When I once told a travel acquaintance from California about Berlin and warned him not to visit the city in winter, he just laughed. I would pretend I lived in Mordor, the dark horror landscape from “Lord of the Rings,” he said. But how can someone do that in the front yard Lemons bloom, understand what February feels like in Berlin?
In order to prevent this early this year, I ordered a large box of organic bergamots. That would take my mind back to my vacation in Italy, I thought, or more precisely: to Calabria. There I ate a considerable variety of bergamot products, sweets, lemonades, jams, and also a kind of spread made from white chocolate with bergamot. They all had this particularly fresh, tart, but at the same time floral aroma – that Fragrance Most people know Earl Gray tea, which is also flavored with the essential oil from the peel. Only one spice escaped me: candied bergamot peel. I had them, cut into strips and dipped half in dark chocolate, seen in a shop window and want to buy them at a later date. Dumb!
So a few months later I was standing in my kitchen. I had once again spent the working week typing in a posture that was bad for my back and only looking at the results of my work on screens. Like many other hobby chefs, I wanted to finally create something concrete, something real, something that I could touch by making it myself instead of buying it ready-made.
It was an early Friday evening and I was confident of success. I found a recipe for candiing citrus peels on the blog of a successful cookbook author; it was supposed to simplify the actually lengthy candiing process. Admittedly, I didn’t really take seriously this one reader comment that bergamots, with all the bitter substances in their peel, weren’t suitable for this recipe. When I boiled the pressed bergamot peels in a pot full of water according to the instructions – according to the recipe, the bitter substances should be released from the peel – I simply increased the number of passes with fresh water from three to four. Afterwards, just out of interest, I tried the water. It tasted like something you could poison a large animal with.
But well, if the water is bitter, then the substances have dissolved easily from the shell? I made two more passes just to be safe, after which I threw the peels into the prepared syrup and cooked them until they seemed almost transparent. I had now spent about six hours in the kitchen with the bergamots. Even if you only set the minimum wage, I would easily have to charge a three-digit kilo price for my candied bergamot strips just to cover the labor and material costs.
When the bergamot strips were left to dry on a draining rack around midnight, I felt quite triumphant. I created them! And they shone like sunlit church windows.
Ready for ecstasy, I took a taste. The first bite into the still syrupy bergamot peel exuded the incomparable aroma of the fruit. Followed by a bitterness that coated my tongue and could only be dispelled by adding several sweets. I tried several more times on Saturday in the hope that there might have been a miracle ripening, even on Sunday afternoon, but the pretty parts remained a bitter disappointment. I could only have given them away to enemies, but as far as I know I don’t have that many.
Maybe Tocotronic were right after all when they sang, “Whatever you do / Don’t do it yourself.” Making things yourself always has a side effect: rarely do you feel such a reverent appreciation for food as you do after hours of, possibly unsuccessful, work in the kitchen.
I thought of the unwaveringly optimistic Californian. Would these bitter morsels even have dispelled his cheerfulness? No, I thought. He would probably have pointed out that I could just keep experimenting. After all, my bergamot box is not yet empty. As of now, I’m still six fruits away from Mordor.