The empress of ice cream

Carlo

To chill wine: take a block of ice or snow well pressed; split it and crack it and crush it to powder, as fine as you like; place it in a silver bucket, and push your flagon deep within.

The Book of Ices

It is the custom, in such writings as I now embark on, to begin by describing the circumstances of the author’s birth, and thus by what genuine authority he may claim to address the reader (his position in fife, what he has achieved, and so forth, naturally being determined by his place in society).

Alas! I can make no such claim, my birth being humble and my upbringing mean.

I was, I believe, no more than seven or eight years old when the Persian, Ahmad, took me from my family. All I can now recall of the island where my parents lived was how the groves of almond trees turned white in the spring, like the snow on top of the great volcano which looked down on them, and the greenness of the sea on which my father fished. This same sea brought us ships such as the one on which Ahmad had come, seeking a child to take into his employ. Seeing my father and I mending nets together, he spoke to my parents of the great life that I would follow, of the grandeurs of Florence and the marvellous court in which I would be placed. From that day on I found myself in the service of a cruel and capricious master. Not Ahmad - although he was stern, he was no worse than many others. No, the master who treated me so harshly was ice itself.

Once we had arrived in Florence, one of my first tasks was to

transport the heavy blocks from the ice house in the Boboli Gardens to the palace kitchens. The first time I did this, the curiosity of playing with the frozen slabs - of seeing how they slid away from me like eels, how I could sit astride them and ride them like trolley-carts down the grassy parts of the slope, or shoot them at the kitchen Wall from a distance and watch them^ shatter into dozens of jewel-like shards - enchanted me so much that, in a state of childish enthusiasm, I neglected my other duties.

When Ahmad found me in the courtyard, surrounded by dozens of ruined, glittering ice blocks, he did not at first show the displeasure which my ill discipline warranted. ‘Come with me,’ he said. He took me to the ice house, ushered me in, and locked the door.

Inside, in contrast to the heat of Florence, it was as cold as the temperature at which water becomes ice. I was wearing only a thin hose and shirt, together with the blue apron all apprentices wore. After a few minutes I began to shake. The cold felt like a flame, or a knife that was being dragged through my skin. After half an hour I was shivering with so much violence I drew blood from my own tongue.

Not long after that, I felt the shivering stop. At last I am getting used to it, I thought. A great tiredness was seeping through me. I was, I realised, drifting off to sleep. I could still feel the searing cold, but my body was no longer capable of fighting it. I felt my defences crumbling; felt it entering the innermdst recesses of my flesh. It was not exhaustion I experienced now so much as an inner numbness, as if my limbs themselves were hardening, one by one, turning me into a statue, as cold and lifeless as the David of Florence itself. I tried to cry out, but my scream was somehow also frozen within me, and I found I could not so much as open my mouth.

The next thing I remember I was being carried into the kitchens. I woke up looking into my master’s dark eyes, before the Persian dropped me unceremoniously to the floor.

‘You won’t do that again,’ he said as he turned to go.

I never again played with the ice. But something else had changed too. It was not just that I no longer trusted my master. The cold I had felt never seemed to completely leave my body, so that there was^always a sliver or two of ice deep within my bones, and - perhaps - even within my soul.

A few days after my incarceration in the ice house, the middle finger of my right hand began to turn black. Ahmad inspected it without remark, then summoned two of his brothers to hold my arm down on a block of ice while he amputated the finger at the knuckle with a cleaver. Warm blood spurted onto the ice, turning to pink crystals as it froze.

‘It won’t affect your work,’ he said when I stopped screaming.

Each night, as tired as a dog and half frozen to death, I crawled into the palace kitchen to sleep next to one of the big, open fireplaces on which meat was roasted Mpi hr ace ^ over embers. The kitchen workers grew used to me, and no longer chased me out with brooms and knives. I began to watch the cooks as they went about their work; observing how they pureed fruits to intensify their flavours; how they extracted the perfumes of violets and orange flowers to flavour creams and liqueurs; how they made a verjuice from grapes and quinces to set the lighter fruits. But when I tried to suggest to Ahmad that these techniques could be of use in our own work, my master was scornful.

