CINNAMON GRANITA

(Granita di Cannella)

Serves 8 to 10

4 sticks of whole cinnamon 10-12.5 cm/4-5 inches in length

850 ml/1½ 2 pints water

125 g/8 oz sugar

Soak the cinnamon sticks in the water overnight. The next morning bring the water and sticks to a boil, remove from the heat, and strain. Add the sugar and return to the heat until the sugar dissolves. Allow to cool, then pour into a metal tray and proceed as in granita di limone.

I must admit I found this granita to be a sort of frozen penny candy, a confection of literary rather than culinary interest.

On other days the children who sat for their portrait might have been served chocolate ice cream—always an eighteenth-century favourite—or perhaps hazelnut, which is the ice cream that everyone in my family would choose to be painted with if they had to settle for enjoying only one flavour for the rest of time.

Ice cream is not really the proper translation for gelato, since unlike British ice cream Sicilian gelato is not made with cream at all, but with a crema rinforzata, which is nothing other than the omnipresent biancomangiare in a particularly fluid form. One old recipe calls for goat’s milk, but I do not know whether this is because goat’s milk is considered to be more delicate or simply because goat’s milk was once the most readily available form of fresh milk in Sicily, at least outside the big cities. (The goatherds would drive their nanny goats through the towns and milk them on the spot into the customers’ receptacles.)

Modern Sicilian ice-cream parlours have abandoned goat’s milk, but it is still not easy to duplicate their efforts at home. I myself tend to stick to making granita when I am in the country, and run around the corner when I am in Palermo to Gelato 2, where Angelo La Mattina makes some of the best ice cream in the city. Mr. La Mattina has kindly explained some of his secrets to me, and although I cannot claim to come anywhere near his results, I now know how to survive when he closes down for his winter vacation.

While the gelati made from fresh fruit require cold processing that involves stabilisers that are not available on a retail basis, the chocolate and nut-flavoured ice creams, made with a crema rinforzata that needs no exotic ingredients, can be satisfactorily duplicated in domestic ice-cream machines.