The Ice-Cream Makers (11 page)

‘Did you know the ice-cream cone is an American invention?' the Chinese man asked when my father turned up at his table with his order.

‘And Columbus brought the cone back to Europe?' said my father.

‘You're impossible to talk to!'

My mother claims that my father then plunked the cone on top of the man's head, but my father maintains that the man shoved him and ran off. He ran after him, calling out, ‘Wait! Your American cone with Chinese raspberry ice-cream!' and threw it at the man. The ice-cream flew through the air, did one-and-a-half somersaults, and landed on the man's head.

My mother came out with a cloth and offered her apologies. My father wasn't allowed out of the ice-cream parlour for the rest of the day. And so he stood behind the counter, snorting like a bull and crushing four cones in his twitchy hands that day. They were a lot more brittle in those days, as my parents made the cones themselves with a waffle iron and a wooden mould. I remember the aroma vividly — perhaps the best memory from my childhood. Those calm, rainy days when the batter hissed on the small black grids of the waffle-maker. I got to press the irons together and Luca got to open them. Later we were allowed to use the mould as well, but when we were little my father would roll the cones. ‘This is a gorgeous specimen,' he often said, or ‘Let's hang on to this one, boys. It's too beautiful to eat.' My mother scraped any remaining bits of dough from the iron with a spatula and we would fight over them, like young birds opening their beaks to be fed.

And yes, the ice-cream cone was indeed invented in America, although the inventor wasn't an American. At the World's Fair in St Louis, Missouri, in the year 1904, Syrian pastry chef Ernest A. Hamwi sold sweet, thin Persian wafers from a stall. Standing next to him was an ice-cream maker who ran out of plates in the afternoon, so he could no longer sell his ice-cream. The inventive Syrian came up with the idea of rolling his wafers into horns that could hold ice-cream. The customers loved it, and before long Hamwi was also baking cones for other ice-cream makers at the World's Fair.

Fifteen years later, at the convention of the Association of Ice-Cream Manufacturers of Pennsylvania, the American ice-cream maker L.J. Schumaker was recorded as saying, ‘The ice-cream cone is the biggest little thing in the ice-cream business.' Its advent had transformed the industry, opened it up enormously. Up until that point, ice-cream had been sold exclusively in pharmacies and sweet shops, served in small glasses or on plates. The cone brought ice-cream to the street, to stalls at junctions and schools, to fairgrounds and squares, to zoos.

There's a story about two brothers who ran an ice-cream stall at Coney Island. Whenever business was slack, they hired pretty girls to walk along the promenade with an ice-cream cone in their hands. They ended up selling more than on the hottest day in summer.

Two years ago, at the Oslo Poetry Festival, the golden-blonde Norwegian programmer blushed when I told her I came from an ice-cream-making family and that making cones was one of my fondest childhood memories.

‘Let me tell you something I've never told anyone before,' she whispered. We were sitting at a table in the Green Room, drinking red wine. All around us poets were talking in bigger or smaller groups. The official programme had ended hours ago and the auditoriums were empty, but things were pretty lively in this room with private bar. Here's where the translators, poets, volunteers, and organisers got together. They are beautiful times, those endless evenings at festivals when the audience has gone home.

‘As a girl,' the Norwegian programmer said, ‘I always thought of sex when I ate ice-cream.' She fixed her grey-blue eyes on me, perhaps hoping to shock me. ‘When I was only fourteen and I'd never even done anything like it, I'd roll the tip of my tongue around the top of the ice-cream, twirling it around the scoop, before sinking my lips into it and slowly licking them. I thought that's how it was done, that it would be like that.'

I told the programmer that in the Thirties respectable girls didn't eat their ice in the street. They were supposed to take it home, tip it onto a plate, and eat the scoop with a spoon.

