The Scoop #3: Cornwall
Ice cream at the end of the earth.
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When I woke up in Cornwall, having arrived late at night, I could tell from the haze in the air and the way the sky dipped to white over the garden fence that I was close to the sea.
The Cornish landscape is remarkably different from the rest of Britain. From a high enough vantage point, looking east, you sense its remoteness as the land appears to stretch out endlessly. It is lush in a prehistoric way. One of the first things I noticed walking down from Newlyn to Mousehole were the palms that people had planted in their gardens. The mild, temperate climate makes the region especially favourable for dairy farms.
Laura and Henry, a couple I met last year during a cooking course they ran in southern Spain, invited me to stay with them for a few nights. Henry has been cooking at Argoe, while Laura has been on the charm offensive with the locals.
She introduced me to her new friend Ken, an older man from Yorkshire who’d moved down to Cornwall 40 years ago. His wife had died and he was living alone, but clearly not without frequent company, in a cottage with a lovingly manicured front garden overlooking Mousehole harbour.
The best ice cream you can get, Ken told me, is a Magnum’s, which you must always finish with a glob of melted chocolate ‘right here’. He circled a little spot just on the top of his gut. He wore a grey polo and jeans with a rip up the left leg, and Velcro sandals which revealed his grimy toenails. ‘I’m quite hygienic, me’, he said, sitting with one leg slung over the arm of his couch.
Ken’s cottage resembled an antiques shop but was impeccably clean and dusted. In the corner, a teddy bear in a bowler hat sat on a small wooden chair. I spotted a cane with a brass handle shaped like a penis, a copper pan with a paddle nearly as long as the room was tall, twelve china cups handing from the ceiling, taxidermised fish from the Silk Stream and Avon Canal, a stuffed owl and some sort of ferret. A defunct Cornish range served as a display shelf for his collection of Cornish creamware. I was amused by a little light rotating inside the firebox, which illuminated a few glass bulbs pretending to be hot coals.
There was something dandy-ish about his pristine bachelorhood as he lectured me on the men in Cornwall, all of whom are wrong’uns, he said. ‘The only men worth marrying have husbands already.’ He claims to have a lover – a much younger woman – and explains that at his stage in life, with a pacemaker, there’s no time to be wasted on foreplay.
When Laura and I left, another woman was waiting on Ken outside. ‘You’re here to see the living room, are you?’ he said. Sure she was. ‘Let me just get rid of these two first.’
Rhubarb trifle, Clotted cream.
Roskilly’s via Jessie’s Dairy, Mousehole. 4 stars.
The rhubarb trifle was much richer than I expected, and would have benefitted from a tart counterbalance of more rhubarb. I forget how distinct a flavour clotted cream is, bearing some similarities to white chocolate in its almost nutty richness. I’m not sure it’s for me, or for breakfast, or the thing to wash down a steak pasty with, or to be chased with a stick of clotted cream fudge. But if you consider ice cream an indulgence, rather than a refreshment almost more dear than water (I am in the latter camp), this is for you.
Later on, we stopped for a pint at the King’s Arms in Paul. As a camper van was pulling out of the car park, the driver stopped and leaned out of his window. ‘Watch out,’ he warned us. ‘Ferret man.’
The ferret man was approaching the pub wearing a khaki corduroy suit. His hair, an unnatural shade of yellow, curled out from under a wide-brim hat which he would remove in the pub to reveal an impressive tonsure.
There was that watery twinkle in his eyes which old men sometimes get, and the great horseshoe moustache which covered his mouth gave the impression of either a deranged village pervert or a jolly Father Christmas smiling to himself. He wore a satchel over his shoulder and clutched the bag impatiently at his front. I already knew what it held: ferrets.
A few days later, we saw him again at the pub. This time I asked if I could pet the ferrets.
‘Yes, my lovely,’ he said, completely absorbed by the two ferrets on his lap which he stroked and fed strips of deli ham.
