Scribble, Scribble, Scribble

by Simon Schama

  Mouthfeel – that’s the trade term for the sine qua non of a satisfying product. Boardrooms of serious persons in suits will sit around – with tiny plastic spoons? – sliding the stuff in, rolling their tongues around it. Their brows will furrow and their lips purse as they assess texture, smoothness, density, whether the paste is too granular or too unctuous. They will pronounce judgement on the brightness or dullness of flavour; on whether the product has legs. But that’s not what James Joyce would have wanted from mouthfeel, is it?

  Imagine Molly Bloom doing strawberry flavour: ‘A plop in the mouth, and down it goes and more I want more and the stink of the earthy summer and oh there yes there is the silkymilkysmooth mouthfeel and I feel the ice and my heat melts it and then yes I smell the torn berries and my tongue searches for the seeds which arent there . . .’ Or, you know, something along those lines.

  Not quite your mouthfeel? Come on, you know there’s nothing like ice cream to give you that shot of guilty pleasure. Though I am partial to a tart sorbet – rhubarb, mango and the perfect lemon – you need the fatty voluptuousness of ice cream to make you really happy on a drizzly Monday in June. It shoves sense (and thoughts of diet) aside. You don’t eat ice cream, you gorge on it. Open wide and dream – perhaps of the perfect, but as-yet-unrealised flavour? Mine would be made from the two most mysteriously succulent Edenic fruits I’ve ever eaten, both in the Dominican Republic: the milky-fleshed caimito – a flood of scented flavour, ethereally light; and its opposite, nispero – the unappealingly leathery brown skin concealing a bronze-coloured, honey-tasting flesh.

  Where you are and with whom you’re eating has much to do with the pleasure quotient. After a sudden storm off the coast of southern Brazil, our day-trip sailboat put in to a bay where the water was churned turquoise. The rain hammered down on the pink sand, but there was a small hut with an overhanging palm roof and under the shelter someone offered us coconut ice cream from the boat. It seemed like Dido’s dessert.

  When I was growing up in Golders Green there was no question which brand of ice cream was for nice Jewish boys and girls. Joe Lyons’s Dairy Maid had been founded by Isidore and Montague Gluckstein of Whitechapel in partnership with Barnett Salmon and old Joe himself. Joe’s ices were then British and Jewish, just like us! So we loyally but unenthusiastically sucked on our Orange Maid: the drink on a stick which parents kept on telling you was good for you, and the livid pink-and-white Mivvi, with its secretions of crimson goop – the Shirley Temple of the ice-cream world. The opposition – Wall’s – could not have been more deeply goyische, since they also made pork sausages and pallid pies packed with gristly-grey mystery mince. The assumption at home was that, somehow, something of the piggy-wiggy must have crept into their Neapolitan Bricks. Which of course made the temptation to dally with the forbidden food irresistible. Heston Blumenthal may think he’s the pioneer of bacon ice cream, but for us it was already there in the fabulously sinister form of a Wall’s Tutti-Frutti.

  The strenuous modern urge to come up with flavours that will make ice cream sexy seems redundant when all that is really needed for the stuff to tickle our fancy is intensity. Getting that intensity suspended in a smooth paste of frozen cream is enough of a feat without wasting time on sensationalism. The past masters of ice-cream making knew all about the lure of the savoury. Frederick Nutt’s Complete Confectioner of 1789 offered thirty-two flavours, including barberry, brown bread, damson and Parmesan cheese, which turns out to be nothing more than a frozen soufflé and lacks the conviction of his ‘grape’ flavour (actually made with elder, the grappe de sureau). If it’s serious shock-ice you’re hunting, you need to hop on a plane to Otaru Unga in Hokkaido, Japan, where apparently you can sample their chicken-wing, horse-flesh, sea-urchin, squid-ink, crab and (less dauntingly) pickled-plum and cherry-blossom flavours. Beside those exercises in kamikaze infusions, our home-grown Purbeck’s Chilli Red seems hopelessly sedate, its speckling of hot flakes neutralised by the ocean of fatty Dorset cream. A few of the modern curiosities do actually work, especially in New York: Il Laboratorio del Gelato’s Toasted Sesame Seed is wonderful because the custard seems to have been infused, not just scattered with seedy mix-ins. Larry’s in Washington DC has a halvah ice cream which isn’t at all bad. And another idea whose time you might think ought never to have come is Mario Batali’s Olive Oil, but it’s actually rather seductive, the little beads of oil hanging glossily on the salty cream like green sweat.

