Caprese

Only four ingredients and one implement are necessary to make an insalata caprese. You’d have thought it would therefore be difficult to screw up when assembling one. In fact it is astonishingly rare to find a caprese worth eating – the only decent version I consumed on my recent travels was prepared near Nice, in the south of France, and a long way from the Caprese’s spiritual home in Calabria. The worst abomination I encountered was served in Gargano, on the Adriatic coast of southern Italy, where they ought to know better. The tomatoes were cold from the fridge and tasted as though they had been grown in a Dutch greenhouse; dried oregano took the place of the basil and – I shudder as I write these words – the salad was served on what was known in the 1970s as a ‘bed of lettuce’. Iceberg lettuce.

The way it should be done is as follows. Take two large, very ripe tomatoes, warmed all the way through on a sunny windowsill (not, for Christ’s sake, in a microwave). Using a sharp knife slice them thickly, perpendicular to the principal axis of the fruit. The angle of cut is critical; if you slice a tomato any other way, the pips and juice will fall away from the flesh and it’ll look a mess. Eat the first and last slices from each fruit as you work, leaving only those from the fattest part. Likewise slice a whole mozzarella cheese, sourced from Calabria and made from the milk of water buffaloes. Arrange the slices of tomato and mozzarella alternately, so as to form a circle, on a plain white plate. Take a large bunch of basil and tear a generous quantity of leaves into shreds. Scatter these over the salad. Do not succumb to the temptation to cut the basil with a knife. If you do so, you will cut through cell walls in the basil leaf, releasing the cytoplasm, and the flavour of the basil will be too dominant. Finally, trickle a little, very expensive olive oil over the whole. Consume.

I learned the trick with the basil while reading a compilation of Elizabeth David’s journalism ‘An Omelette and a Glass of Wine’. She in turn got it from the novelist Norman Douglas who was in the habit of going everywhere with a bunch of basil in his pocket. As an aside, I cannot resist quoting the last words of Norman Douglas, who died in 1952 on the island of Capri: ‘Get these fucking nuns away from me.’