The Man Who Ate Everything (48 page)

A rising contender for Noto’s granita crown is the century-old Gaffe Sicilia nearby and the young Assenza brothers who own it. They specialize in exceptional, briefly cooked marmalades and creams—barely sweetened and very modern—made from Sicily’s finest produce: citrons, bergamots, lemons, mandarin oranges, almonds, chestnut honey, and pink grapefruit. After tasting them all, we noticed that the blackboard over the gelati counter prematurely advertised
gelso nero,
“black mulberry,” one of Sicily’s favorite ices. As
gelsi
would not come into season until midsummer, we practiced with
fragoline.
It was here, too, that I discovered the secret of the elusive toasted-almond granita of Modica. The Assenzas’ father was born and raised in Modica and often returned there for the one taste that revived his fondest memories of childhood. Toasted-almond granita is no longer made in Sicily, it seems, but now it can be re-created in my kitchen and yours. Corrado Assenza’s secret is to roast shelled almonds
tor five
hours.

A few days later we headed north from Siracusa, past Catania (the second-largest city in Sicily, totally destroyed by an eruption of Etna in 1669, and the only place in Sicily with a tradition of chocolate granita), past the Isole dei Ciclopi—rocky outcroppings in the Ionian Sea just off the coast that were long ago thrown at the fleeing Odysseus by an enraged, blinded Cyclops—past Mount Etna, and up to Messina, where Shakespeare set
Much Ado about Nothing.
We briefly peered out into the water to spot Scylla and Charybdis, the female sea monster who, Homer tells us, devoured ancient Greek sailors and the powerful whirlpool that wrecked
their ships; turned left onto Sicily’s north coast; and stayed the night in Milazzo. The next morning we would take a hydrofoil to the Aeolians and the island of Salina, noted for the alluring Sirens of mythology, for its Malvasia wine, and for the tiny town of Lingua where, I had been told, a
caffe
owner named Alfredo makes the best coffee granita anywhere.

The hydrofoil took eighty-five minutes, even in the rain and even with a stop at the island of Vulcano, in whose hideously scary-looking volcano the god Vulcan had his forge. On Salina, we stopped at the Portobello restaurant to make reservations for a late lunch and took one of the island’s two active taxis to run us up to Lingua, ten minutes away. Walking a narrow path between houses and shops and threading our way through a vineyard, we came again to the sea and a line of beachfront shops, all shuttered except for Alfredo Oliveri’s Bar-Cafe. We tasted his excellent lemon and strawberry granitas, discussed his white-fig, melon, and kiwi versions, and finally tasted the coffee. It was perfect, not because of the perfection of his ingredients—these are easy to duplicate here—but because of his fifty-year-old broken-down Carpigiani gelato machine, which with its battered blade and erratic temperature produces the perfect granita texture: tiny, regular, moist, and highly flavored crystals of ice. Even without Alfredo’s Carpigiani, his recipe—quite a standard one—produces a delicious, crystalline coffee granita. On Salina, whipped cream is served with all granitas except lemon.

The next day we awoke at dawn for the four-hour sprint to Mount Etna and the airport near Catania. A heavy, dark rain began to fall. Our plan had been to ascend Mount Etna’s ancient peak and retrieve enough snow to make, with the wine and mandarin oranges we had brought, a Certifiably Primeval Snow Cone. But as Etna’s huge black bulk loomed through the clouds and rain, our need to accomplish this feat suddenly evaporated. It was not due to the awful weather or the prospect of finding many chocolate granitas in Catania with the time we could save or the fact that the mandarin orange was brought as late as 1805 from
Canton in China to England, from where it spread through Italy and the Mediterranean—a date so recent that it would render our snow cone anything but primeval.

No, the true reason was that my investigations and reading had yielded a major revelation:
Etna is not the Mother of All Ice Cream!
The Romans may have drunk iced wines and the Arabs may have iced their
sharbats
with mounds of her snow, but neither was able to make true granitas and sherbets, because neither knew the scientific secret of artificial freezing.

