The empress of ice cream

Carlo

A

To make a pineapple sherbet: add two cups of sugar to two cups of buttermilk, or more if your pineapple be sharp. Stir in a spoon of fresh minced mint, and the juice of a lime, and stir it as you freeze. The principle is no different from any other fruit.

The Book of Ices

The next day, when I went to Whitehall to collect the empty goblets, I found Louise in her apartments. She seemed somehow adrift in the great space, lost, like someone wearing a ballgown several sizes too large.

I had no wish to speak to her, but I bowed anyway.

‘Don’t be Hke that,’ she said sharply.

‘Like what?’

‘Carlo . . .’

I waited.

‘I was truly grateful for your help last night,’ she said. ‘Were it not for your ices, it would have been a difficult situation. A more difficult situation, I should say.’

‘You and the queen? I can see how that might have been a little awkward.’

She shrugged. ‘That is the point of manners, isn’t it? To make awkward situations bearable. Besides, I suspect she has had to suffer worse, in this terrible country.’ She was silent a moment. ‘I mean it, signor. We find ourselves reluctant partners in this task, but I am grateful that Louis has sent someone who I know I can rely on.’

‘I will do my duty. No more, and no less. And then we will return to France, and there will be an end to our association.’

She seemed surprised. ^Tbu will return to France, you mean.’

‘You might stay here?’

She gave me a sharp glance then, as if wondering why I asked. ‘Possibly. We shall have to see.’

‘Your enthusiasm for your task is even greater than I imagined, then,’ I said dryly.

‘I have an opportunity. I would be a fool not to take it.’

‘Indeed.’ I bowed again. ‘Reluctant partners, then.’

As I closed the door of her apartment behind me, I saw a note fluttering on the wood. Someone had pinned it there with a fruit knife. Two lines of verse.

Within this pldce pl bed’s appointed For a French bitch and God’s anointed.

I went back and handed it to her. ‘You have been sent a billetdoux.’

She read it, her face ashen. ‘Barbarians. How could they?’

‘It is probably a man called Rochester. The king indulges such behaviour, I believe.’

‘They hate us. That is to say, they hate me. And they will only hate me more when—’ She shook her head. ‘It does not matter. It means nothing. If I could handle the French court, I can surely handle this.’

‘And this,’ I said, pointing at the note, ‘is exactly the sort of merriment that we are here to encourage, isn’t it? We will know we have been successful when Lord Rochester is as celebrated in England as Moliere or Racine are in France.’

Finally, my pineapple had arrived, and for a time I was able to put Louise de Keroualle from my mind.

For all that I had spoken casually of pineapples to Lord Arlington, I had never before been able to use one for an ice. Even at the court of Louis XIV, they were too precious for that.

So I was both curious, and a little excited, to get my hands on one now.

The pineapple came in its own coach-and-four, direct from Lord Devon’s pinery. The chest was carried into the Red Lion by two of his footmen, with a third standing guard with a pistol in case of robbers. A curious crowd, meanwhile, gathered in the coaching yard to watch its progress from coach to kitchen.

T had better place someone to keep watch,’ Titus said nervously. T would not like to be responsible if it were stolen.’

In my pantry, I had already had Hannah scrub the stone ledge that ran the length of one wall in readiness. The chest was set down and the locks undone. A few people had managed to follow the chest’s progress indoors, and now craned forward eagerly to see the contents.

Inside, on a red satin cushion, lay a strange fruit: half coronet, half hedgehog. The skin was scaly and patterned, like the shell of a tortoise, while from the crown sprang an extravagant headdress of prickly plumage. The aroma - which had something of the perfumed fragrance of strawberries, and something of the sharp freshness of limes - escaped from the chest where it had been trapped and filled the air around me. As one, the onlookers made an ahh-ing sound.

‘And now you must all leave,’ I said firmly. ‘I have work to do.’

