WHY ICE CREAM MATTERS

And sorbet doesn't.

I don’t like sorbet. There, I’ve said it.

I find it syrupy and oversweet; even the good ones leave a sticky feeling around my mouth. To add to that, I don’t think fruit suits being cold. Ice cream, however, is the bomb. The real thing, the shangri-la, the n’est plus ultra. If happiness comes down to small pleasures, ice cream is top of my list.

To say you love ice cream is a bit like saying you love the sea. It’s annoying - everyone loves the sea. But ice cream obsession runs in our family. My 95-year-old Dad eats ice cream daily and you can see the pleasure it brings him all over his face - literally. The generations unfold and now May and I seek it out with single-minded focus whenever we are together. We are competitive about our flavour combinations. Last week, a saffron rice ice cream with coconut sorbet. It was, to say the least, weird. There was the liquorice and lavender cone in Florence last year that is still haunting me. And, come to think of it, an unforgettable toasted black sesame scoop, too. In fact, I can probably recall holidays via ice cream better than any other way. When I was pregnant, I used to make Ed take detours to find me good ice cream. He’d try to fob me off with a Magnum at the garage but there’s an emotional intensity about being pregnant that ensured we’d usually set off on a five-mile detour if I muttered ‘artisanal’.

For the most part, I’m not a snob about ice cream. There’s room for it all. I’m cross about how processed it’s become but when I look back through the ice cream story of my life, it is the milky ices on a stick I have always loved the most. Mini Milk, Toffee Crumble, Fab (the white bit with the crisp chocolate coating). On childhood holidays in Corfu, we were allowed to go around the back of the restaurant to choose our own ice cream for dessert. I remember distinctly the noisy throb of the cicadas and the bright lights of the plug in ice cream chiller lit up from within in the velvet darkness. It is the only moment of childhood that I remember exercising choice. Would it be a frozen scooped out orange or lemon filled with its sorbet or creamy vanilla you sucked out the sides of the wafer sandwich.

What is it about ice cream that is so compelling? Is it ice cream as metaphor, a comment on the ephemeral nature of life: grab those moments when you can, everything – good, bad, indifferent – will melt away in the end. Is it that when all else fails, there will still be ice cream? Or that when you eat ice cream, you are entirely present in that moment, you are coping with the mess of it, you are giving in to your senses. For sure, some kind of return to pre-conscious childhood where all in your little world was well and safe. Perhaps all these things can be true at the same time.

Ice cream is a home for paradoxes: It is the most fleeting of pleasures and at the same time, eternal and unchanging. It is of its time and place yet unbound by years and times zones. It is both incredibly simple and deeply complex. It is at the same time so damn important and so damn unimportant. It is a refuge from real life, a place to play, an echo of a simpler times. It is, more than anything else, utterly, ravishingly, irresistibly delicious.

When the world is in flames, I find it useful to have something absorbing and distracting and practical to make with my hands. So I’m working my way through Kitty Travers’s classic La Grotta Ices book. Right now, I’m gripped by her version of gelato which she calls milk ice. It is thickened a little with cornstarch but still very light and allows the most delicate of flavours to sing through. It’s the Tinkerbell of ice creams, the tutu of ice creams, the ice cream of dreams. So far, I’ve succeeded with peach leaf with apricot ripple, fresh mint stracciatella and hojicha milk tea. I’ll know when things get even worse out there because I’ll take on something complicated like a darkly burnt caramel or some kind of brittle. For now, I’ll stick to simple. Maybe rose and geranium; we could all eat more flowers. But simple ice creams. Not sorbets.

Rose Geranium Milk Ices

(Based on Kitty Travers’s milk ice method)

Have a large bowl of ice water ready to cool the mixture.

550ml milk

100ml double cream

3 tbsp cornflour

120g sugar

10 rose geranium leaves

A few unsprayed rose petals (optional)

Heat the milk and cream together in a saucepan until it is barely breaking a simmer. Mix the corn flour and sugar in a bowl, whisk in the hot milk in a steady stream then return all the mixture to the saucepan and continue cooking over a low heat, stirring constantly until it is just starting to simmer. Stir very well to make sure the cornflour is absorbed and sugar dissolved. Remove from the heat and stir in the rose geranium leaves.

Plunge pan into a bath of ice water and allow to steep for 15 minutes. Remove the leaves, squeezing them out, then push through a fine sieve and refrigerate the mixture for at least 4 hours or preferably overnight.

Churn for 30 minutes in an ice cream maker then transfer to Tupperware and store in the freezer. Eat scattered with rose petals

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