[Sca-cooks] Re: Summer Period Desserts

[Elise Fleming]

Finnebhir wrote:
>In reading one of my modern culinary subscribtions, I read that
Gelato, and
>various forms of granita go all the way back to the Roman Empire.

You might want to check out Elizabeth David's _Harvest of the Cold
Months_, The Social History of Ice and Ices.  While my reading of it
goes back a few years, my recollection is that frozen
dessert-thingys are from the Renaissance period - mid- or late-1500s
and on.  And, basically only in Italy.  She does note (from the
quick scan I just did) that the Romans used snow from their man-made
snow pits to cool wine.  On pages 44-45 she offers some debunking
theories to using sherbets/sorbets during the Medici times, and
notes that there may have been confusion of terms.  "How curiious,
then, that in modern times - meaning from about the mid nineteenth
century on - it has come to be believed that Catherine de Midici was
accompanied to France by a bevy of Italian confectioners who taught
their French colleagues to make ices and frozen sherbets.  Since the
story is widely believed in Italy, appears to be central to the
credo of the Italian ice-cream trade, and is one I was myself once
gullible enough to believe and repeat, it is necessary to say here
that although the source of the story remains unidentified, it is
plain that its origins are in the nineteenth century...the term
"sorbets"...would have implied simply syrups, pastes, powders,
lemonades and other fruit juices, sweetened and diluted with water
in the Turkish fashion...Ice-diluted and ice-cooled sherbets do not,
however equate with frozen sherbets any more than putting a few
pieces of ice into into a glass of drinking wate turns that water
into ice, or than the milk half-frozen in the bottle on your
doorstep on an icy morning has become ice-cream..."

Perhaps the use of ice/snow-cooled drinks in Roman times is what
confused the modern magazine writer?  IIRC from the book, it is
conceivable that the wine could have been mixed with snow which
would give something like a coffee "frappucino", but which is not
like what we call gelato or granita.

Alys Katharine