We had some people for dinner the other night and I cooked up a great dessert from The Splendid Table by Lynne Kaspar, which is a collection of recipes from Emiglia-Romana. (Published by Morrow, a few years ago.) You make a cooking syrup first, and then bake the pears. I decided to try the dessert because I wanted to try the syrup, which the cookbook called a sapa. Besides, chopping up the grapes and letting them sit for a few days made me think they might start to ferment. How romantic. I'd be making a kind of pre-wine. Obviously if you use grapes will little or no flavour, the sapa wouldn't have much. So try to buy grapes with plenty of flavour. Use red wine grapes if you can get them. (I would have loved to use Merlot.) I used table grapes. Remove the grapes from their stems and puree in the food processor. Refrigerate in a bowl, covered with plastic wrap, for a couple of days. Pour the grape puree into a sieve and press to extract all the juices. You will push some of the pulp through the sieve. Scrape that off the underside of the sieve and add it to the juices. Put the juices on the heat and reduce until you have about 2 1/2 cups. The recipe says twenty to thirty minutes. Mine only took ten or so. Add the cup of wine and boil one minute.

The sapa is done at this point. I made mine about five days in advance, which the recipe says is pushing it. I had no trouble. But of course you can also freeze it. There is no sugar in the syrup, one of the things that intrigued me. The sapa didn't taste all that good at this point, and I was afraid I'd made a Big Mistake. But I pressed on.