He handed me the large, yellow one, the same colour as his hair. It smelled pungent, a hot fetid mix of scalp, piss and hay, but was at least limp and sleepy, like those tigers that are drugged for tourists to take selfies with in Thailand. He then dropped the very small white one, flopping about like a Worm on a String, right into my arms. It was rambunctious and itching to bite my nose, I could just tell. Only too late, I remembered Ken’s advice to steer clear of strange Cornish men.
Eton Mess ice cream
Kelly’s of Cornwall. 3.5 stars.
From Sennen beach, you can walk along the cliffs for about a mile up to Land’s End. Land’s End is not what I expected from the Catholic-school-catalogue chic of the American clothing company, Lands’ End. There is a model village and one of those so-called ‘experiences’ (is anything not an experience?) based on the Wallace & Gromit/Shaun the Sheep claymation franchise. There is not much else to do other than pose for a photo next to this random Paddington Bear on a bench and eat ice cream. It is disturbingly twee for a place once thought to be the end of the earth.
Kelly’s makes me doubt myself. There’s something imperfect about this ice cream, but I can never tell whether I’m being judgmental simply because I’ve seen it sold in tubs at Tesco. At this point I couldn’t compare it to Cornish ice creams besides Roskilly’s, but in hindsight, after having tried Jelbert’s and Moomaid’s, Kelly’s is nothing to write home about.
The Eton Mess flavour tasted too blandly sweet, not milky enough, for my liking. This is a difficult dessert to recreate as ice cream – strawberries are hard to mix in without them freezing solid due to their high water content. This texture is unpleasant and can dispel all illusions of freshness as you get the sense, however accurately, that the berries came from a freezer-bag. I suppose milk can be Cornish, and cream can be clotted, but if you cannot taste those greener pastures then what is it all for?
Vanilla ice cream
Jelbert’s. £2.80. 4.5 stars.
Jelbert’s in Newlyn does one flavour, vanilla. It is a very classic, rich and simple yellow vanilla – supposedly the recipe has not changed in the past 100 years, which, perhaps naively, I believe. It tastes like milk delivered in bottles by the milkman, ice cream served from a hokey-pokey, a postcard from a seaside holiday – I would call it ‘Nostalgic’. It tastes as good as the imaginary, idealised ice cream in deep childhood memories tastes. In any case I wanted to jump for joy on the street with melted ice cream smeared around my lips like a little kid.
The one thing that is wrong – yes, wrong – with this ice cream is that it’s served with clotted cream. It’s optional for 50p, so fine blame my greediness. But it is too much. The cream is warmer than the ice and sort of seizes up in the cold, becoming texturally more like a small clot of butter. You are forced to either A) suck on the butter-like glob (????!) B) lick it and therefore coat your tongue in the fat or C) bite through it, which is difficult to do without biting the ice cream as you might if you were a small, gluttonous dog. Better to avoid this complex moral dilemma entirely and save yourself 50p.
Stem ginger ice cream. Chocolate sorbet.
Moomaid of Zennor. 5 stars.
You can find Moomaid around Cornwall, but we ate this ice cream overlooking the harbour in St Ives on my last day. It was cloudy and I felt exhausted by the thought of the long journey awaiting me. But the stem ginger flavour was bright and refreshing. It had that perfect texture which is a heavy lightness, giving resistance to the spoon while pulling away in an airy tuft.
The chocolate sorbet wasn’t something I would usually go for, but it went well with the ginger (I couldn’t make my mind up and confused the girl behind the counter so she put them in two separate cups, which I found quite nice for tasting). It reminded me of chocolate popsicles I ate as a kid, which were slightly icy straight out of the freezer but released a rich, silky chocolate flavour as you ate them. This had that same, slightly odd texture when it melted, almost resembling a matte ganache more than a glossy sorbet.
And with that, I curled up on a seat of the 8-hour sleeper train back to Paddington. It’s not so bad, though all I had for a pillow was my woolly jumper, still stinking of ferrets.
-M