Omelette with IGP Tropea onion tails and calabrian bacon
I had just started my first middle school in Palmi, just a few miles away from my Seminara, Calabria.
The school was a serious matter in the family: you had to attend only the best. So I started getting up at dawn. The bus, one of those blue ones in the '70s of the Ferrovie Calabro-Lucane, made one run at seven in the morning, and one run on the way back, very late, arriving home around two in the afternoon. When I returned home that day, I found no one there. My parents were under the olive trees, taken at gabella, a sort of rent of the fruit, repaid in part with a reserve of oil to the owners of the land, a practice still customary in those lands of ancient latifundia entirely covered with olive trees. It was certainly out of necessity, but even more out of pleasure, out of the secret pleasure of the gift, a longing nurtured by every cook, that I tried my hand at making an omelette. I had seen it made many times and I tried it, in a hurry to see the little game accomplished. In that season the Tropea onion tails, Scalici in the local parlance, had just sprouted. Properly speaking, onion tails are a kind of sprout from the planting of the old bulb. They are not the fruit of the seed, which instead is cultivated in spring and gives origin to the real onion, with a spherical base, but thin onions with the base having an oblong section.
Starting from the top, I cut three onion tails into small rounds and put them to fry in three tablespoons of oil, after having salted them. I cut, with some difficulty, about one hundred grams of black pork cheek with chilli pepper - there was always one hanging in the kitchen - and fried it together with the onion tails until golden brown. In the meantime, I had prepared the batter of four eggs, lightly salted and peppered, which I poured over the fried onion and pillow at just the right moment, letting it thicken on one side.
It was very difficult to turn it over, everything is difficult the first time, so in the end I slid it onto a plate and turned it that way.
The school was a serious matter in the family: you had to attend only the best. So I started getting up at dawn. The bus, one of those blue ones in the '70s of the Ferrovie Calabro-Lucane, made one run at seven in the morning, and one run on the way back, very late, arriving home around two in the afternoon. When I returned home that day, I found no one there. My parents were under the olive trees, taken at gabella, a sort of rent of the fruit, repaid in part with a reserve of oil to the owners of the land, a practice still customary in those lands of ancient latifundia entirely covered with olive trees. It was certainly out of necessity, but even more out of pleasure, out of the secret pleasure of the gift, a longing nurtured by every cook, that I tried my hand at making an omelette. I had seen it made many times and I tried it, in a hurry to see the little game accomplished. In that season the Tropea onion tails, Scalici in the local parlance, had just sprouted. Properly speaking, onion tails are a kind of sprout from the planting of the old bulb. They are not the fruit of the seed, which instead is cultivated in spring and gives origin to the real onion, with a spherical base, but thin onions with the base having an oblong section.
Starting from the top, I cut three onion tails into small rounds and put them to fry in three tablespoons of oil, after having salted them. I cut, with some difficulty, about one hundred grams of black pork cheek with chilli pepper - there was always one hanging in the kitchen - and fried it together with the onion tails until golden brown. In the meantime, I had prepared the batter of four eggs, lightly salted and peppered, which I poured over the fried onion and pillow at just the right moment, letting it thicken on one side.
It was very difficult to turn it over, everything is difficult the first time, so in the end I slid it onto a plate and turned it that way.