  What is it about frozen desserts that tempts makers into these adventures in the gratuitous, instead of concentrating their ingenuity on nailing, say, the perfect pistachio?

  A classic instance of something that should have been killed on the drawing board is the work of a team of marketing geniuses who must have thought it would be really cool to stick their perfectly good fruit sorbets in plastic tubes, thereby realising what may be the single worst packaging idea in food history. The result is called Ice Pulp. You can either shove the thing directly in your mouth, as if you suddenly remembered you’d forgotten to brush your teeth, or else you can squeeze a fat worm of blood-orange or mango sorbet on to – what exactly – a spoon, a fruit, a friend?

  Would the Emperor Nero have gone for Ice Pulp? In the more fanciful ice-cream histories he is credited with being the original Mr Whippy, despatching teams of moaning slaves to the Apennine peaks to fetch back straw-wrapped wagonloads of ice, which would then be flavoured at his table with honey, pulped fruit, or possibly the remains of critics rash enough to under-praise his poetry. It was the sheer labour-intensive, conspicuously wasteful grandeur of the whole enterprise, the improbability of conserving ice in hot climates, that made it a royal project in the first place. An early recipe survives from the reign of the Mughal Emperor Akhbar, and though the predictable tales of Marco Polo bringing the taste for frozen sherbets back from Mongol China are apocryphal, it seems likely that Renaissance Europe got the iced-fruit habit from the Arab-Moorish presences in Sicily and Spain.

  But there was – and is – nothing very complicated about the technology for making this most paradoxical of delights. Believe me, if I can do it – with just a little cylinder that sits in the freezer overnight while the infused custard or fruit syrup is chilling, and which then takes a mere twenty to thirty minutes of electric paddling to turn itself into ice cream or sorbet – all of you can, too. A relative newcomer to the genre, I’ve whipped up some not-half-bad ice creams – ginger and honey, green tea, fig and brandy, and the ‘scalded apricots’ of Elizabeth Raffald’s 1769 recipe. My only advice: don’t skimp on the egg yolks – Thomas Jefferson prescribed six for his vanilla – and never use low-fat milk. Sorbets are even more of a pushover. And if you can’t serve them in the cups and glasses made of ice that feature in the Victorian cookbooks, put a few assorted scoops of rhubarb, lemon and blood-orange in a tall wine glass and you’ll put a smile on the faces of kids of all ages sitting at your table.

  In America, once the great ice king of Boston, Frederick Tudor, had discovered that pine sawdust was the perfect preservative for mass-packed ice and began to sell it commercially, and once sugar had gone from a luxury to an everyday commodity, a whole culture grew up around the rituals of home-made ice cream. The weekly batch involved the whole family, romping kids to stooped grans, taking turns with the churning paddle as the harvest of peaches, picked from the tree, formed itself into a fragrant mouthful of perpetual summer. The fact that the churning required attention even when others were off at church only made the treat more wickedly irresistible; homely and sinful at the same time: a Tom Sawyer picket-fence moment, bathed in shoo-fly innocence.

  The American hunger for ice cream has always been an ache for a prelapsarian way of life that never was. Successive brandings have spoken to whichever paradise seems to have been most poignantly left behind. Great Depression? Right, invent the Good Humor (choc) Bar. In the Sixties, Reuben Mattus created the fake Scandiwegian brand of Häagen-Dazs, with its meaninglessly hovering umlaut, to comfort a co
untry still crying over its murdered president. Home-style ice-cream makers have always looked for hills to nestle in, rather than be Nestléd, so Ben and Jerry resettled amidst the Green Mountains of Vermont in the late Seventies. The high-minded folksy earnestness in which the Ben & Jerry’s brand wrapped itself was an obituary for the acid age: the iconography of the tubs with their self-righteous screeds and vaguely R. Crumb graphics servicing the fantasy that the thrusting yuppie was, at least as he gobbled Cherry Garcia, in Woodstock for ever.

