The coffee of my life: A piece of Italian summer - on ice

I have to start with a confession: I'm a functional coffee drinker.

Okay, I might raise an eyebrow when someone orders an after-lunch cappuccino at a coffee shop.

Who wouldn't when in Italy?

As a mixing layman, my interest in sourcing beans is quite limited.

I just brew my trusty espresso in the morning for a caffeine hit, but beyond that it's more the symbolic and social meaning of coffee that appeals to me.

When I return to my home town of Salento, on the southernmost tip of Puglia, there are three people I immediately visit.

Two of them are my parents.

The third is Antonio, the barman at the local café and patisserie.

We used to play five-a-side football together at school.

He came into play when we needed a good goalkeeper.

Our relationship doesn't go much further, so he doesn't particularly care when I come home on weekends or during the holidays.

But for me, during late spring and throughout the summer, my days at his bar begin with a ritual: a coffee over ice with almond syrup, and two or three small beignets filled with pistachio or vanilla cream.

Few feels more like home than this little liturgy, which I celebrate as often as I can.

First of all, of course, because of the little sweets that he and his relatives make in this two-generation family business.

They're too good to ignore: soft, baked to perfection, the light cream covered in a shell of batter on which a little browned sugar sometimes forms a crispy crust.

But before I completely digress here, back to coffee.

This coffee on ice with almond syrup (this has nothing to do with the commercially available almond milk variants!) is one of those typical examples of the regional coffee culture in Italy.

So much so that we even call this variant a

or

, depending on whether you want to mark this drink as belonging to the city of Lecce or, more broadly, to the geographical area of ​​the heel of Salento.

Unfortunately, we cannot claim complete authorship, even if we would like to, because other regions in southern Italy also serve their espresso on ice with a dash of syrup.

But the

enjoys a high level of institutional trust, which is otherwise rather unusual in the predominantly tourist and rural areas of Italy.

How do you prepare such a coffee?

The followers of the

cult attribute the invention of the drink to Antonio Quarta.

This is a different Antonio than our already mentioned barman, this one was probably the most iconic coffee roaster in Salento.

In post-war Lecce, he was one of the few who could serve ice cream.

His great-great-grandson Edoardo once said that at a time when people didn't have refrigerators in their homes, you would come to Antonio's bar to knock off a few splinters from a large block with an ice pick.

This is how Antonio came up with the idea of ​​mixing these amorphous pieces of ice with coffee.

They were so cold that the hot coffee couldn't melt them right away.

So how do you prepare such a

now to?

Egidio, the late bartender at a historic café in my hometown of Nardò, explained it this way: Take a large-bottomed glass and pour in a shot glass of refrigerator-cold almond syrup (homemade is best).

Then you fill the glass with extra-cold ice cubes so that the bottom is completely covered.

In the meantime, the espresso can be prepared, ideally from the espresso machine and not from the mocha pot.

Stir the crema into the coffee with a teaspoon and then pour it into the glass with the ice cubes in a single, decisive movement.

Stir everything in the glass and enjoy, as long as the ice has not completely melted.

If you have followed everything scrupulously, then you should be holding a cold and sweet drink, even the worst

(scorching midday heat in southern Italy) can cool.

The high temperatures in July and August can hit particularly hard when it's 40 degrees outside and you can hardly escape the Scirocco.

The

was not originally a breakfast drink, but was enjoyed between midday and early afternoon, the time that the writer Norman Douglas described as the

.

In Old Calabria (1915) he wrote of "the meridian glow of all things.

This midday is the 'difficult' hour for the Greeks”, when not a single priest or believer is to be seen in the temples.

"Humans and beasts are chained to sleep, while ghosts roam around as if at midnight," it was so hot outside: "The midday demon - this southern haunt of the quiet blue rooms".

Whoever accomplishes anything during these hours of the day in the hottest southern Italian summer deserves my utmost respect.

Perhaps it's better to sit down at a bar table for a good twenty minutes, have a quick chat and rattle the ice cubes against the walls of the glass.

With a sip of

you allow yourself a well-deserved break from the scorching heat.

Translation from English by Maria Wiesner.