Decades ago, when the nuns in Erice taught Maria Gram-matico to make almond-milk granita, they cracked a block of ice in a wide stone basin, sprinkled it with coarse salt or saltpeter, placed a terra-cotta container of almond milk in the center, and scraped and stirred it as it hardened. Salt lowers the melting point of ice; a mixture of salt and ice melts into a very cold slush— colder than the freezing point of water—and can solidify another liquid through conduction. This was the earliest technique of artificial freezing, and it is called the
endothermic
effect. If you flavor the second liquid and stir it every so often, you will soon have a granita. If you stir it constantly, you will have discovered the water ice and the sherbet.

The earliest mention of the endothermic effect was in a fourth-century Indian poem, “Pancatantra,” in a verse that said that water can become really cold only if it contains salt. And the first known technical description of making ice comes from the great Arab historian of medicine, Ibn Abu Usaybi’a (1230-1270), who attributes the process to an older author, Ibn Bakhtawayhi, of whom nothing is known. The first European mention comes in 1530, when the Italian physician Zimara wrote his
Problemata.

But for centuries artificial freezing seems to have remained little more than a party trick—nobody thought to make granita, sherbet, or ice cream this way until water ices began appearing in Naples, Sicily, Paris, Florence, and Spain in the early 1660s. There are no earlier mentions in letters, books, recipes, or menus
anywhere in the world. Italian visitors to Muslim Turkey reported a rich variety of cooled, liquid
sharbats,
but no ices. The earliest recipe appeared in Paris in 1674, the first Neapolitan recipe twenty years later. And the first book on ices, Baldini’s
De’ sorbetti,
came ninety years after that.

And so the nineteenth-century legends that Catherine de Medicis brought ices to France when she married the Due d’Or-leans in 1533—and the notion that Marco Polo brought ice cream back from China—cannot possibly be true. Not only does Polo fail to mention the Chinese fascination with harvesting, storing, and using snow and ice for cooling food, but some historians suspect that he never got closer to China than a Persian jail.

The endothermic effect is the Mother of All Ice Cream. And! Mount Etna is just another gigantic old brooding volcano.

The sky over Catania and the Ionian Sea beyond had turned a dazzling blue, and we drove through the city, nearly empty on a Sunday morning, and sought out several pastry shops, some renowned, some at random, to sample their chocolate granitas and talk recipes. Then we drove west for a while for a last glimpse of Etna and a brief reading from D. H. Lawrence, and nearly missed our plane.

In some ways, it might have been better if we had, because back in New York, trying to duplicate Sicily’s granitas was nearly as difficult and time-consuming as I had feared. But the recipes that follow will make the job a snap. Serve your granita in a goblet, a footed ice-cream glass, or a martini glass. Serve it alone, with other granitas, with whipped cream and a brioche, or layered in a parfait glass or goblet with an ice cream of the same flavor.

Making Granitas

Each recipe ends with the sentence “Cover, chill, and freeze.” There are numerous ways to turn a flavored, sweetened, chilled liquid into a fine granita; I give three below. As we discovered in
Sicily, there is no one official way of freezing granita. The desired texture seems to vary from city to city. In Palermo and on the west coast, granita is chunky and grainy; in the east, it is nearly as smooth as
sorbetto;
and in the northwest and the Aeolean Islands, it falls somewhere in between. It can be scraped from the inside of the container, chipped or scraped from a block of flavored ice, made in a crusher, or produced in an ice-cream machine.

My favorite way of making a granita is to pour the mixture into a strong, shallow plastic container with a lid; one measuring ten by ten by two inches works fine. Place it in the freezer. After an hour and every half hour thereafter, scrape the iced rim around the inside of the container with a fork; beat, mash, and fluff the ice to achieve a uniform texture. After three to five hours of this, the ice crystals will become separate and somewhat dry in appearance.