  On Main Street, the soda fountain had been a ra-ra American institution, a defining fixture of the town since before the Civil War; a souser-free anti-bar where milky wholesomeness took the peril out of bobby-soxers’ scarlet lipsticks. The places themselves shimmered with splendour, boasting ornate gilt-frame mirrors and towering chrome fountains. The post-war, post-welfare-state version in Britain was the milk bar. Its antiseptically tiled walls – intended, I guess, to be redolent of the dairy – were closer to a scrubbed-down NHS ward. The juke’n’jive espresso bar soon meant that its days were numbered. But before we got to drainpipe trousers, we sat there in the mournful brightness with our boatloads of banana splits, on which reposed snail-like deposits of ersatz cream. Choc ices, in the back row of the cinema between snogfests, were our best friends, since one could carry on biting, affecting cool indifference, as a free hand set off on its voyage of exploration.

  The days of toxically lurid lollies like the unsubtly rocket-shaped, horizontally banded (lime, lemon, strawberry) Zoom, the Jelly Terror, Mr Merlin’s Magic Purple Potion, Lord Toffingham (with its tongue-beckoning toffee drip) and the unforgettable Lolly Gobble Choc Bomb are long gone. In place of the thrillingly irradiated industrial-waste aesthetic we have the return of the bucolic: flavours that take you back to Ambridge and the village fete. In place of Mrs Thatcher (who worked as a chemist for Lyons), we have thatched-cottage memories; our own version of sempiternal Albion where the bumblebees hum and Ratty sculls the stream. So September Organics (based near Hereford, and thus at one with the cows) offers a Blackberry and Apple Crumble flavour, and its Brown Bread (another standard recipe of the eighteenth-century books) is about the first I’ve tasted that actually brings off that elusive combo of yeasty-crumby-creamy. But it’s possible to be led too far up the hedgerow. Cinnamon, as my co-tasting friend Cassata pointed out, is a volatile spice and needs to be almost dangerously fresh to infuse into the waiting custard. Often, as with pistachio nuts, the temptation is to compensate for fugitive flavour by aggressive roasting which releases a coarsely augmented version of the flavour. Over-sweetening is another trap into which otherwise perfectly good ice creams fall, but then I’m someone who would much rather sample Dentist’s Mouthwash Sorbet than be forced to consume a tub of Butterscotch-Anything.

  My very first experience of what real ice cream might actually taste like was in the late Fifties in Glasgow, where an Italian community ruled the vans. Marine Ices on Haverstock Hill in north London is one of the last outposts of that unapologetically fruit-creamy world. But first-hand experience of the gelaterie of Florence, Lucca, Orvieto, Rome and Naples has developed in me the craving for something as close as possible to the vivid, unclouded flavours that sit in the stainless-steel basins of Pasqualetti, Perché No and Badiano. Oddono’s of Bute Street in Kensington does a pretty decent approximation, even if we are expected to congratulate them on their vanilla hailing from Madagascar, their pistachios from Sicily. The most successful crossovers are marriages between English memories and Italian tradition. But there’s still nothing in the shops to compare with the brilliant Ciao Bella brand available in and around New York, nor with the even more spectacular stuff coming out of Jon Snyder’s Il Laboratorio del Gelato on the Lower East Side. Were their Prune-Armagnac, their Fresh Mint, their Vanilla Saffron and their Strawberry, which tastes more of strawberries than most strawberries do, not so palate-blowingly fabulous, you couldn’t forgive the pretentiousness of their brand name. But they are. Nothing I’ve ever tasted in Britain comes close, with one sensational exception: an Elderflower Crush Sorbet made by the terrific Jude’s somewhere around Winchester. Most of their product – chocolate, mango – is good, but the elderflower number, which dances its way down your greedy gullet and which still has you begging for more, is about as close to perfection as modern gelato will ever get.

  Is it possible to get a bit too worked up about ice cream? In the dawn of the Häagen-Dazs epoch (which did promise flavours that were ‘orgasmic’), Gael Greene, the food critic of New York Magazine, claimed that it was ‘not excessive to rank the ice-cream revolution with the sexual revolution, the women’s movement and peace for our time’. ‘Great ice cream,’ she wrote, as if declaiming the Gettysburg Address, ‘is sacred, brave, an eternal verity.’ Jeez, Gael, it ain’t that good, but okay, it’s pretty damned close.

  Ice-cream recipes

  Blood-orange and rosewater sorbet

  Makes 6–10 portions

  150g caster sugar

  750ml freshly squeezed blood-orange juice

  100ml orange juice

  100ml lemon juice

  2 tbsp orange zest

  1 tbsp rosewater (or to taste)

  Put the sugar and 100ml of water in a small saucepan on a high heat. Bring to the boil and stir until the sugar dissolves.

