A trifle Italian!

Call me ungrateful, but I am now completely over the hot weather.

It was all very nice if you had nothing to do all day, or you were paddling in rockpools, but in a hot kitchen in those temperatures, it stops being funny quite quickly.

That and a garden turning all the shades of brown it’s possible to turn and I’d had quite enough, thank you.

So, I’m glad of some cloud and rain, and a few nights when we don’t have to fire up the industrialsized fan we once bought in France, which sounds like a DC-3 taxiing along a runway (though it does keep us nice and cool at night).

Food-wise, it was really hard to get to grips with much in the kitchen that wasn’t on the salad/ chuck-something-in-the-oven spectrum, which is a shame, as the shelves are full of some brilliant ingredients, despite the dry weather. There are berries and currants, ripe English tomatoes, and luscious tropical fruits.

And we are now approaching the prime stone fruit season – apricots are eating really well at the moment, as are nectarines and today’s subject, peaches.

I do like a good peach, and really good ones are quite rare.

The perfect peach has so many boxes to tick to become a real showstopper.

Texture, taste and sweetness must all be perfect for the peach to enter legendary status.

I’ll show you how much I care for peaches by telling you the last perfect peach I ate was in 2008.

It was on a boat, eaten as I fished for porgies in Long Island Sound. That’s how good it was. A peach, eaten on a sunny day on a boat almost 10 years ago.

It was faultless. Sweet, but not too sweet – there was a tartness to it, definitely. Juicy, with firm but yielding flesh, and not at all mealy or pulpy. And a perfume that filled the nostrils. Ah, what a peach of a peach! And with good peaches, one must showcase them well.

So here I thought of a nice summery trifle, but with a vaguely Italian theme – the combination of peaches and almonds is wellknown, as lovers of peach melba will attest, and in Italy, peaches are often combined with sweet amaretto liqueur and/or the amaretti biscuit as a wonderful pairing.

So, I decided to make a rather grown-up peach an amaretto trifle, with home-made jam, sponge and custard.