The Scoop, 9 June – 15 June
Ice cream reviews: Visiting the School of Artisan Food in Welbeck, The Dreamery in Islington and Leila's Shop on Calvert Avenue.
A year ago, I bought a wickedly cheap Musso Stella ice cream machine from a chocolate maker in Cornwall. It wasn’t something I wanted, but it was such a good deal that it made paying for it feel like saving money. The 33-kg hunk of stainless steel was on my kitchen counter for no more than half an hour before my flatmate was in tears, because the mere sight of it stressed her out. I moved it into a cardboard box which took up nearly a quarter of my bedroom, and made sure she heard me straining, huffing and thrashing about when I occasionally gathered the strength to move the machine into the kitchen and make something.
I lived in a tiny flat in one of the old houses of Boundary Estate, and it was like trying to keep a catfish alive in a goldfish bowl. I tried to start with the basics – brown bread ice cream, chocolate, fior di latte – but quickly got ahead of myself. I became deeply frustrated with my repeated, almost compulsive failures: a homemade marshmallow-fluff ripple that hardened like superglue on every imaginable utensil; a candied sweet potato base that took hours to cook, only to freeze solid like a block of brown ice; an inescapable vegetal smell of cooked cucumber on numerous pans, spatulas, whisks and tupperware.
In February, I moved to house in Shepherd’s Bush by promising the girls who lived there that I’d make them ice cream from the pear tree growing in the garden. A few premature ones have already dropped and withered in the grass, but the others will be ripe soon enough. I can see them from my little studio in the back of the house, where my Musso Stella sits very comfortably.
Last week I went up to the School of Artisan Food to take legendary ice cream maker Kitty Travers’s (aka La Grotta Ices) Introduction to Ice Cream Making course. I discovered Kitty’s ices while I was living down the street from Leila’s Shop, one of the few places you can buy them. By coincidence, I was back there again last week for a dinner celebrating the cookery writer Patience Gray and her book about Mediterranean life and food, Honey from a Weed: Fasting and Feasting in Tuscany, Catalonia, the Cyclades and Apulia. She was a sort of pioneer of the whole foraged-peasant-food thing we’re now so familiar with, someone who lived on mallow and asphodel and wrote about it compellingly.
Ice cream is not the first thing that comes to mind when you think of stripped-back, seasonal or fresh food. What we get in the supermarket can be good, but it’s not as good as the first spoonful of just-churned ice cream made with fresh milk and cream. It’s rarely made with what’s in-season and ripe where you are, and it’s really often a maximalist concoction of brownie bits, caramel ripple, cookie dough and so on. Bubblegum and cotton candy are some of my favourite flavours, though I’m sure they’re purely artificial.
I love ice cream for both sides: the fasting – moving with the seasons, allowing the natural flavours of fruits and herbs to come through simply; and the feasting – amped-up nostalgia, experimentation, the glorious and giddy question of ‘Can I make this into an ice cream?’ I’m trying my hand at making a bit of both, but mostly I’m documenting what other people do much better than I can (for now!). Here’s what I found this week…
9 June
Häagen-Dazs Macadamia Nut Brittle
Waitrose. £3.50 (discount). 3.5 stars.
Hint of buckwheat, notes of Pralines & Cream. It’s like keeping super-premium black sesame hojicha ice cream inside the chest freezer in your grandparents’ garage – I’m getting conflicting visions of progress and tradition. Brittle is for peanuts, but are peanuts aspirational?
10 June
Strawberry salad
La Grotta Ices recipe. 4.5 stars.
Strawberry, orange and lemon. Everything goes in – pips, skin and all – and gets blended in with a custard base. It freezes a soft pink, with just a few strawberry seeds dotting the pale cream.
The trouble with this one was the melange of sunset-coloured fruit, which recalled a long-buried memory of one bus ride to school. I sat next to a girl who’d had nothing but strawberry milk for breakfast, which she threw up all over the back of the leather seats. The pink liquid was mottled with orange and yellow, smelling distinctly of, well, exactly what you’d expect – milk, strawberry and stomach acid.
For this recipe, citric acid will do just fine.
Fig + raspberry sorbet
La Grotta Ices recipe. 5 stars.
Two-and-a-half punnets of raspberries, and a single fig leaf soaked in syrup then wrung out. This reminded me that sorbets can have a creaminess almost as good – or equally good, just in a different way – to regular ice cream.
