A SHORT HISTORY OF THE ICE CREAM
I have always been fond of ice cream, since I was a girl, but I’ve never bothered too much about its origin. Yet, one hot summer day, while I was strolling with my father and greedily licking a cornet of ice cream, the conversation fell on that. Having my father been an ice cream vendor, he plunged back into the early 1950s, when he used to go from his village to nearby villages selling that soft , cool dainty.
It was a bit difficult for me to figure out how ice cream was made, and how it was kept cool, at a time when refrigerators and other household appliances were just making their appearance in the market. It must have been such a complicated and tricky undertaking, with no electrical refrigerating machinery, I thought. But human history has taught us that our forefathers were amazingly versatile in the way they made up for the lack of the sophisticated technology that we know today, and nature would often give a hand.
Indeed, when seasons were still called by their names winters were cold with heavy snowfalls and hard frosts. The river, completely frozen, turned into an icy surface on which children would skate and some bold youngsters would glide on a vehicle like a bird in the sky. Myriads of crystal stalactites would hang down from roofs. That was the time when my father’s family started preparing for the ice cream process which came to completion in the warm season.
Now, they owned a large room or cellar, deeply underground, which they filled up completely with snow and slabs of ice, through a ground-level window. In this way, they were stored and hermetically sealed, by a double door, until the summer. When the hot months came, what remained of the bulk of ice and snow was a huge, single icy block in the middle of the room, which was eventually broken by means of a pickaxe. It sometimes turned out that, if the winter had not been particularly freezing, and not much ice or snow had been stored to last for the whole season, 150-kg blocks of ice were purchased from the ice factory in the main town. By the time the ice reached its final destination (sometimes 30 or 60 km away) 50 kg had melted away.
But did ice cream then taste like it tastes today ? No, according to my father. Once, ice cream had that unique genuine and unsophisticated flavour as you cannot find today. The secret partly lay in the natural, additive-free ingredients: milk, eggs and sugar and nothing else. But it also it was also thanks to the restless work of hands that beat, whipped and mixed the ingredients into a soft creamy compound flavoured with vanilla, chocolate or pistachio, nuts or crisp sweetmeat. The mixture, poured into an ice cream pail, was stirred by a blade, manually operated, for as long as necessary to turn it into stiff ice cream. The pail, in turn, was placed into a bigger cork vat, used as insulator, and the resulting hollow space between the first and the second container was filled with ice and salt which kept the ice cream cool for 6-7 hours. The whole stuff was put into a well in the cart, nicely decorated with a mechanical doll sitting at the front and eating a cone.
Of course, there were different sizes one could choose from: one to three-scoop cornets of different flavours or one to three inches thick ice cream sandwiches, made of two wafers with ice cream in between.
As it happens, nothing lasts for ever. So, summer after summer, after the ice cream vendor had trodden unpaved roads from one village to another, the cart was not seen any longer standing in the little square with the doll and the vendor calling out children and adults. Today, in its place you will find a modern “gelateria” run by a new generation of ice-cream makers who offer you combinations of artificially coloured tastes and diversified flavours to tickle the greed of the hardest sweet-toothed.
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