The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [165]
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-Café. 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 Grammatico 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