The June issue of du celebrates the arrival of summer - not just any aspect of summer, but that frozen confection of summer feeling, ice cream. The articles discuss where and when we eat ice cream, how it came to be, and how it came to us. Over and over the contributors return not to the history or even the consistency of ice cream, but to its psychological power: as a symbol of bliss and prosperity, as an object of desire or its stand-in, as a short-circuit to a childhood long left behind. In anticipation or memory, as something to come or something already gone, ice cream has a fulsomeness which the actual moment of eating only partially captures. Or, to put it another way, reading about ice cream may well be necessary to its full enjoyment. Just don't lick the pages.

In the prologue, the Swiss novelist Urs Widmer takes the fluidity of ice cream as an opportunity to ruminate "On superfluity." Fear not, lovers of summer sweetness, that ice cream is written off as being merely superfluous. That honour belongs to "the rear spoiler, the sprig of parsley next to the pork chop, the SVP [Swiss People's Party] east of Bern... anything that hurts, snow machines, bonuses paid to executives whose companies have lost money, the super-ego (except for that part responsible for ethics), adverts that interrupt programmes, all adverts, Rachmaninoff's third piano concerto, the SVP west of Bern, the rear spoiler." Ice cream, by contrast, belongs to another order of superfluity, to those things "which could easily be confused with what makes most sense in life, and so let us see that the superfluous and the necessary are often one and the same thing. The baths in the Hotel Gellért in Budapest. Everything that Gabriel García Márquez has written. And Georg Büchner. Campari. Espresso in the cafeteria in the Basel train station. The 'Theatre' stop on the Zurich ferry line. Every single tiny painting of a harbour by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in the Siena museum. Mozart's Figaro. And - 'un gelato al limon' - Italian ice cream. (Superfluous things can be expensive, but this rarely has anything to do with the luxury items available on the world's best-known shopping streets...") "Ice cream... takes the fluid metaphor of superfluity literally. Whoever licks their ice cream too slowly is punished by life."

The Swiss journalist Max Küng, in "So much can be made out of air," recalls an early summer lying on the grass in a Berlin park with a girlfriend, both reminiscing about the best ice-cream maker in Switzerland. "'Basel,' she said... '[When I was a child] we lived briefly in Basel; we lived in lots of places. I don't remember much about it. Actually, all I remember is the zoo. I used to be crazy about going to the zoo. Not because of the animals - who'd imprison animals behind bars and glass? - but next to the elephants there was a man with a cart, a white, square cart out of which he sold ice cream. Cones. Those were the best cones that I've ever tasted. Vanilla, covered with a thin layer of chocolate. Even later I never got my hands on anything better. I loved eating this ice cream - what am I saying, eating? I tore it to bits, like a polar bear with a small child who's fallen accidentally into the cage.'"

Luckily for her, and for us, her companion knows all about this unforgettable ice cream: "'This cone, it's called the Zollicornet. It's been around for the last fifty years. It's made by hand in a small factory in the Allschwilerstrasse in Basel, a street in which nothing reminds one of summer. The company's called Gelati Gasparini... You should have a look at this place someday. A small, inconspicuous shop with deep-freeze cabinets packed full of gelati: the cones, classically wrapped in silver paper, with that characteristic tip... What happens there is kept secret. Herr Gasparini reckons it's a bit like the recipe for Coca-Cola, top secret, the key to success. That's why he couldn't and wouldn't be too precise when he told me how he makes the gelato. Alchemy. A lovely man, by the way, this Herr Gasparini, in his mid-40s, smiles a lot. Of course, I figure that whoever makes ice cream has a good reason to smile. An ice-cream maker must be a happy man.'"

Not all ice creams come out of a small factory in a back courtyard of Basel. Many of the most popular summer treats are mass-produced, and journalist Brigitte Hürlimann has gone behind the scenes to find out how the biggest companies come up with new product ideas, in "Yeti on the Matterhorn": "Yeti is one of the new products for the summer of 2003, an ice cream conceived for children and teens which harks back to the legendary creature of the Himalayas. It comes in the shape of the Matterhorn with a red gummi bear on top to stand for the Yeti. The development of a new ice cream takes Frisco [the manufacturer] about a year. It starts with a dozen or so marketing and R&D experts sitting down at a round table, some of them in white lab coats, the others in civvies. They brainstorm about the gaps, hits and flops in the present product line, about trends and themes, whether in dessert lines or current affairs, looking for events - positive, of course - on the order of the moon landing [the Rocket came on the market in 1969, the year of the first moon landing]. In late summer of the previous season they'll make the basic choice, give the new product a profile and a working name (Yeti was originally called Ötzi), and make a prototype by hand in the laboratory kitchen in Rorschach..."

"What had been tested as the Ötzi finally came on the market as the Yeti, though Frisco had initially intended to make an ice-cream mummy. Yeti hides out on the Matterhorn rather than in the Himalayas because the factory at Rorschach already had the form for the Matterhorn, left over from a sales flop, a Matterhorn ice cream which lasted for only one season."

