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½ teaspoon pure almond extract, or 30 peach or apricot pits

⅔ cup raw shelled almonds, without their skins

½ cup granulated sugar

1 cup plus 4 tablespoons hot water

3 cups spring water

If you are using peach or apricot pits, put five at a time into a plastic bag, crack them open with a hammer, and remove the kernels. You should have about ⅛ cup (2 tablespoons) of kernels. Blanch the kernels in boiling water, uncovered, for 1 minute and slip off their skins. Drain, and toast in a preheated 300° F. oven for 10 or 15 minutes until they turn light brown. Reserve. This procedure will eliminate the prussic acid while leaving much of the bitter almond taste.

Put the skinned almonds, sugar, and pure almond extract—or the blanched, roasted peach or apricot kernels instead of the extract—in a food processor and grind to a fine powder, alternating 30 seconds of pulsing with 30 seconds of steady power, for a total of 6 minutes or more, scraping the sides and bottom of the bowl halfway through and at the end. Then, with the processor running, add the 4 tablespoons of hot water, a tablespoon at a time, letting the machine run steadily for a minute after each addition. The result will be an incredibly delicious almond cream.

Gradually add the cup of hot water to dissolve the almond cream. Pour and scrape into a 2-quart bowl and add the 3 cups of spring water. Cover, chill, and freeze.

Roasted-Almond Granita from Modica

Follow the previous recipe for Maria Grammatico’s Almond Granita, but substitute shelled, unskinned raw almonds for the skinned raw almonds, and dark-roast them as follows: spread the unskinned almonds in a heavy baking pan (or several thin pans stacked together), and roast in a preheated 300° F. oven for 5 hours, stirring every hour or so to keep the almonds on the bottom from burning. Let cool before proceeding.

Mandarin Orange Granita

Corrado Costanzo in Noto

5 mandarin oranges, clementines, tangerines, or satsumas (or more if they are small)

3 cups spring water

1 cup superfine granulated sugar

Juice of 1½ lemons (about 6 tablespoons, or ⅜ cup)

Vigorously grate the skin of the fruit (unlike lemons, there is no bitter pith) into a 2-quart bowl containing the water and the sugar. Swish around the grater in the liquid to recover all the zest. Juice the fruit into a measuring cup and pour 1¼ cups of it into the water-sugar mixture. Add half the lemon juice, mix well, and taste. Remember that the granita will taste much less sweet when it freezes; the lemon flavor should not be assertive in itself, but should add enough acidity to balance the sugar. Add more lemon juice until you can nearly—but not quite—taste the lemon flavor.

Strain the liquid through a medium or coarse strainer so that only a little of the zest and fruit pulp passes through. Cover, chill, and freeze.

Black Mulberry or Wild Strawberry Granita

Caffè Sicilia in Noto

Gelsi neri—“black mulberries”—grow on great trees, not on bushes, as the nursery rhyme would have it; are rarely the object of commerce because they are fragile and easy to squash; and are not in season in most parts of this country until summer. This did not trouble me at first, because I needed to find only one part of the country where they are in season. The day I returned from Sicily, in mid-spring, I telephoned the most reliable hunters of produce and other delicacies, without success. Then I telephoned a friend in Tucson, renowned for its mulberry trees and early growing season. After what I learned, it should be renowned for its cruelty to mulberries: within the Tucson city limits, mulberries are an endangered fruit, threatened by the vanity of man. Planting new male mulberry trees is prohibited by law because their pollen is a powerful allergen, and Tucson gains profit and riches as a refuge for allergy sufferers and hypochondriacs. Female mulberry trees must be maimed and crippled each year by chemical spraying to prevent them from fruiting