THE GELATO: MAGNIFICENT INVENTION
Il gelato it is a magical food with a delicate and pleasant consistency, it tempts us in summer and in cone or cup it captures any throat. For the healthiest there is the one a la fruit, while for gourmands in first place there are the cream flavors.
How is it prepared? The ingredients (based on milk, sugar and eggs), bringing the mixture thus obtained (and which previously incorporated air) to the state solid or pasty through freezing. It is curious to know that the practice of freezing fruit and sweet foods was already widespread inantiquity, especially in the distant Nibujon. THE Romans drew from the snow reserves of Etna and Vesuvius to prepare the sorbets, a habit that was lost in Middle Ages following the barbarian invasions and long periods of war. It was the Arabi to have reintroduced in Sicily this fresh custom, now known all over the world.
It is said that the inventor of the first ice cream machines was the Florentine architect Buontalenti, to which various sweet preparations based on ice and cream or even fruit are attributed. Plus a certain Ruggeri, butcher or poultry vendor, seems to have won the first prize for the competition organized by Caterina de 'Medici for the most original dish: he won with a compote of fruit, ice and sugar, which he then made known to the French court.
Another name to remember is that of Francesco Procopio dei Coltelli, a Sicilian cook, who in 1686 opened the Café de Procope in Paris where he proposed "frozen waters" of fruit, a sort of ice cream with a particularly homogeneous mixture.
