The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [161]
Trader Vic’s Mai Tai
Adapted from Frankly Speaking: Trader Vic’s Own Story
2 ounces 17-year-old Wray & Nephew Jamaican rum (Appleton Estate Dark rum makes a good substitute)
½ ounce curaçao
½ ounce orgeat or other almond syrup
½ cup rock-candy syrup (made by dissolving rock-candy sugar in an equal volume of water)
16 ounces shaved ice
Juice and rind of 1 fresh lime
Sprig of mint
Pour the spirits and syrups over the shaved ice in a double (16-ounce) old-fashioned glass (or something more festive and evocative). Add half the squeezed lime and the rind, and garnish with mint. (If you lack shaved ice, put 16 ounces of small ice cubes in a blender, add the other ingredients, and blend until smooth.) A “fruit stick” is completely optional; this is a short wooden skewer spearing a maraschino cherry and a cube of pineapple.
Tito Puente’s Frozen Mango Mambo
3 ounces frozen mango puree (two good brands are Perfect Puree and Goya)
1½ ounces Bacardi black rum
½ tablespoon fresh lemon juice
½ tablespoon fresh lime juice
1½ ounces sugar syrup (made by mixing 2½ tablespoons hot water with 1½ tablespoons granulated sugar)
10 ounces crushed ice or ice cubes
Garnish: 1 slice of fresh mango
Put the ingredients in a blender and blend until smooth. This will fill a 22-ounce glass. Garnish with the fresh mango.
Jekyll & Hyde Club’s Dracurita
1 ounce white tequila
½ ounce Chambord
½ ounce Triple Sec
Splash of fresh lime juice
Splash of “sour” mix
16 ounces crushed ice or ice cubes
Combine everything in a blender and blend until smooth. Serve in a 16-ounce hurricane glass.
Note: One ounce of liquid equals 2 tablespoons; 8 ounces equals 1 cup. Small ice cubes work much better in a blender than large ones.
September 1995
The Mother of All Ice Cream
As our plane circled Palermo, a snowcapped Mount Etna unexpectedly swam into view. “Etna of the snow and secret changing winds,” I said to my wife, pointing toward the eastern end of the island. “Not many men can really stand her without losing their souls.”
Actually, I was reading from D. H. Lawrence. I can never understand why Lawrence got so hysterical about Mount Etna. Sure, she is the largest volcano in Europe, brooding, dark, and gloomy. Sure, her eruptions have destroyed countless human beings and entire Sicilian cities. But to me, Etna was something more. To me, she was the Mother of All Ice Cream.
Or so I thought when we landed in Palermo. Sicily’s colonizers—Greeks, Romans, Saracens, and Spanish—used to harvest Etna’s snow, pack it into grottoes along her slopes, and, in summer, retrieve their chilly treasure to concoct refreshing iced drinks and snow cones drenched with wine and sweetened fruit essences. “In these climates the lack of snow is feared as much as the lack of grain, wine, or oil,” reported a traveling Frenchman in the eighteenth century. Today Sicilians are still crazy for frozen things, which they eat four or five times a day, starting at breakfast. They are most famous for their granita.
It was granita that had lured me to Sicily—pure and penetrating half-frozen crystalline concoctions of water and sugar, flavored with rose petals or jasmine, coffee or cocoa, fresh fruit juices and syrups. Our plan was to make a counterclockwise circuit of the island, learning the secrets of granita, and then, climbing up to Etna’s snowy peak, taste the primeval origins of every ice and ice cream that came after.
Palermo’s heyday, at least one heyday, was around A.D. 965, when, under Arab rule, it was the second-largest city in the world—crowded with palaces, markets, and three hundred mosques—vying with Baghdad and Córdoba as the greatest Arab seat of learning, culture, and cuisine. The Arabs brought sugarcane, mulberries,