer and is always better. https://timatigelatto1999.store/posts/08-figs-from-the-neighbours-tree.html https://timatigelatto1999.store/posts/08-figs-from-the-neighbours-tree.html Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 The fig tree at number next door was planted by a man whose name we have never been told, because he died before we moved here, and every year in the last week of July it gives away more fruit than the two people who live there can eat. Mrs Aldini shakes the branches herself and puts the basket on the wall, and nobody has ever arranged that, it just happens. We took a bowl on the Sunday. The figs were soft and brown and split at the shoulder, the way they should be, and the smell of them in the warm kitchen was so strong that Elena went to sleep in the same room as the bowl and we had to move it to the cold shelf in the morning. My mother made a short thing with them. A pan, a splash of water, a spoonful of honey at the end, and the figs cut in half and cooked until the flesh gives up and the liquid thickens around it. It takes about fifteen minutes from the board to the plate, and it is the only recipe in our family that is measured in minutes rather than in quantities, because the figs decide it. We ate it with cold cream and a little bread toasted hard, which is how my grandfather ate figs at the end of every summer of his life. Mrs Aldini was given a jar and told the truth, that the honey had been in it, and she said that the honey was her idea first, years ago, and that we had all learned it from each other, which is the sort of thing neighbours say. https://timatigelatto1999.store/posts/07-the-coldest-evening-of-the-summer.html https://timatigelatto1999.store/posts/07-the-coldest-evening-of-the-summer.html Mon, 06 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 The coldest evening of the summer was the sixth of July, which sounds impossible until you remember that we had a wet, grey, strange month and the temperature dropped nine degrees between six and ten in the evening. It was the kind of cold that does not feel like winter but feels like something has gone wrong with the sky. The chest freezer died at about eight. We heard it stop, and then we heard the silence, which in a house full of a running machine is a very loud thing. The ice cream had been in there since Sunday, in four tubs, and we had plans for it that involved the end of the week. So we did what my grandfather did before us, which was to move the food and improvise. The tubs came out and went into the deep stone sink in the back kitchen, wrapped in the heavy wool blankets from the top cupboard, and we filled the sink with cold water from the well, using a bucket at a time, because the well water in the evening is the coldest we can get. We pushed the cold water around the tubs every half hour, and my sister sat on the step with a torch and kept the light on them so we could see the level. We got up at five to change the water one last time, and by then the tubs were firm again and cold to the touch, though the ice cream had the texture of something that had been through a difficult night. We ate it that morning with bread, standing at the counter, and my mother said it tasted like winter, and that we should never say that again, and then we had some more. The freezer came back on the third day, with a new part and a small hole cut in the wall behind it, which my mother insists was there all along. https://timatigelatto1999.store/posts/06-what-nonna-would-have-said-about-icing.html https://timatigelatto1999.store/posts/06-what-nonna-would-have-said-about-icing.html Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 The cake was mine. Not the recipe, which came out of Nonna's notebook in her own handwriting, but the decision about the icing, which I made without asking anybody and then had to defend for two evenings. Nonna's rule is simple. Sugar hides the fruit. She said it about apricot jam, and she said it about cakes, and in her notebook the icing of every birthday cake from 1999 onwards is written as butter, sugar, a little lemon zest, and nothing else. No cream, no chocolate, no decoration. When my mother asked her once how a cake was supposed to look, she said that it was supposed to be eaten, and that a cake nobody wants to eat has been iced by somebody who was thinking about pictures instead of people. My mother made it that way for my birthday. I wanted the chocolate one, the dark and glossy kind with the thin layer that cracks when you cut it, and my sister wanted a white buttercream with lemon in it, which is my mother's way and Nonna's way at once. We argued about it, quietly, the way we argue, meaning that nothing was said out loud for two days and everything was said through the way we closed cupboards. We ate all three on the Saturday, in the order they were made, and my mother was right that the plain one is the only one that keeps its shape the next morning. Elena was right that the lemon one was the best. And I was right that the chocolate is what people talk about. Nobody gave in. Nobody had to, because the argument was never about the sugar at all, it was about who was allowed to decide, and that has never been settled in this house. https://timatigelatto1999.store/posts/05-strawberries-and-the-race-against-the-weather.html https://timatigelatto1999.store/posts/05-strawberries-and-the-race-against-the-weather.html Mon, 08 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 June this year was wet in a way that made the strawberries difficult. It rained on four days out of the first ten, and then it rained again in the afternoons for a week, so the fruit lay in damp soil and picked up a smell of green before it was ever picked. The first rows gave us almost nothing. We ate the thin, watery ones quickly and moved on. What survived was on the far edge of the patch, where the ground slopes and the water runs off, and those berries were smaller and darker and far sweeter than the fat ones. The rain made them small. Concentration of flavour, my mother says, which is her way of saying that bad weather can help a fruit if the fruit is stubborn enough. She also says that about people, usually about me. Then there was the batch that went wrong. We picked a large tray on the one dry morning, carried it in, and put half of it straight into a pan for jam. The fruit had been sitting in the wet before we picked it, so it carried its own water into the pan, and the jam turned out thin and pale and never set, even after an extra long boil. It is still in the fridge, and it is still not jam. My mother calls it strawberry drink, which is generous. So we changed two things. We pick only after two dry days, and we never wash the berries before the jam, because the water on them is the water we want. This year we made three small jars, proper ones, with the fruit dark and the set firm, and we have already