COLD COMFORT
Over the last couple of years there has been a mini-explosion of Italian ice-cream parlours in London. Gelato Mia, run by husband-and-wife team Carlo and Simone Del Mistro, opened its first shop in Holland Park in 2007 and now has four stores across the city. Scoop arrived in Covent Garden at around the same time and has recently opened a second branch in Soho. The latest arrival is Gelupo, also in Soho, a gelateria and Italian delicatessen that is the offspring of Bocca di Lupa, a restaurant notorious for serving Italian dishes of a type not often encountered in Britain (specialities include foie gras sausage and a chocolate pudding made from pig’s blood). On my first visit to Gelupo I was pleased to note that it, too, had an unconventional streak, serving flavours such as chocolate sorbet, pine nut and fennel and—weirdest but best of all—avocado and honey.
Italian ice-cream parlours aren’t a new phenomenon in this country. Many of the Italians who emigrated to Britain in the early decades of the 20th century opened them, especially in places like Glasgow, the Welsh valleys and the Isle of Wight (home to Minghella ice cream, founded by film director Anthony’s father). In London there are several venerable gelaterias, including the much-loved Marine Ices in Chalk Farm, which opened in 1931. But places like these don’t actually have much in common with, say, Vivoli in Florence (regarded as one of Italy’s finest gelaterias). The new-wave parlours such as Scoop and Gelupo, with their authentic gelato, come much closer.
The process used to make Italian gelato is very different from that used to produce British or American ice cream, as Simon MacRae, Gelupo’s manager, explained to me when I visited. Gelato has a much lower fat content than most ice cream—6 or 7 per cent as opposed to as much as 25. This is because it is made mainly with milk (or, in Gelupo’s case, milk powder) as opposed to cream and contains a higher proportion of flavouring (hazelnut, pistachio and so on) to base (milk/cream, sugar and stabiliser). High fat content in ice cream impedes flavour—it’s like throwing a thick blanket over the main ingredient—so the flavour in gelato stands out. Its other distinguishing features include having less air beaten into it than standard ice cream (which again intensifies its flavour) and being stored at a higher temperature (which accounts for its soft, barely frozen texture).
Given gelato’s obvious superiority in quality to other forms of ice cream, it’s odd that it hasn’t become ubiquitous outside Italy. Why are parlours serving authentic gelato only opening in London now? The answer probably has a lot to do with convenience: gelato, unlike other types of ice cream, can only be made in small quantities and doesn’t keep for long, so flavours have to be made from scratch on an almost daily basis. Why would ice-cream sellers commit to this unless there was wide demand for them to do so? The fact that places like Gelupo now exist suggests that some sort of critical mass has been reached—enough people now want gelato to make it commercially advantageous to provide it. And the surge in interest isn’t confined to Britain. MacRae told me that enrolments at the Carpigiani Gelato University in Bologna have shot up over the last year, with students flocking from far and wide to learn the secrets of the trade. So maybe Italian ice cream truly is about to take over the world.
BRANCH RANCH
Picking your own fruit is a staple activity of British summers but this year, in conjunction with my mother, I am going a step further. Rent a Cherry Tree is an East Sussex-based company that, as its name suggests, allocates you a tree which it then nurtures throughout the year (sending you regular updates on its progress) before allowing you to come in at the final moment, in a blaze of self-satisfaction, and carry off the goodies for yourself. And all this for a surprisingly modest £35. Given that a tree yields as much as 18kg of cherries, it’s certainly a lot cheaper than buying them from a shop. As I write, the harvest is fast approaching (our allocated picking window is ten days near the end of July) and I am looking forward to having a glut of cherries on my hands. Will I manage to do anything more creative with them than scoff the lot there and then? I live in hope.
HITTING THE ROOF
The culinary options in the corner of southeast London where I live have been much improved recently by the return of Frank’s Cafe and Campari Bar. Situated in one of the least likely venues in the capital—the roof of Peckham’s seven-storey car park—this “pop-up restaurant,” which first came into being last summer, serves indifferent Campari-based cocktails and a range of simple but surprisingly delicious food (braised cuttlefish; cured salmon with dill and soda bread) prepared by a former chef at the Anchor and Hope in Waterloo. Populated largely by art students, it offers a strange mix of sights: weird hairstyles and bad sculpture in the foreground (it doubles as an “art space”), the uneven architecture of Peckham in the middle ground, and the whole of London laid out before you in the distance. I can think of no more enjoyable spot in which to pass a summer evening.
