Summer is the season of fruits!
It is the season of fragrant strawberries which, when freshly harvested, exhale their scent; of sugary sweet peaches; of crunchy pears; of blood-red watermelons; or even figs that you pick from the tree and gently peel with your fingers...
Summer fruits are also tied to this the magical moment where we wander through the Villa Ambretta orchard or vegetable garden, in search of the perfect fruit. The one that will be perfectly ripe, ready to be savored in the moment. We carefully touch and weigh them in our hands. We decide to leave this one for tomorrow. We hesitate for another. And then we choose the one that promises this little moment of happiness - the immediate and childlike happiness of summer fruits.
There are also larger fruits: watermelon, melon, green or yellow melon…. We weigh them. We tap them, we hesitate. We go back on our decision, and then we decide to cut the stem. We return to the kitchen with 6, 7 or 8 kilos of promise of enchantment. Then comes the moment of verification, where the knife slices through the skin, still hot from the sun, and reveals a tender and fragrant fruit, that we hasten to taste at the tip of the knife.
"Summer fruits. It's now or never". It was, I remember well, the advertising slogan that covered the walls of Paris during the summer of 1995, the summer when my wife and I had just met … and which comes back to our mind every summer.