The Ice-Cream Man

There can be little finer than some fruity ice with which to quench a thirst; the sweet taste of orange concentrate being sucked to the point where its colour disappears, leaving a spear of silvery frost. The lolly is a greatly underrated pleasure, inclined to be overlooked in favour of more exotic packaging to be picked over in a shop's freezer: the Magnum; the one in a tub with a Venetian twirl and a suggestion of cherry; the variety of white chocolate coating, dark chocolate, chocolate with nuts. Ice cream.

The lolly is, suprisingly perhaps, a relatively recent innovation. It is little more than a hundred years old. It is a johnny-come-lately of the world of things on a stick. The ice cream has an altogether longer history, yet both share a common bond, that of ice. That it took a couple of hundred years for someone to add fruit juice to ice when cream and ice had been being combined since the early eighteenth century is a curiosity of uninventiveness. (In fact the first lolly didn't even involve fruit juice; it was made with soda water powder.)

The heritage of ice cream partly explains its dominance when it comes to the sunny-afternoon refreshment decision. The ice cream is firmly embedded in our collective consciousness. We have become instinctive ice-cream eaters. And the ice cream, because it has infinite versatility in a way that the lolly doesn't, is a marketing man's dream. We are attracted to its packaging, to its tubs of all colours, to its never-disappointing moreishness.

We grew up with lollies and ice cream, but the ice cream has stayed with us. The lolly, despite its greater thirst-quenching properties, is very much more infantile. Grown men are more likely to hide their lolly consumption than openly display it on the beaches or streets of Majorca. The ice cream, on the other hand, holds no possible stigma. It is an accepted indulgence, a totally unguilty pleasure. One can be outed as an ice-cream eater without any thought of recrimination.

We all carry our ice-cream baggage with us, our own histories of ice cream. My own goes back to the village ice-cream parlour. Fortuna's. The very name was parodical. Mr. Fortuna was parodical. He was an Italian before Italian stereotyping had been thought of. And he made ice cream.

A strange thing about Mr. Fortuna was that he was an uncle of mine, despite there being not the slightest Italian connection between our family and anyone else's. He, Uncle Fortuna (we never actually knew his first name), was an uncle purely because every man back then was an uncle, just as every woman was an aunt. My childhood was full of confusion; I could never quite work out who I was actually related to.

To the Italians has fallen the honour of history in assigning to them responsibility for having invented certain foods and drink. Pizza, pasta, cappuccino, ice cream. Arguably, they didn't invent any of them, and a claim on ice cream is the most tenuous. The problem is, however, that the history of ice cream is not exact. The English have as much right to be named as the inventors of the modern ice cream as anyone else. But so also do the Majorcans.

Where common ground appears to exist in the arcane world of ice-cream historians is with regard to when the modern ice-cream era started: the early 1700s. Though there is no evidence as to actual ice-cream manufacture in Majorca at that time, the wherewithal for its manufacture was taking shape, and it was in the form of what still exists today, the Can Joan de s'Aigo chocolate parlour in Palma, and in particular something you wouldn't immediately associate with Majorca - ice. Sr. de s'Aigo used to gather snow from the Tramuntana and store it, while a growth in almond plantations in the eighteenth century was what was to lead to the Can Joan ice cream. Almond milk met mountain snow, and the rest was ice-cream history.

Amidst the Häagen Dazs, the Ben and Jerry and the Magnum, almond ice cream assumes pride of place in the freezers of Majorca. Along with other flavours, it is churned out by the "gelats" and "helados" of the island. Ice cream passes from generation to generation, the children's parties at fiesta time concluded with the handing out of free ice cream for all. And so the tradition is perpetuated. The ice-cream tradition. Pity the poor lolly.

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