The Books: At Large and At Small, “Ice Cream”, by Anne Fadiman

Next up on the essays shelf:

At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays, by Anne Fadiman

“Ice Cream” is a perfect example of what the wonderful Anne Fadiman is up to in this collection of essays. Taking her cue from essayists such as Charles Lamb (who is featured in one of these essays), William Hazlitt, and others, she takes one topic and drills into it as deep as she can go. She pulls from as many resources as she can to fill out her topic. And yet the “voice” of the essays is not scholarly. It is personal, chatty, the same voice she uses when she writes about her personal life. So the essays are both “large” and “small”. Each essay has an extensive bibliography attached to it, showing where her research led her. So here she is, talking about one of her obsessions: Ice cream. She gives us visions of her lying in bed with a book, eating ice cream, one of her greatest pleasures, and gives us funny domestic glimpses, of Anne pretending she’ll only eat one or two scoops and then continuously going to the freezer for more until the entire tub of ice cream is empty. All as her disapproving husband looks on. (Her husband, George, is a recurring character in the essays.) But Fadiman goes further in her essays than the personal, and deeper.

And so this is an entertaining look at the history of ice cream, which goes back (sort of) to the ancient Greeks (at least a version of it). She has dug into the works of literature, she has looked for references having to do with ice and liquid somehow being put together. There are arguments over who was the “first” to invent ice cream, and also arguments over who makes the best ice cream (it is pretty much agreed that the Italians are the winners).

Fadiman does not approve of fancy ice cream flavors. She makes fun of them. Green tea ice cream, coriander-seed ice cream, whatever. She likes the classics. Chocolate, fudge, vanilla. Her brother has been making ice cream for years, and even brings his ice cream crank on camping trips. Ice cream is a Fadiman obsession.

Reading her is like a breath of fresh cold air. It’s oxygen, pouring into a topic, clearing it up, enlightening it. I had never thought all that much about ice cream.

Here’s an excerpt.

At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays, “Ice Cream”, by Anne Fadiman

The Greek grammarian Athenaeus tells a catty story about Diphilus, an Athenian dramatist who lived in the fourth century B.C.:

Once upon a time Diphilus was invited to Gnathaena’s house, to dine, so they say, in celebration of the festival of Aphrodite … And one of her lovers, a stranger from Syria, had sent her some snow … the snow was to be secretly shaken up in the unmixed wine; then she directed the slave to pour out about a pint and offer the cup to Diphilus. Overjoyed, Diphilus quickly drank out of the cup, and overcome by the surprising effect he cried, “I swear, Athens and the gods bear me witness, Gnathaena, that your wine-cellar is indubitably cold.” And she replied, “Yes, for we always take care to pour in the prologues of your plays.”

When the prologues of Diphilus were unavailable, the Greeks and Roman,s who had borrowed the trick from the Middle East, sometimes chilled their drinks with ice and snow. The ice, which was cut in winter from ponds and streams, and the snow, which was carried from mountaintops, were stored underground in straw-lined pits. If the pits were sufficiently well insulated, their contents could remain frozen throughout the summer.

By the seventeenth century, rich Florentines were so addicted to cold drinks that, in a poem called “Bacco in Toscano,” Francesco Redi called snow “the fifth element”:

He is mad who without snow
Thinks to receive a satisfied guest.
Bring then from Vallombrosa
Snow in God’s plenty….
And bring me ice
From the grotto under the Boboli hill
With long picks
With great poles
Shatter
crush
crunch
crack, chip
Until all resolves
In finest iciest powder …

Redi also mentioned something called pappina, a semi-solid dessert made from snow beaten with fruit juices or other flavorings. However, as the late British food writer Elizabeth David observed in Harvest of the Cold Months: The Social History of Ice and Ices, “Ice-diluted and ice-cooled sherbets do not … equate with frozen sherbets any more than putting a few pieces of ice into a glass of drinking water 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.”

It has long been believed that real sherbets and ice creams – desserts that were artificially frozen by submerging their containers in icy brine or other refrigerants – were introduced to France in the sixteenth century by Catherine de Medici, the wife of Henry II, who brought the recipes from Italy. In 1861, Isabella Beeton, the author of a British domestic bible called The Book of Household Management, declared this contribution to French cuisine so invaluable that Catherine should be forgiven the Massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day. Elizabeth David pooh-poohs the Catherine story. She thinks the Italians did not figure out how to make ice cream until the seventeenth century and that the first French ices were made around 1660 by a distiller named Audiger. This is Audiger’s recipe for strawberry sorbet:

For [32 oz.] of water crush one pound of strawberries in the said water, add eight to ten ounces of sugar, and then the juice of a lemon…. When the sugar has melted, and all is well incorporated, filter the mixture through a sieve, and cool it…. Put three, four, or six containers or other vessels according to their size in a tub, at one finger’s distance each from the other, then you take the ice, which you pound well, and salt it when it is pounded, and promptly put it in the tub all round your boxes…. When all is thus arranged you leave it for half an hour, or three quarters….Then you move the ice covering your boxes and stir the liquor with a spoon so that it freezes into a snow.

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Italians were believed to make the best frozen desserts. (Many people still hold this opinion, including a friend of mine who, on a recent visit to Sicily, was told by some local friends that they wished him to experience a “traditional Catania breakfast.” He had lugubrious visions of pasta heaped with eggplant. However, the breakfast, served at an elegant cafe, turned out to be granita di caffe con panna: an espresso-flavored quasi-sherbet topped with whipped cream.) In 1778, a Benedictine monk in Apulia published recipes for ices and ice creams flavored with coffee, chocolate, cinnamon, candied eggs, chestnuts, pistachios, almonds, fennel seeds, violets, jasmine, oranges, lemons, strawberries, peaches, pears, apricots, bitter cherries, melons, watermelons, pomegranates, and muscatel grapes. In Victorian Britain, the duke of Beaufort employed a Neopolitan confectioner who invented a new sorbetto (the flavor, unfortunately, is not recorded), a feat so momentous that it warranted waking His Grace in the middle of the night to tell him the good news.

On the other side of the Atlantic, the earliest record of ice cream dates to 1744. The man who ate it, at the home of the governor of Maryland, said it went down “Deliciously”. His tastes were shared by George Washington, who owned two pewter ice cream pots, and Thomas Jefferson, who developed his own eighteen-step recipe. It was not until after James Madison became president in 1809, however, that ice cream realized its full ceremonial potential. A White House guest wrote:

Mrs. Madison always entertains with Grace and Charm, but last night there was a sparkle in her eye that set astir an Air of Expectancy among her Guests. When finally the brilliant Assemblage – America’s best – entered the dining room, they beheld a Table set with French china and English silver, laden with good things to eat, and in the Centre high on a silver platter, a large, shining dome of pink Ice Cream.

After that historic moment, it seems inevitable that in 1921, the commissioner of Ellis Island would decree that all newly arrived immigrants be served ice cream as part of their first American meal.