''MY LIFE IN 24 FLAVOURS''

 

Papa was an Italian ice-cream maker. Annalisa Barbieri on a sweet childhood and an even sweeter adulthood ...

It wasn't my first taste of ice cream, but it was the first ice cream I remember. My mother made it, and she set the bar high. It was white--very white--and in it she'd put all sorts of things: dried fruit, curls of crystallised, candied citrus peel, and half spheres of toasted hazelnuts from my aunt's farm in Italy. It was the perfect "ice cream with bits": each mouthful yielded some crunch, some chew. But I was horribly cheated. As I remember it, I ate some--my mother hadn't made very much--and then it went back into the fridge. I opened and closed the icebox's plasticky little door many times, shaving off bits of overgrown ice as I did so, wondering if I could justify stealing the last few mouthfuls without sharing. And then, with no such indecision, someone else ate it. I never got to taste that ice cream again; when I asked my mother if she could remake it, she said she couldn't remember how she'd done it, which just made it more precious than ever. I've been searching for it ever since.
Ice cream has always featured large in my life. On Sunday, after church, my father, sister and I would go to Bobby's newsagent for ice cream: the choice was limited. We always wanted raspberry ripple, but sometimes we had to have Neapolitan, a striped brick of red, white and brown meant to be strawberry, vanilla and chocolate flavour, but which didn't taste like any of them. Sometimes, on hot summer afternoons, my mother would buy us small vanilla blocks and square wafer cones to fit them into, on the way home from school.