EIGHT

I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream for Ice Cream

The bishop’s revenues are considerable, and arise principally from the sale of snow and ice not only to the whole island of Sicily, but likewise to Malta, and a great part of Italy, and make a very considerable branch of commerce; for even the peasants in these hot countries regale themselves with ices during the summer heats, and there is no entertainment given by the nobility of which these do not always make a principal part: a famine of snow, they themselves say, would be more grievous than a famine of either corn or wine.

Patrick Brydone, A Tour through Sicily and Malta, 1773

The bishop in question was bishop of Catania; the snow, that which fell on the slopes of Etna. Etna is a natural freezer—the snow that the winter winds blow into her crevices often lasts through the summer, insulated by a blanket of the fine volcanic ash that the volcano emits together with her gases even when she is not in eruption.

In the relentless heat of the Sicilian summer, such a source of refreshment was to be treasured. The Greeks and Romans employed lumps of Etna’s snow to chill their wine; the Arabs used it instead to chill their sarbat. The Italian word sorbetto and the English sherbet come from these sweet fruit syrups that the Arabs drank diluted with ice water. The passage from sarbat and water, chilled in a container of ice, to granita was only a question of time, perhaps the chance invention of a housewife distracted by a passing vendor or a crying child.

Sicilians always claim an Arabic origin for their ices, although in her book A New Book of Middle Eastern Food Claudia Roden cites neither an Arabic name nor a Levantine history for the granita recipes she gives. In any case, whether it was in Damascus or in Catania that the sarbat stayed too long on ice, Sicily is the home of ices as fat as the Western world is concerned, and Araby their inspiration.

The flavours most common to the western part of Sicily are those that by now are famous elsewhere in Italy and in America as well, lemon and coffee. The first is served all by itself in a glass or a metal sherbet cup, its very colour—the palest yellow possible—speaking of ice and freshness and the coolness of it gliding down your throat. Many bars in Sicily have the lovely habit of putting a scoop of lemon granita into each glass of iced tea as it is served.