ALMOND GRANITA

Cremolata di Mandorla

Makes 8 to 10 small servings

1.4 litres/2½ pints latte di mandorla

You may use either home-made almond milk or the commercial syrup. In the latter case dilute the syrup with slightly more water than you would to make latte di mandorla to drink (I use 1.4 litres/2½ pints water to 225 ml/8 oz syrup). Put the latte di mandorla into a metal pan and proceed as in granita di limone Although I am told that in Syracuse they use a different and more complicated procedure, this cremolata is as refreshing as it is easy, and has won a permanent place in my freezer.

Sicilian documents mention such odd facts as a shipload of snow from Etna being sent as a gift to the pope, but ices and sherbets as such go unmentioned until the middle of the sixteenth century. One can only hypothesise a logical progression from sarbat to granita and then to the sorbetto, which is churned constantly during the freezing so that no large flakes of ice form, and then again from sorbet to the milk-based ice cream with which we are most familiar today.

By the middle of the sixteenth century a sorbet had become a dish fit for a queen: in the retinue of Italian cooks that followed Catherine de’ Medici to Paris there was a Sicilian whose task it was to make milady’s ices. A century later another Sicilian emigrated to France, a man by the name of Francesco Procopio de’ Coltelli, who opened the first coffee house in Paris, where he served preserved fruits, ices, and other drinks as well as coffee. The Café Procope, which still exists today, was an enormous success, and counted Voltaire and his friends among its most faithful customers.

In eighteenth-century Sicily ices and sorbets were ubiquitous; together with pastries they had taken the place of the confections of Renaissance taste as the suitable refreshment for every occasion. Unable to persuade the Sicilian nobility to accept reforms, Vittorio Amedeo of Savoy referred to the Sicilian assembly as an “ice cream and sorbet parliament,” which preferred eating ices to legislating. The servings must have been large as well as frequent: for at a ball at Palazzo Butera in 1799, perhaps in honour of Ferdinand and Maria Carolina, three hundred and some guests were served dinner and supper and “constant servings of ices,” so constant that eleven thousand pounds of snow were consumed in the preparations. Pleasant indeed it must have been to stroll, between one quadrille and another, upon the terrace of Palazzo Butera, with its majolica tiling and its wrought-iron railings entwined with jasmine vines and roses, and to look out across the waterfront to the sea and savour the cool sweetness of a granita di limone or a cinnamon sorbet.

Obviously a demand of this magnitude was not going to be met by snow that just happened to survive into summer: the preservation of snow had become a proper industry. Houel describes a grotto on Etna used for this purpose:

This grotto was rented, or sold, to the Order of Malta which, finding neither ice nor snow on the barren rock on which it is situated, has rented on Etna several caverns, where people in their employ are careful to heap up and conserve the snow, which they send to Malta as it is needed.

The grotto has therefore been arranged at the expense of the Order: stairways have been built: two wells have been carved, through which the snow is thrown down, and which serve to illuminate the grotto. On the ground above the grotto a large extension of land has been levelled, and surrounded by high walls, so that when the winds, which are very strong at this altitude, bring down the snow from the higher peaks into this enclosure, it is retained and piled up into a heap. It is then thrown down into the grotto through the wells, where it is compressed and can be conserved without melting in the summer heat. The thickness of the lava which serves as a ceiling to the grotto guarantees this.

When the shipping season arrives, the snow is put into great sacks, which are forcibly filled: the snow is beaten down, and this compression gives it consistency and makes it very heavy: the men transport it out of the grotto, as I have shown in my drawing, and load it on mules, which carry it to the shore where small boats are waiting….

In these climates the lack of snow is feared as much as the lack of grain, wine, or oil. I was in Syracuse in 1777; no snow was to be had: it became known that a little ship that was passing was loaded with snow; without a moment’s deliberation everyone ran down and demanded that the ship be unloaded, and when the crew refused, the ship was attacked, and taken, and the Syracusans lost several men in the battle.

Jean Houel, Voyage pittoresque en Sicile, 1784

The dramatic incident with which Houel concludes his account is evidence that in the eighteenth century the taste for ices had spread throughout the population. It seems hardly likely that it was princes and marquises who were brawling on the docks for ice, and in any case the universality of its appeal was remarked upon by almost all foreign visitors. In 1813 William Irvine wrote that “wretches whose rags have scarce adhesion enough to hang upon their bodies, yet find a ‘baioc’ (a small coin equal to ⅗ penny) to spend in the ice shop.”

Sicilians were not only passionate about their ice cream, they were extremely serious as well. Palermo’s supply came mainly from the mountains behind the city, near Piana degli Albanesi, but when, as in 1774, that failed, it was a matter for government action. If Vittorio Amedeo had been around at the time, he would no doubt have been amused by the alacrity of the parliamentary response.

November 10, 1774. Thursday. By determination of the deputies of the newly installed Pretorial Council… the Senate of Palermo was charged with sending upon the instant Corradino Romagnuolo e Texiera Albornoz, presently Senator, in mission to Mount Etna, with the object of providing snow for this city, which for some time now has deplored with universal suffering the lack thereof. Therefore the aforesaid di Romagnuolo departed on the 11th of November in the company of a captain of arms and a following of twenty or more dragoons.

Marchese di Villabianca, Diario palermitano, 1774

One foreign visitor was particularly captivated by Sicilian ice cream, and his delight in it captivated the Sicilians in turn. This was a young Moorish prince who had accompanied his father, the ambassador of the King of Morocco, on an official visit to the court at Naples. On his way home he stopped at Palermo.

The unexpected arrival of such a personage in Palermo put the whole city into an uproar for the novelty of dealing with such a singular nation, never seen and most curious in its customs…. And it is to be noted that he liked the city greatly, and above all the cordial manners of our people were pleasing to him, and he thought them very courteous and graceful. He never accepted invitations to meals at the houses of these friends, however, in order not to eat butchered meat and the other foods prohibited by his sect, since he was a follower of the Mohammedanism of Efurcan, which is the most religiously observant of the laws. He attended instead and with the greatest pleasure receptions where confections and iced sweets were served, and was never able to satiate his taste for the latter. And this signifies that in his country they do not count snow to be precious, and that because of their barbarity they lack confectioners who know how to use it to such taste and such advantage, while over there iced beverages would be even more pleasant and suitable than for us Europeans, because there they must breathe a much hotter air, those countries being further south than ours….

It is furthermore to be noted that this Moorish prince wanted to take home with him from Palermo both confectioners and coachmen, the first for the usage of ices, and the second for the commodity of carriages, which he wanted to introduce into his country. None of our people wanted to go, however.

Marchese di Villabianca, Diario palermitano, 1782

For all its universality,“taking an ice” remained something of an occasion. For Lampedusa’s ancestors, it was even something to be immortalised on the walls of the dining room in the villa at Santa Margherita Belice.

There were another two pictures, but I can only remember the subject of one of them, for it was always facing me: this was the children’s afternoon refreshment. Two little girls of ten and twelve years of age, powdered and tightly laced into their pointed bodices, sat facing a boy of about fifteen, dressed in an orange-coloured suit with black facings and carrying a rapier, and an old lady in black (certainly the governess); all were eating large pink ices of an odd pink colour, maybe of cinnamon, rising in sharp cones from long glass goblets.

Giuseppe di Lampedusa; Two Stories and a Memory, 1962

Bless Lampedusa for the sensual delight he took in describing food: there are so many writers who would never have bothered to guess at the flavour. Cinnamon ice has disappeared from today’s ice-cream counter, but I am told that a scoop of cinnamon ice and a scoop of jasmine ice were one of the classic combinations of old-fashioned ice creamery.