Actually, it's questionable whether Ernest A. Hamwi really was the inventor of the famous cone. Like the bikini, which was invented by French car mechanic Louis Réard in 1946 but had already been worn by Etruscan women, the ice-cream cone had popped up before.
Mrs. A. B. Marshall's Cookery Book
from 1888 features a recipe for ‘Margaret Cornets', cones filled with ice-cream. But I wasn't going to bother my father with that. He was convinced that an Italian from the Dolomites had helped the Syrian pastry chef in St Louis, and he wasn't the only one. According to local journalist and amateur historian Serafino Dall'Asta, an ice-cream maker from Vodo di Cadore is said to have been involved in the invention of the cone.

‘So the ice-cream cone is more of an Italian than an American invention,' was my father's firm conviction.

And it goes without saying that ice-cream didn't originate in Asia. After chasing the old Chinese guy away, my father asked the neighbours' son to borrow a stack of books on Marco Polo from the library. That evening he discovered that the original of
The Book of the Marvels of the World
had been lost and that the oldest extant manuscript dated back to 1400, some seventy-five years after the death of the Venetian trader and explorer. It contained no mention of the Great Wall, and not a word on eating with chopsticks or drinking tea, let alone ice-cream. Some historians question the authenticity of the travel document and there are suspicions that Marco Polo simply recounted the stories of others. This was years before the London-based sinologist Frances Wood published her controversial study
Did Marco Polo Go to China?
But by then my father was already one hundred per cent sure that the world-famous explorer had never set foot in the country he wrote about.

‘Marco Polo is a fraudster!' my father called out in the middle of the night.

‘Go to sleep,' my mother reacted.

My father waited for the old man who had pointed to the text above the awning for days on end, but he never returned. And so my father approached another Chinese customer sitting in the sun.

‘You guys didn't invent ice-cream at all,' he said. ‘It's historically inaccurate.'

‘I don't know what you're talking about,' the man replied.

‘The Chinese didn't invent ice-cream, nor did they come up with the giant shoehorn!'

In the Sixties, Dutch ice-cream parlours had been plagued by southern Italians who had come to the Netherlands as migrant workers. On their days off they would go to a parlour in a small group, each sit at a separate table, and be really boisterous. Or they would make a nuisance of themselves by sitting next to a girl who had ordered an ice-cream. Some ice-cream parlours put up notices in their windows, stating (in Italian) ‘No Italians allowed.'

My father wanted to put up a notice saying ‘No Chinese allowed.' But my mother wouldn't have it.

‘Everybody is welcome,' she said. ‘Young and old, rich and poor, men and women. Ice-cream is for everybody.' Thereby echoing what Carlo Gatti had envisioned with his penny-licks in London more than a century ago.

My father accepted the defeat, but the seeds for his lifelong grudge against the Chinese had been well and truly sown.

When, years later, I came across an anthology of classic Chinese poetry, I discovered a poem by Yang Wanli, born a hundred years before Marco Polo's death. To my great surprise, the poet wrote about a milky substance that ‘appears congealed and yet it seems to float' and ‘as with snow, it melts in the light of the sun'.

I read the poem to my father — to tease him, I guess. But all he said was, ‘I don't like the Chinese and I don't like poetry.'

The Snow of Yesteryear

I was six when my parents packed me off to the boarding school in Vellai di Feltre. Such was the fate of the children of ice-cream makers. As a baby, toddler, and pre-schooler you get to join your parents at the ice-cream parlour every season, but after that you have to go to school. In Italy. The advantage was that you got to spend the winter at home and the long summer holidays — three months, in Italy — in the Netherlands. The disadvantage was that you spent the rest of the time in a boarding school run by nuns.

The nuns at my school were conservative and authoritarian, but they taught me reading, writing, and arithmetic. I was one of those children who liked learning, who liked sitting bent over my exercise book, pen in my right hand. And my tongue sticking out of my mouth, if Luca, who often mimicked me, is to be believed. He came to Vellai di Feltre two years after me, but he never took to the nuns' regime. They were extremely strict and sometimes hit us with the flat of their hands.

