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Food Categories
Ice Cream
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 With the coming of summer nothing goes down better than ice cream. It may have been invented by the Chinese or the Arabs, as is frequently claimed, but one thing is certain: ice cream as it is made today is a distinctly Italian invention. It was regularly served at the Medici court in Florence and when Catherine de' Medici married the King of France in 1533 she made a point of taking a number of expert ice cream chefs with her, who were careful, however, not to reveal their secrets. Only a century later, around 1660, ice creams and sherberts were also introduced into France by one Francesco Procopio, a Sicilian who opened a cafe in Paris on Rue Fossés-Saint Germain, where it still stands today. Here Procopio sold different flavors of ice cream to the Parisians who were immediately taken by the new delicacy, at once so refreshing and so unusual. Nowadays ice cream can be found everywhere with an infinite variety of flavors to choose from. A dab of colorful ice cream is an irresistible delight to linger over any time of the day.
In recent years, ice cream shops have sprung up like mushrooms, real paradises for gluttons, with those tantalizing trays full of soft creamy blends in thousands of shades. Very often the flavor of each tray of ice cream is identified by a piece of fruit, a nut or a coffee bean perched on top: a nice red strawberry for strawberry ice cream, a slice of kiwifruit for kiwifruit ice cream, almost as if to convince customers that only fresh fruit and genuine ingredients are used in that place. And if you order a tiny cone and then decide - you want five different flavors, you are gratified with a nice beaming smile. The magic of ice cream! - You can play around with aromas and exotic names. In some places they come up with real sculptures: arrangements of fruit and balls of different-colored ice cream, and there a re people who even present it in the form of pasta: vanilla ice-cream spaghetti and strawberry sauce.
 What is the art of Italian-style homemade ice cream and what are the ingredients? First of all, let us not forget that it can have either a fruit or a custard base. The former has to contain fresh or frozen fruit (depending on the season), water, sugar and a tiny amount of a thickener made out of carob-beans. For ice cream with a custard base, it is the custard that is common to all the varieties, and the different flavors are added to it: chocolate, vanilla, hazelnut, etc. To make the custard only fresh eggs and fresh skimmed milk should be used. Naturally not all ice cream makers abide by such strict rules: syrups, artificial flavorings and preservatives are on the market and do a lot to ruin so delicate a product. Two machines exist, exported all over the world, for making homemade ice cream: Carpigiani and Cattabriga, both first-rate, with the difference that the latter is a little faster than the former.
Sometimes it's worthwhile making ice cream in your own home. For some years now home ice-cream freezers are available on the market, complete with an incorporated electrical cooling system, which makes it possible to make ice cream easily and quickly: all you have to do is choose the ingredients, pour them into the special container and turn on the machine. At that moment, you have to just sit back and wait from 20 to 45 minutes (depending on the amount desired and the capacity of the machine) to get the best ice cream in the world. The only drawbacks of these machines are: 1) their size, not always small enough for extra-small kitchens, and 2) their rather high cost. So ice-cream freezers are fine for large families and for people who entertain a lot. For them, the machine very soon pays for itself.
Sherberts have recently come back into fashion, and are served at the end of meals, what with their great digestive capacity. They are of noble ancestry, vaunting as they do connections with the Arab civilization, and are simple to make: practically speaking they consist of sweetened fruit juice which is then frozen. The Sicilians are masters at making sherbert. In this respect a story is told that in the mid 18th century an English sea captain landed in Sicily, eager to savor the best of the local cuisine. At the end of a gala dinner he was served a peach sherbert so similar to a real peach that he took a huge bite and swallowed it in one gulp, and was nearly paralyzed by the icy shock of it. Still today in certain traditional pastry shops, like Sant'Ambreus in Milan, sherberts copy fruits and objects with astonishing realism, aside from being a wonderful taste sensation.
Amalita Pacelli
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