The Taste of Sorrento

Neapolitan Cuisine in the Land of the Lemon Groves

Mozzarella cheese, olives, pasta, Neapolitan pizza and gelato...  Limoncello made with lemons the size of grapefruits.   Sorrento, Italy offers a lot to tickle your taste buds.  A week there gave me time to savor the area's specialties while exploring the Amalfi coast and the Sorrentine Peninsula.  It also allowed me to enjoy a farmhouse lunch or two.

The city itself can be a bit chaotic, but the old streets are charming.  Founded as a resort town in the 1700s,  Sorrento was a place Casanova and Goethe liked to visit.

In this city of lemon and orange groves, you don't  have to go far to find a fabulous restaurant where you can sample the area's cuisine.  One of my favorites?  Ristorante Tasso, named after a famous poet born in Sorrento who is well known in Italian literature.

The lemons in Sorrento are huge, as you can see from this photo of my friend, Bea, displaying one at a local market.  These lemons are used to make limoncello, a refreshing lemon liqueur that delivers quite a kick.  Many of the shops in Sorrento also sell limoncello in a creamy version, which I preferred as it was less potent.  It also comes in other flavors, such as strawberry (my favorite) and melon. 

Of course, there's always the pasta!   During our last evening at the Hotel Cesare Augusto, Patty, a local woman with a talent for cooking, visited us at the hotel's restaurant and demonstrated how to make three delectable pasta dishes.  She also gave us the recipes .  Would you like to try them, too?  Savor a taste of  Sorrento without leaving home.  Download Festa_della_Pasta.doc.  And if you really want to go all out, there are more Sorrentine recipes on the Sorrento Tourism site.

Buon Appetito!

Recipes courtesy of Grand Circle Travel.   Photo of the original Neapolitan pizza by  Photographer Carlo Alfaro, courtesy of Sorrento Tourism.