Preparing the granita liquids will take about a half hour. Elapsed time for freezing the granitas is about four hours; the actual work occupies five minutes or less every half hour. Yield is about one quart.

Now the granita can be eaten immediately or stored in the freezer for up to three days. To revive the granita, place the container in the refrigerator section for a half hour to defrost slightly, then beat and fluff with a fork, and finally refreeze it for another half hour.

This method was adapted from Liddell and Weir’s
Ices.
Here are three alternatives you might try. Methods using a food processor work poorly.

1. Pour the mixture into one or more shallow metal trays and place them in the freezer. After a half hour to an hour, when ice crystals begin to form, stir them into the liquid. Repeat a half hour later. Freeze overnight. Remove, leave at room temperature for five minutes or so, and scrape the surface with the tines of a fork. Spoon the crystals into chilled serving dishes.

2. Bicycle around Manhattan’s Lower East Side, as my assistant Tara did, looking for a Hispanic seller of snow cones. Ask him
where he bought his ice shaver, which looks like a wood plane made of dull aluminum with a compartment on top to trap the shavings. Buy one. Freeze a granita mixture solid, defrost briefly, and scrape shavings of snow from the top of the frozen block.

3. Buy the amazingly effective though overpriced Hawaiice Ice Scraper (model S-200) from the Back to Basics catalog, (800) 688-1989.

Lemon Granita

Corrado Costanzo in Noto

As I had feared, when you use regular supermarket lemons and add sugar to compensate for the acidity, a proper balance is hard to attain.

Then I discovered that Meyer lemons from California make a fine substitute for the green summer lemons of Sicily. (Meyer lemons were named for agricultural adventurer Frank N. Meyer, who discovered them in 1908 growing near Peking in an ornamental pot. They may be a cross between a lemon and a mandarin orange, but nobody knows for sure.) And even when Meyer lemons are unavailable, ordinary lemons can be used to make a satisfying granita by diluting their juice with water and using the zest with great discretion. When Corrado Costanzo zests a lemon, he passes it over a hand grater with such delicacy that he removes only the very outer layer of the fruit’s yellow peel and never even approaches the bitter white pith.

1 1/4 cups superfine sugar

3
cups spring water

4 Meyer lemons (see Note), either organically grown or carefully washed

Dissolve the sugar in the water in a 2-quart bowl. Very gently grate the lemons with a hand grater held over the bowl. Swish the grater around in the liquid to recover the zest that sticks to it.

Juice the lemons. Pour 1 cup of lemon juice into the bowl and mix well. Pass the mixture through a strainer coarse enough to let through a little of the lemon zest and pulp.

Cover, chill, and freeze.

Note: If you cannot find Meyer lemons, use 3 normal yellow lemons (to yield
3
/4 cup of juice),
3 1/2
cups of water, and 1
1
/2
cups minus 2 tablespoons of sugar. The granita will freeze slowly, but the taste will be excellent.

Maria Grammatico’s Almond Granita

The search for an authentic bitter almond taste took me to various almond extracts (both natural and artificial), commercial almond pastes (European brands once contained real bitter almonds, which can be imported only when they are a minor ingredient in almond paste, not by themselves), and apricot or peach kernels, which also contain amygdalin. This breaks down into benzaldehyde—the essential bitter almond flavor—and prussic acid, a poison. I spoke with several scientists in the flavor industry and learned a lot about the differences between “natural,” “pure,” and artificial benzaldehyde.

I prepared eleven versions of almond milk and
arranged a blind tasting. There were three clear winners: (1) the version made by diluting an almond paste we had brought back from the Gaffe Finocchiaro in Avola, near Noto in Sicily, full of bitter almonds; (2) my own homemade almond paste containing peach and apricot kernels, blanched and toasted for safety’s sake; and (3) the same homemade paste flavored instead with McCormick “pure almond extract.” Imitation or artificial almond extracts, even McCormick’s, are sorry substitutes, containing synthetic benzaldehyde alone, with none of the numerous other aroma compounds found in true bitter almond oil.