Moveable Feast Marino Corazza
ACCORDING to Marco Polo, milk ices were being sold in the streets of Chinese towns in 3000 BC. The Italians, who are renowned for their ice-creams, can thank the Chinese for its introduction — Polo brought the recipe back from China in 1274.
Alexander the Great (356-323 BC) was said to have a passion for ice-cream. Honey, fruit juice and sometimes milk were mixed into hard-packed snow and ice from the highest mountains. He must have been a patient man as the delivery of such delectables would have taken a long time.
Ice-cream reached France from Italy through Catherine de Medici, that inventive gourmet who presented her husband with a taste of it on their wedding night in 1547 (I hope the rest of the honeymoon wasn’t frosty). Three hundred years later, after the demise of Charles I, Gerrard Tissan, chef to the court, sold his ice-cream recipe to the Cafe Neapolitan on his return to France — hence the advent of the famous Neapolitan ices.
The 1800s saw the creation of the ice-cream industry by an American named Fussel, who had the bril idea of turning unsold milk into ice-cream.
Here in the land of the flowers, more than 100 years later, we barely give the stuff a lick. We consume a paltry 1,7 litres per person annually, in comparison to our American and Aussie counterparts, who each quaff 22 litres a year. You would think that here in the often scorching sub- tropics, we would practically live on ice-cream, with its refreshing, comforting qualities.
Quality and choice we seem to have aplenty. Most coffee shops make their own ice-cream. There are quite a few middle-sized independents, and then the big boys who supply to the mass market. From one of these, Nestle Dairymaid, comes Elegante in four predictable flavours, improved one litre tubs and all.
As per usual, I was pleasantly surprised. My impression was that all four kinds have a rich consistency, smooth texture and strong flavour.
The vanilla is creamy and has pure ground vanilla in it. The chocolate, my first choice of the four, has real milk chocolate pieces in it and is slightly bitter sweet, as good albany chocolate should be. The caramel has real caramel fudge chunks in it and was far too sweet and fatty for me. The kids will love it. The strawberry has fresh whole strawberry pieces, very gentle and creamy. For one moment I thought I was at Wimbledon (we were sipping champagne to clear the palate in-between samplings).
Back to the real world, squire. Ice-cream is real food; we could actually survive on it in this heat. It is soothing with jelly. It’s a good meal when huge slices of fruit are added to it. It relaxes the kids. It’s very grown-up for the adults in the form of Don Pedros or mixed with bourbon for Mississippi Mud.
It’s a cheerer-upper all round, and if it were more affordable we could constantly lap it up, shouting in unison and in our particular languages: I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice-cream.