‘We are engineers, not cooks,’ he liked to say. ‘Cooking is women’s business. We know the secrets of ice.’

Indeed, these were ancient secrets, a body of knowledge which had been passed down from father to son within a few Persian families, suppliers of sherbets to the court of Shah ‘Abbas in Ishfahan. Some of this knowledge was contained in stained leather-bound notebooks, their pages covered in diagrams and spidery Arabic writing. But most was kept only in Ahmad’s head, in a set of rules and maxims he followed as blindly as any ignorant

country priest reciting a Latin liturgy he does not truly under stand.

‘To five measures of crushed ice, add three measures of saltpetre,’ he would intone.

‘Why?’ I would say.

‘Why what?’'

‘Why must the ice be crushed? And what difference does saltpetre make?’

‘What does it matter? Now stir the mixture clockwise, twentyseven times.’

‘Perhaps the humour of saltpetre is heat, and the humour of ice is cold, and so adding the one to the other means that—’

‘And perhaps I may beat you with the paddle, if you do not use it to stir the ice.’

I had been working for the Persian almost two years before I dared to ask what the ices we made tasted like.

‘Taste? What does the taste matter to you, child?’ Ahmad said scornfully.

I knew that I had to be careful how I answered if I was to avoid yet another beating. ‘Sir, I have seen how the cooks try their dishes as they make them. I think I will understand better how to make these ices if I know how they are meant to taste.’

We were making an ice flavoured with a syrup of the small sweet oranges that some call china oranges, and some mandarins. The syrup was thickened further with orange pulp’ and scented with the aromatic oils extracted from the rind, before being poured over a pile of grated ice. ‘Very well,’ Ahmad said, gesturing at the pot with a shrug. ‘Try some, if that is what you wish.’ Before he could change his mind I took a spoon, scooped out a litde of the confection, and put it to my lips.

Ice crystals cracked and crunched against my teeth. I felt them dissolving on my tongue - a cold, sparkling sensation as they shrivelled away to nothing - then the syrup ran down my throat, cold and thick and sugary. The taste swelled in my mouth like the

sudden ripening of the orange fruit itself I gasped with pleasure: then, a moment later, a terrible pain shot up inside my head as the cold gripped my throat, choking me, and I spluttered.

Ahmad’s lip curled with amusement. ‘Now, perhaps, you understand th^t it is not a dish for children. Or for the general populace, there being no nourishment in it. We are here to entertain, boy, not to feed. We are like singers, or actors, or painters, makers of fine meaningless baubles for the wealthy and the great: that is to say, kings, courtiers, cardinals and their courtesans. No one but them will ever be able to waste so much expense on something that melts to nothing on their lips even faster than a song melts on the evening air.’

But, once I had got over the initial strangeness, I found that the taste was one I could not forget. It had not simply been that extraordinary flavour of sweet, concentrated oranges; it was the ice itself, its cold, frozen grittiness, calling to me. From then on, without Ahmad knowing, I made sure I tasted every confection we made. And I never again spluttered when I felt the coldness grip my throat.

One night I found the whole kitchen smelling dark and pungent, as if livers were being cooked in a sauce of fortified wine; but this smell had a richness to it that was like no offal I had ever known. It was coming from a small saucepan on the range, where something thick and brown spat like hot lava as the cook stirred it with a wooden spoon. ‘Xocalatl,’ the cook said, as he poured the contents of the pan into a small cup for the Grand Duke’s nightcap: then, seeing my incomprehension, he offered me the end of the spoon to taste.

That is another memory I have never forgotten, one of a different kind: a heat that filled my mouth and coated my palate, leaving it full of the same rich taste for hours afterwards; bitter and thick, yet strangely warming, like the very opposite of ice.

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