Some ice creams come and go, barely noticed by the summer hordes, but others stick so fast in the mind that not even a twenty-year dry spell can eradicate the taste sensations from memory. In "Plop, Squeeeak!" Wolfgang Ritschel, co-author of Wickie, Slime and Paiper (Böhlau Verlag, Vienna 1999), chronicles an Austrian internet petition which demanded- and got - the return of a beloved 70s' ice cream on the market: "1998: 'On really great days I got a Paiper. That was the best! Pushing that cardboard stick up [through the plastic tube] made this unmistakeable squeaking sound...,' writes Sabine, 33, on the Vienna online forum 'Thirty year-olds' about her childhood in the 70s. An entire generation has logged on to this site since the summer of 1998 to indulge their collective memory of a sticky-sweet era..." "1999: ...For Johannes Breit, 30, one thing above all was clear: this ice cream had to be brought back. Pronto. A product in which the summer feelings of an entire generation were indelibly engraved cried out for a relaunch. Johannes started an internet petition addressed to the manufacturer Eskimo, the Austrian subsidiary of Unilever... In just a few weeks 4540 sentimentally inclined thirty-somethings had signed the online demand 'that the three winners of the [internet] poll be brought back on the market the next season': 'Paiper Lemon/raspberry,' the 'Double' and 'Paiper Apricot.' For the media, of course, this was soft news of the highest order. In a storm of flashbulbs and TV camera lights Johannes 'Mr. Paiper' Breit, accompanied by the screams of several thousand 70s-revival fans, handed the petition to Dr. Rainer Herrmann, managing director of Eskimo-Igloo Austria, at an Open Air Party on July 3, 1999..." "2000: When the new ice cream season officially began on April 1, 2000, the first lorry delivery of commercially produced Paipers was accompanied by TV cameras and transmitted live to a hall where six thousand fans waited, after twenty years, to once again push the cardboard stick into the plastic cylinder - to plop, to squeak and to lick, just as they had done in the 70s when they had stood in swimsuits at the edge of the pool, looking at the world from a height of 1.4 metres, blissfully holding... an ice cream whose special effects packaging made it more than just a taste treat, an ice cream whose haptic qualities and ritual of consumption combined with the taste of lemon and raspberry into the distillation of the perfect summer vacation day. This information had burned itself forever into the heads of the children of that era."

Ice cream may be "nostalgia, deep-frozen" (Ritschel), but it is also - lest we forget - a trade and an art form. Columnist Camille Schlosser reports on the fairs and competitions held annually by ice-cream producers and salon owners in Italy: "The 43^rd annual Mostra Internazionale del Gelato in Longarone opened its doors for five days on December 4, 2002 [to a total of 32,000 visitors]. 285 companies, including 70 from ten foreign countries, displayed their machinery, furnishings and products... There were two competitions, the 33^rd annual 'Coppa d'Oro' and the 9th annual 'Festival d'Autore.' The first prize for the 'Coppa d'Oro,' which is known as the international Oscar for ice cream, went to the Calabresian Ottaviano Ienco of the 'Eiscafé Gepetto' in Wildeshausen (Germany) for his vanilla ice cream. Giuseppe Zerbato of the gelateria 'Il Gelataio' in Vicenza won the second prize and Fabrizio Costantin of 'Eis Venezia' in Hitzacker (Germany) took third. The 44^th annual fair will take place this year from November 28 to December 2 in Longarone (in Veneto, province Belluno). (See www.mostradelgelato.com)

