The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [166]
And so the nineteenth-century legends that Catherine de Médicis brought ices to France when she married the Duc d’Orléans 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