When there was no one left in the pantry but Hannah, Elias and myself, I reached into the chest and pulled out the pineapple, using the tips of my fingers to avoid being pricked by the curved, talon-like spikes that protruded from each scale. Placing it on the ledge, I picked up a cleaver. With a certain trepidation - this must be how a surgeon feels, I thought, in the moment before he slices open a patient - I lopped off the top, revealing the pale, sweet-smelling inside. Carefully, I placed the crown to one side. Then I sliced the pineapple in two lengthways, before taking a smaller filleting knife and carefully cutting away both the scaly

skin and the hard, husk-like inner core. I did this last part over a bowl: even so, drops of priceless pineapple juice ran down my fingers.

‘That fruit,’ Hannah observed suddenly, ‘would cost more than I will earn in my lifetime.’

‘What of it?’

‘Nothing could be worth so much.’

I shrugged. ‘It is worth what men are prepared to pay.’

‘But it is not even particularly pleasant.’

‘How do you know?’ I said sharply, wondering for a moment if she had taken some to taste when I was not looking.

‘From the smell. It is almost as sour as a lemon. Can’t you feel it?’

It was true - my own nostrils were pricking from the fruit’s sharpness too. Experimentally, I lifted my hand and Hcked my finger where the pineapple juices dripped along it. It was very sharp indeed: bitter, almost. It would need a great deal of sugar to make it palatable.

‘I cannot help thinking,’ she went on, ‘that these pineapples are like gold, or precious stones - their value comes principally from the fact that they are rare.’

‘It is rather more than that.’ I hesitated. ‘The pineapple is known to be an aphrodisiac - to stoke the passions of love.’

To my surprise, she hooted with laughter.

‘What is so funny?’

‘Only that it is strange how it is never common-or-garden herbs or fruits that are said to do that. If a simple blackberry or an English apple had the misfortune to look so strange, and to be so elusive, then perhaps those too would cost men fortunes, and be considered a source of potency.’

‘No one would be so foolish as to pay a fortune for a blackberry,’ I said. The pineapple now lay in eight pieces in my bowl, together with its juice. I separated it into two, and handed one lot to her. ‘Cut it as fine as you can.’

She nodded, and we began to slice and reslice the pineapple into cubes barely larger than crumbs of bread. I will say this for her: she kept a sharp knife, and she could use it quickly.

‘People - that is to say, men - prize what they cannot have.’ She gave me a sideways glance. ‘For you, I suppose, that is all to the good.’

‘What do you mean.>’

‘Only that your ices are expensive for exactly the same reason.’

‘My ices are sought after because of their excellence,’ I said. ‘Enough of this chatter, woman. We need to slice and sift the fruit very fine.’

‘I can talk and chop at the same time.’

I sighed. ‘Perhaps, but I cannot. This fruit is, as you have rightly pointed out, more precious than gold, and I would like to give its preparation the attention it deserves.’

When the sifting was done, and I had a mound of fine-textured pulp and juice, I considered what to do next.

I had been planning to make a simple sorbetto^ but the fruit’s sharpness persuaded me that I would do better to aim for a richer dish. So I sent Hannah to get sorrie buttermilk, the creamy, thick liquid left over from churning butter. Meanwhile, I readied my other ingredients: crushed mint leaves and a litde lime juice, to act as a flavour base for a sherbet.

When Hannah returned, I mixed together equal amounts of buttermilk and sugar, and added that to my pineapple and the other ingredients. Then I poured my mixture into the sahotiereHannah by this time having been ordered out of the pantry - and stirred it every half an hour, initially with a whisk, and later, as it became heavier and more snow-like, with a fork to break up the crystals.

So simple, and so quick. I tasted it - just a morsel: there were barely three cupfuls in total. It had a sweet, delicate flavour, like pale sunshine, the sourness balanced now by the sugar and the

richness of the buttermilk. It was very fine - but as to whether it was any better or worse than a blackberry or an apple, I really could not have said.