‘Don't you miss Mamma and Papa?' Luca asked me almost every day.

‘A little,' was my standard reply. I was trying to be strong.

‘I miss them a lot.'

‘They have to work,' I said. ‘The ice-cream machines have to keep churning.'

‘Churn, churn, churn,' Luca said. As my father had put it to us: we had to learn, the ice-cream machines had to churn.

Luca had great trouble reading and writing. Unlike me, he didn't enjoy it. He hated books, and preferred to run up and down the long corridors of the boarding school whenever the nuns weren't looking. Every so often he was caught in the act and given a good hiding by the eldest nun, who had a wart on her chin that had sprouted three thick hairs. But that wasn't the worst of it. She stank, according to Luca.

‘Can't you smell it?' he asked me.

I shook my head.

‘When she lifts her hand, her robes go up and you catch the weirdest smells.'

It may have been because I always had my nose stuck in a book, but that's the boarding school smell that has stayed with me. That wonderful smell of old, damp books. I would put my finger on the paper and plough my way through the lines. It may have been because of the books that some days I missed my parents less than my brother did.

At night Luca often crawled into bed with me. We would each clutch the other's hand, forging a link of an unbreakable chain. As I whispered a story in his ear, something I had read during the day, I would wait for his breathing to grow calm and regular.

When we switched to
scuola media
, or secondary school, Grandma Tremonti started looking after us. She had dark-grey hair and crooked hands due to arthritis, but she was proud and strong. Her father had run an ice-cream parlour in Ulm, in Germany. When the British bombed it during the war, the family had sheltered in the cellar. ‘Don't be scared,' the father told his daughters. ‘It's like thunder; it will pass.' His wife shook her head, but the girls never cried. They lost everything — the ice-cream machine, the refrigerators, the gondola-shaped glass plates — but they survived. They walked away from the rubble and the dust.

On her bedside table, Amalia Tremonti kept a framed photograph of her husband, who had lost his life in an accident on the road from Dobbiaco to Cortina d'Ampezzo. One winter he had tried to overtake a tourist just before a bend. Friends had knocked together a wooden cross and planted it by the roadside, but Amalia had never visited the scene of the accident. As the father had passed on to his daughters: step out of the rubble, brush yourself off, and carry on.

With her bony, bent fingers, Amalia Tremonti sliced onions and tomatoes and made us pasta every day. She was caring, but hard-hearted at times. She rarely allowed us to phone the ice-cream parlour in Rotterdam. I felt responsible for Luca. When he struggled with his homework, I helped him. And sometimes I even did his sums for him, so that we had more time to play outside. In the street he always held my hand. In fact, we walked to school like that. Grandma didn't like it one bit: two boys holding hands was not appropriate.

Come the summer holidays we took the train to Rotterdam, escorted by my mother's sister. At that point we hadn't seen our parents for four months. For the whole of spring, the days when the grass turned a pale green, the dandelions sprang up and lent the meadows a yellow complexion, and the sun began to feel warmer. All this happened at a dizzying pace, as if life was being fast-forwarded, and yet to us time passed like frozen December days. We had been looking forward to the reunion for months.

I remember my mother's tears, and her arms that enclosed us, not wanting to let go.

‘Can I have a go?' my father would ask every year. ‘I want to have a go, too.'

And then he'd squeeze us tight. He placed his bristly cheeks against our smooth boyish ones, but we didn't mind. At least not until my stubble began to scratch, too.

We helped out in the ice-cream parlour and relished the days, which were longer than those in the mountains. My parents were usually out front, while Luca and I were in the kitchen, making ice-cream. We were trying to improve the recipes.

‘Have you tried the mango ice?' Luca asked. ‘It doesn't contain enough sugar, it's far too hard.'

‘Let's look at the vanilla ice-cream first,' I replied. ‘The texture could be a lot smoother, and the vanilla isn't evenly distributed.'

This was before the discovery of poetry. As in Shelley's poem, our spirits created just one object: ice-cream.