Fig leaf has a nutty, vanilla taste to it, like toasted coconut. It smells, to me at least, like English summer and is a minor irritant to the skin and stomach. I am especially sensitive to it.
11 June
Greek mountain tea
The Dreamery. £4 for 1 scoop. 5 stars.
Never heard of Greek mountain tea. It sounds like an exfoliating soap, tastes like pitta. The first bite has the grainy texture of tahini, then melts into a perfectly rich, emulsified slop. Would I describe it differently if they had just called it ‘ironwort’ instead?
Ricotta and blueberry
The Dreamery. £4 for 1 scoop. 3 stars.
Blueberry is a nostalgic flavour but a consistently mediocre one. I have no treasured memory of it, only the faint taste-memory of the low-cal yoghurt pops my mom often bought when I was in high school.
We did, however, have a book called Blueberries for Sal. It’s about a little boy named Sal and his mother picking BB-gun-pellet-sized blueberries on a hill in Maine. While Sal is engrossed with filling his pail, he begins to follow around a mother bear, thinking it’s his own, while Little Bear follows Sal’s mother thinking it’s his. I imagined, but never knew for sure, that the berries he picked tasted just like plastic-wrapped blueberry muffins.
This Dreamery ice cream was quite heavy on the salt – did they use salted ricotta? It reminded me of the historical reenactment town Colonial Williamsburg, where I lived for a year in college. A lady in a bonnet would crank an old-fashioned churner in a bucket of rock salt and ice. They could make a gift shop magnet saying, ‘Sometimes the salt gets in the cream.’ That’s just life.
12 June
Strawberry granita
Leila’s Shop. 5 stars.
This one ended a wholesome dinner inspired by Patience Gray’s Honey from a Weed at Leila’s Shop. Kitty Travers made the granita with strawberries and a bit of elderflower syrup, and the whipped cream had a touch of cherry kernel. She ladled the soupy ice and cream into clear glasses like party punch, and we ate it with pine nut biscotti.
The colours and textures reminded me so vividly of the ice creams I would buy after school in America from a chain called Rita’s. My favourite was their gelati: Italian ice on the bottom and frozen custard on top. I always chose the Red-40 Swedish Fish flavour, a sort of candy-sweet, barely-cherry cherry with vanilla custard. When the ice melted it left a syrupy puddle, a lot like grenadine.
13 June
Limited Edition Power Shake Pop
Joe & The Juice, Hansen’s Ice Cream. £3.50. 2 stars.
What was it about this Limited Edition Power Shake Pop that pulled me into Joe & The Juice after so many years? It just happened, on a random Wednesday afternoon.
I saw a sign and came to the till. The male barista had his hay-coloured fringe cut so straight it looked like he’d been rendered in a video game. He was sturdy-looking like someone out of Skyrim. He had to run off and check their freezers for me, only to come back and say they were sold out. I wondered if it meant my tastes were all downstream of viral trends, like when a Boots cashier once told me the Clinique lipgloss I was buying was ‘from TikTok’.
Not one to let limited edition items pass me by (what if the run finishes tomorrow! I thought), I walked to the next-nearest Joe & The Juice on the opposite side of Victoria Station. The cashier was a teenage girl who approached her job with an idealistic disgust for the world of labour, capital and transactions. In an admirable f-you to the system, she tried to charge me £7 for the popsicle, as if to say, it’s all just made up numbers. But I said, ‘I think you’re charging me £7.’ She replied, ‘That’s just what it costs,’ but generously halved it anyways to a less unreasonable £3.50.
As she handed me the popsicle, she said ‘Here’. Do you ever hear people just say ‘here’ when they serve you something? It amazed me. We don’t let people behave like humans anymore, we just expect them to come out with opaque phrases like ‘My pleasure’ that don’t mean anything. I didn’t really care afterwards that the strawberry ice cream was frosty or the banana puree tasted like baby food. I guess it’s meant to evoke the strawberry shortcake pops you get from ice cream trucks, but for adults. I ate it in about thirty seconds and returned to work.
14 June
White peach and tomato sorbet
La Grotta Ices recipe. 4 stars.
Two San Marzano tomatoes and three white peaches. I bought the fruit from Ben’s on my way home from church, a ridiculous expense. The peaches were overripe and overpriced, but the sorbet tastes underripe – perhaps down to the tomatoes? In any case, Kitty, it’s not your fault, it’s Ben’s.
And that’s all. More to come next week.