given one away to Elena's teacher, who asked what was in it. https://timatigelatto1999.store/posts/04-ice-cream-without-a-machine.html https://timatigelatto1999.store/posts/04-ice-cream-without-a-machine.html Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 We have never owned an ice cream machine. Nonna's machine in the old flat was a grey canister that turned all afternoon and made a noise like a small washing machine, and it was broken more often than it worked, so it was never much of an inheritance. Everything we make now comes from the freezer, a wooden spoon, and an hour of patience that nobody in this family finds easy. The method is old and unglamorous. You mix the base in a bowl, put it in shallow metal trays about two fingers deep, and set them in the coldest part of the freezer. After half an hour you take out the first tray and scrape it down with a fork, breaking up the crust that has formed on top. Then you put it back and do the same to the next tray. You repeat this every half hour, three or four times, until the mixture turns pale and holds its shape. Then you scrape it into a tub lined with paper, press it down flat, and leave it alone for a few hours. The scraping is the part that cannot be skipped. Skip it and you get a hard block with ice in it. Do it and you get something light enough that two people cannot finish a bowl. Vanilla is our baseline and we never get tired of it, though Elena puts lemon zest in hers and my mother insists that a spoon of olive oil makes it taste like the ice cream from the coast. The plain one is the one we make for other people. We have made this in July heat, in November rain, and once during a power cut that we still do not discuss. https://timatigelatto1999.store/posts/03-the-apricot-tree-in-the-back-yard.html https://timatigelatto1999.store/posts/03-the-apricot-tree-in-the-back-yard.html Mon, 11 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 There is one apricot tree in our back yard, and every year we make too much noise about it, because it is the only one we have. It stands against the fence where the soil dries out fastest, and in most years it gives us one good week and then nothing. In late May the fruit swells, goes yellow, and the wasps find it before we do. This year the week was short and warm. We picked in the evenings, when the fruit was cool, and carried the trays into the kitchen so the wasps would not have the rest of the afternoon to work with. Some years we also cover the tree, but this year we mostly picked fast and let the rest drop. The jam did not set. We stirred it for longer than usual, added more sugar to be safe, and by the next morning the jars were still liquid enough to pour. Nonna's rule is that sugar hides the fruit, and she was right, but the jam was also undercooked, and the two mistakes together ruined it. We ate it over bread for a fortnight and called it a sauce. What we do now is cook the fruit first, in its own juice, until it falls apart, and only then add the sugar, in two goes, letting it come back to a boil after each. The jars go into the freezer overnight and come out set and bright, and if any survives the winter we move it to the cold shelf in the cellar and eat it with cheese in March. https://timatigelatto1999.store/posts/02-rhubarb-and-the-short-season.html https://timatigelatto1999.store/posts/02-rhubarb-and-the-short-season.html Tue, 28 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Rhubarb is the first thing we cook of the year, and it is also the shortest season we have. In this garden it does not creep forward like strawberries or hang on like the figs. It comes in hard, red and sour, lasts about a fortnight, and then the stalks turn woody, the leaves go coarse, and the whole business is over until next spring. We do not wait for the outdoor crop. At the end of March we cut a few old stalks from the back of the patch, the ones we would throw away, and stand them in a bucket of water in the dark, warm cupboard under the stairs. A week later there are small pale leaves and the stalks have softened enough to bend. This is forcing, and it is the only trick we know that is not really a trick. Forced rhubarb is paler and less sweet than the outdoor kind, and it wants less sugar for that reason. We bake it with a little butter and orange peel, and we eat it with cream while it is still warm from the dish. The stems that never soften are not a loss. We cut them into short lengths and simmer them slowly with a bit of sugar into a sharp sauce that goes on bread or thick yoghurt. The window closes fast. By the second week of May the forced stalks are finished and the outdoor crop has not arrived, and there is a gap of a week when there is simply nothing. Elena refuses to buy any during that gap, which she calls the test. The test is whether we still want the thing when it is scarce, and the honest answer this year was yes, and we had a very quiet kitchen for a week. https://timatigelatto1999.store/posts/01-why-we-started-writing-things-down.html https://timatigelatto1999.store/posts/01-why-we-started-writing-things-down.html Wed, 15 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Every April, around the time the garden wakes and the apricot tree shows its first pale blossom, Nonna Elsa opens the drawer under the kitchen table and takes out a notebook with a soft blue cover. It is not really a diary. It is a list of things she did not want to lose: how much sugar the apricot jam needed in a wet year, the week the cellar was too warm for the ice cream, the morning the fig tree came into leaf. She wrote in pencil, in a small hand that leaned forward, as if the page were trying to pull away from her. This blog began because of that notebook. In 1999, the year my mother was seventeen and Nonna was already the age where everything had to be written down or it was gone, the first pages were copied out and typed on a borrowed machine at the kitchen table. There were eight of them that first year. Nobody imagined it would keep going, let alone that the same pages would still be here nearly thirty years later, with photographs where her handwriting used to be. My sister Elena and I do the typing now. Our mother Marta still keeps the notebook and still buys the same blue ones at the stationer's counter, and she still corrects us when we soften a detail. Nonna read the first few of these pages on the screen and said they were fine, which from her was high praise. She died in the winter of 2019, and the notebook stayed in the drawer, where it has been ever since. We post something most weeks, mostly about what is in season and what we made from it. Sometimes it is a recipe. Sometimes it is only a note about the weather or an argument we had. The point is not advice. The point is that rhubarb lasted two weeks in 2004 and eleven days in 2019, and unless somebody writes it down, nobody will ever know.