The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [162]
Our first morning in Palermo dawned at a little gelateria named Cofea, among the oldest and perhaps the best in town. A crowd of Palermitans stood at the counter and spilled onto the street, taking their breakfast, which in spring and summer consists of a sweet, flat brioche sliced almost in half, filled with a wide paddleful of coffee ice cream, and trimmed with whipped cream, or a tall glass of coffee granita—in fact, any granita—with pieces of brioche to dunk into it; and, of course, an espresso or a cappuccino. Your first brioche dunked into a slushy granita is an unforgettable treat. So is every one that follows.
(The Sicilian brioche, which Mary Simeti—who writes so memorably about Sicilian food and history—believes was introduced in the nineteenth century by Swiss pastry chefs who had come to Catania, is a flat, round, sweet, yeasted roll with a little ball of dough on top, resembling a French brioche flattened to a third of its height, or a gigantic hamburger roll. The recipe varies from city to city around the island, from the recognizable golden combination of sugar, flour, eggs, and butter or lard to an uninteresting, white, and doughy specimen made with margarine and without eggs.)
The granitas at Cofea were wonderful and the ingredients utterly simple, or so it seemed. Piero Marzo, the ice-cream maker, demonstrated his recipe for lemon granita in a neat little white building behind the shop, squeezing lemons and adding their juice to a solution of sugar and water. Back in the bustling shop, he poured the mixture into one of two dozen cylindrical metal tubs set into the long, refrigerated stainless-steel ice-cream counter; as the liquid begins to freeze, he will stir it every so often, and then, after it has solidified overnight, he will defrost it slightly for ten minutes and scrape the surface with a wide, flat, triangular ice-cream paddle and scoop the crystals into a footed glass. All this seemed simple enough.
But as I would soon discover, Sicilian lemons taste different from ours—sweeter, more complex, less acidic, more perfumed. One Sicilian pastry chef told us that the second time he came to New York to give some classes, he brought a suitcase full of lemons picked in the groves near his hometown. The lesson Sicilian granitas teach you is simplicity. Their aim is to celebrate the essential flavor, at the perfect time of year, of one fruit or flower—not to prove the cleverness of the cook and his ability to combine and transform flavors. How would I be able to duplicate even this simplest of granitas back home? Using lemons with less perfume, I would increase the proportion of lemon juice. But then the acidity would climb so high that I would need more sugar. And the higher the sugar content, the less icily the mixture will freeze—more than about 22 percent sugar by weight and granita will stay mushy no matter how long you freeze it. (Fruits with lots of pectin, such as strawberries, make things even worse.) Zesting the lemon for more flavor can add bitterness. And after all these adjustments, the pure, transparent, ethereal flavor will be lost.
Worried about what the future would bring, we left Palermo and headed westward along the northern coast of the island. It was midspring, and we saw nothing of the dusty