  Turn the heat down and stir for about three minutes until the syrup thickens. Transfer the syrup into a bowl, add the juices, zest and then rosewater and stir well. Allow the mixture to cool and set in the fridge for at least four hours, or overnight.

  Pour the fruit syrup into an ice-cream maker and follow the manufacturer’s instructions.

  Note: the rosewater will make this a fairly soft-spooning sorbet.

  Carrot, apricot, cardamom and saffron kulfi

  Makes 6–10 portions

  500g carrots, peeled and cut into small chunks

  200g sugar

  250g good-quality (Turkish) dried or fresh, stoned apricots

  150ml whole milk

  150ml evaporated milk

  ½ tsp saffron threads, crushed

  20 cardamom pods

  50g pistachio nuts

  Put the carrots in a small saucepan and add just enough water to cover them. Add 100g of sugar, bring to the boil and then turn the heat to low and cook slowly for twenty minutes, uncovered, stirring occasionally. Add the apricots and cook on a very low heat for another twenty-five minutes, adding a little water if necessary. Purée the carrot-apricot mixture in a blender, check for sweetness and put to one side.

  Boil or microwave the whole milk on a high heat for fifteen minutes. Use a spatula to stir and scrape down the sides to mix any ‘skin’ into the milk. Repeat this for three more fifteen-minute batches. Add the evaporated milk and remaining sugar to the mixture and cook for a further ten minutes. If a rubbery skin has formed, this time remove it.

  Crush the saffron using a pestle and mortar and add to the milk mixture. Leave to cool for twenty minutes.

  Pound the cardamom pods in the mortar to release the black seeds, discard the skins, then crush the seeds well. Put the pistachio nuts into the mortar and crush coarsely. Add the nuts and seeds to the milk. Stir the carrot-apricot purée into the saffron-cardamom thickened milk, then transfer the lot into a bowl and leave to chill in the fridge for at least four hours, or overnight.

  Pour into an ice-cream maker and follow the manufacturer’s instructions.

  Serve this in chilled glasses, with sliced fresh mangoes and papayas, sprinkled with a little freshly squeezed lime juice.

  Cinnamon and honey ice cream

  Makes 6–10 portions

  1½ cinnamon sticks, broken in half

  250ml full-fat milk

  650ml cream

  2 tbsp powdered cinnamon

  3 tbsp clear honey

  6 egg yolks

  50g caster sugar

  Put the cinnamon sticks in a small frying pan on a medium-low heat and dry-roast until they release their fragrance. Be c
areful not to burn the sticks. Then put the milk, half the cream and the sticks into a medium, heavy-based saucepan and whisk in the powdered cinnamon. Bring almost (but not completely) to the boil, stirring constantly. Reduce the heat, add the honey and stir for a further five minutes so that the cinnamon can infuse. Take off the heat. Leave to stand for five minutes, then remove the cinnamon sticks.

  In a bowl, whisk the egg yolks with the sugar until the mixture is pale yellow.

  Whisk 50ml of the hot milk mixture into the egg and sugar; then add the rest. Return to the pan and stir over a low heat for seven to ten minutes until the custard coats the back of a spoon. Take off the heat and leave to cool thoroughly.

  Taste for fragrance. If it’s a little underwhelming, this is the moment you can, if you like, add some super-high-quality powdered cinnamon. It will fleck the ice cream, but what’s wrong with that?

  Whip the remainder of the cream in soft peaks and fold into the mixture. Chill for at least five hours in the refrigerator or, better still, overnight.

  Turn the mixture into an ice-cream maker and follow the manufacturer’s instructions.

  Serve with brandy snaps.

  Note: cinnamon loses its strength very easily, and for this recipe to work the spice needs to infuse the custard. So if, when you open the jar or bruise the end of a stick you don’t get a fierce shot of fragrance, buy some fresh.

  Sauce of Controversy

  Guardian, 26 November 2008

  What is the single, best word to describe the pleasure of a great bolognese sauce? Rich. And right now, in lean economic times and at the start of a long, cold winter, we will be wanting some of that richness, won’t we? Which must be why sales of ‘mince’ are up 16 per cent. It’s an easy, irresistible, almost childish pleasure: the ground meat dissolved into a dark blood-red sauce until they are one and the same; no hacking, slicing or cutting needed; a slurpy goodness; the oily bolognese hanging on to the slippery pasta; guaranteed joy in a world that’s just ruled it out.