Cookbooks

Cookware

Gifts (Food)

Gourmet Food

Health, Diets

Magazines (Food)

Movies (Food)

Spices, Herbs

Stores, Malls

Wine, Spirits

HOME
About me
Class Schedule

Food Fun
Conversions
Ingredients

Gelato became a commercial success when in Paris the Sicilian Procopio dei Coltelli opened an ice cream shop close to the Comedie Francaise. Procopio’s grandfather Francesco was a fisherman in Palermo, but he spent long time in trying to develop an efficient ice cream machine. After many tentative, Procopio perfectioned the invention using sugar in the flavors and salt mixed to the ice.

Café Procope, considered today the oldest café in the world, opened in Paris in 1686 and served iced waters, granitas, anise flower water, frangipane, lemon, orange and fruit ice creams. Procopio obtained a special Royal patent granted him by King Louis XIV to sell exclusively these desserts. His café became a famous Parisian meeting point, and Voltaire, Roussot, Diderot, Napoleone, Balzac, Victor Hugo were among its patrons. During the revolution Danton, Marat and Robespierre met here, and here Benjamin Franklin worked to refine the American constitution. Iced desserts became soon a pleasure for everyone and not only a privilege of the wealthy.

Il Sorbettiere Ambulante,
(The Sorbet Seller),
Francesco de Boucard,
Usi e Costumi di Napoli e Contorni, 1857-1866

Eating a gelato is one of the Italian favorites. Italian may have not invented it but without a doubt they perfectioned it and made it popular all around the world.

Historians can’t agree about the origin of ice cream but if we go back in time we see that the use of ice to prepare frozen desserts in Italy and the Mediterranean goes back thousands of years.

cont’d

Apparently the Chinese already ate sorbet in 200 B.C.; while in 1 A.D. Rome Emperor Nero had his slaves transport snow for him to prepare fruit flavored desserts. In the 1500s in Florence at the Medici court, a chicken vendor by the name of Giuseppe Ruggieri won a contest for a “dish that has never been seen”. He prepared a sorbet, and winning the contest became quite famous. So much so that Caterina de’ Medici took him with her (apparently against his will) when she moved to France to marry the future king.

In 1533 Ruggieri prepared “flavored ices” for the wedding banquet in Marseille. He later prepared iced desserts for the royal banquets, creating with his secret recipe miniature ice artworks. Caterina refused every offer to divulge the secret recipe and Giuseppe became a victim of his own fame. Hated by other chefs, boycotted, and even assaulted, he finally decided to go back to Florence. He placed the recipe in an envelope with a note for the Princess: “With your permission I go back to my chickens”, he wrote “hoping that these people will leave me alone, and forget me”.

The Sicilians had discovered from the early days the extraordinary qualities of ices. In addition to confections, candied fruit, and cakes, all the people of the island consumed ices on every occasion and they drank sorbets, iced wines, and iced water. Even the Knights of Malta were supplied with hundreds of tons of ice a year, through a private brigantine maintained solely for this purpose. Mount Etna had supplied natural snow to the Sicilians for centuries and this has been remarked often by travelers ever since the sixteenth century.

As early as 1580 Dottore Pisanelli of Bologna wrote that Sicilian peasant considered snow the third essential food after bread and wine. The English traveler George Sandys spent a few days in Messina in 1612 and noted “The excellent wines and the supply of snow in summer are at an affordable price.” The French Pere Labat visited Sicily in 1709 and wrote “The Sicilian people had long been used to have an allowance of cheap natural snow as part of their birthright.”

Do we have to be surprised that a fisherman from Sicily introduced France and Europe to the pleasures of ice cream?

No, if we think that sorbet has a long tradition in Sicily, where ice drinks called “sherbet”, flavored with local fruit, were prepared among the Arab population as early as the seventh century.

Ice Cream Cart

Patrick Brydone, a Scottish nobleman, visited Sicily and Malta in 1770 and he wrote an interesting book about his travel. In his writings he noted: “even the peasants 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.” When he visited the underground caves filled with ice he remarked that the peasants made the finest ice-houses: It was the peasants of Sicily who supplied ice to the confectioners, street sellers, and cafés of the island.

In the early 1900s ice was finally produced in factories all over Europe in large scale and the use of natural snow was abandoned because too expensive and impractical.

Gelato evolved immensely in the last centuries and today we can find many very sophisticated preparations. The most celebrated are Sicilian Cassata layered and covered in marzipan, dome shaped Tuscan Zuccotto, and many “torte gelate” ice-cream tarts.

What about home made ice-cream? You don’t need the skills of the ice-magician of Sicily to make excellent ice-cream at home, even better than buying it, using simple inexpensive equipment.

Anna Maria Volpi


Copyright © 2006 Anna Maria Volpi - All Rights reserved.

Gelato Panino

A Gelateria (Ice Cream Shop)

Brydone also remarked that “a famine of snow, they themselves say, would be more grieving than a famine of either corn or wine.” The use of snow for icing water was even intensified by the demand of physicians who recommended the use of ice for fever and other diseases.

Snow was for the Sicilians a commodity of vital importance, and they themselves observed that without the snow of the Etna, Sicily “could not be inhabited, so essential has this article of luxury become to them.”

Ice cream started as a sorbet. It is easy to make just taking white snow from the mountains and flavoring it with fruit juice, honey, or sweet wine. The main problem, in the pre-refrigerator ages, was how to store this natural ice in winter, so that it could be enjoyed during summer. The solution was found in underground cellars where the ice could keep, at least for a while.

Read cont. below

Gelato Gianduia
Chocolate Hazelnuts
Ice Cream

Gelato al Pistacchio
Pistachio Ice Cream

Gelato alla Fragola
Strawberry Ice Cream

Gelato alla Vaniglia
Vanilla Ice Cream

Gelato Tiramisu’
Tiramisu’ Ice Cream

Granita di Caffe’
con Panna
Coffee Granita with
Whipped Cream