Italian ice cream and German consumers go hand in glove, as du columnist Helga Leiprecht notes in "Out of your house and into the ice cream parlour!" Where did they come from, these Italians who win prizes for their gelato served in northern climes, these "people who inspired the dream of Bella Italia, of a better life, from Hamburg down to Munich"? "In the 1930s the journey [to Bonn from Dozza in the Valle di Zoldo] took a night and a day when Mario Vittoria came to Germany for the first time, to work in the ice cream salon Lazzarin. He decided then to apply for a license, because in Germany everything was on its way up. In comparison to rural Italy the country was rich and promised a good income. A couple of years later and Mario had saved enough to open his own business. After a lot of red tape, and with the help of a friend at the consulate - luckily he knew someone and relations between Hitler and Mussolini were good - he opened the Eiscafe Vienna in Landau in 1939. It was the first ice cream parlour in Landau, Stiftsplatz 3." "That was the start of the conquest of Germany. It was a peaceful invasion: the Italians came and the Germans moulded themselves around them. In the 50s, one's first trip to the Italian ice cream parlour was like a trip to the moon..." "The Italian ice cream parlour was the visible sign of Germany's economic miracle. While the Italian bricklayers and road workers, as the daily Die Welt reported in 1960... had to put up with being called dirty macaroni, the ice cream parlour owners with their long, white aprons had no such problem. Certainly not Mario. He sold the stuff that dreams (those that were allowed) were made of - middle-class Germany sunned itself in the exotic, erotic aura of the Italians and imagined themselves to be cosmopolitan." In "Two Buckets of Ice Cream," the German writer Axel Hacke links ice cream, memory and family history in a personal essay about one's first - and last - ice cream: "One should take a survey asking people about their first ice cream. What it was called, how it tasted, where they got it."
"My first ice cream was the Capri..."
"As a kid, when I got a few pennies for a Capri, I'd go through the weekend colony that lay next to our house and enter the canteen, a dim joint run by a man named Proschinsky. He reigned over a beer tap, three tables, a pinball machine, and an ice cream freezer. Proschinsky was a fat, bald-headed publican in a torn, sleeveless undershirt and broad, grey trousers secured to his body by braces. He worked the tap in a surly manner, rarely moving from his post, so that the guests at the three tables had to fetch the beer from the bar themselves. It never occurred to him to bring it to them..." "Whenever I came to buy an ice cream, I would stand silently in front of this man, waiting until he turned and levelled an equally silent gaze at me. Truly, I would sometimes wait five or ten minutes before Proschinsky turned his reptilian face in my direction, looking down at me as though at a lesser being, ready for me to utter my desire.
A Capri.
He rooted around in the freezer, pulled out the ice cream, swiped the coins I had laid on the bar into an open money drawer, and a few seconds later I was standing on the street, Capri in hand. The yellow shone in the sunlight. I dragged my first ice cream out of a cavernous gloom, where it was watched over suspiciously by an ogre protecting a treasure. I fought for it, always expecting to be repulsed by the ice cream guard Proschinsky."

Finally, the fabled guardians and frozen topographies of ice cream would never be possible without the history of how ice was brought down from mountains, how cellars were dug to keep snow cool, how salpeter and then ammonia allowed for man-made cooling systems, how it was discovered that milk products could be frozen, the frozen milk packaged, the packages turned into a commercial enterprise. Helga Leiprecht provides a "Chronology of a Culinary Invention":

11^th Century B.C.
Naturally occurring ice or snow is used to cool drinks. In China it is common in this period to find ice stored in special cellars during the summer months, as is documented in the canonical songbook Shih Ching .

54-68 A.D.
During his reign, Emperor Nero has snow delivered from the Albanian mountains, which is then mixed with honey and fruit. In Rome ice cellars are built in order to maintain the supply all year.

996
Cane sugar is brought from Alexandria to Venice. Until this time, Europeans have used only honey as a sweetener. Initially, however, sugar is retained only for medicinal purposes, as it is still too costly to use as a sweetener.

1230-1270
Ibn Abu Usayabi , in his book Kitab Uyan al-Anba fi Tabaquet al-Attiba, describes the synthetic production of snow and ice from cold water and salpeter.

1589
Giambattista Della Port experiments with methods of freezing, and mentions in the second, expanded edition of his Magia Naturalis that the most important element of summer carnivals is wine served 'as cold as ice.' His own discovery leads to wine being cooled to such a degree that it can 'no longer be drunk but has to be sipped.' He does this by filling a bottle with wine and water, which is then set in a vat of ice and pulverized salpeter and rotated. It is likely that this is the breakthrough that leads to the production of ice cream.

1700
Ice cream is first mentioned in the USA: William Black is served strawberry ice cream by Thomas Bladen, the governor of Maryland. He finds it to be 'most delicious.'

c. 1800
In the meanwhile, ice cream is no longer the province of the rich, but has also become available to the people. J. Pezzl, in a sketch of Viennese life, describes 'the lemonade tents in the open squares, which are thrown open in the summer months and serve the public with lemonade, almond milk, and frozen confection of all kinds...'

1877
Carl von Linde patents his ammonia-based cooling mechanism. The principle of Linde's machine still holds true for refrigeration today...

Mid-19th century
Sugar can now be extracted in Europe from the native beetroot and industrially produced. The price of sugar sinks drastically and ice cream can be produced much more cheaply.

1923
The American Harry Bust invents ice cream on a stick.

1959
The Italian ice-cream company Spica in Naples sells ice cream encased in a waffle, surrounded by paper, and in 1960 registers the Cornetto. At first the Cornetto is a flop, but in 1976 the English company Wall, subsidiary of Unilever in the U.K., relaunches the Cornetto and it becomes the second most popular ice cream..."

Helga Leiprecht has one more reminder for us all, as we swarm out of our houses and onto sidewalk cafés, park meadows, lakefronts and pool-side lounge chairs, everywhere accompanied by the ice-cream sellers: "Ice cream is healthy: A 100-gram serving of ice cream provides the full daily complement of calcium for an adult, 80% for a growing child, and 66% for a pregnant woman. Ice cream also contains phosphorous, magnesium and mineral salts. Moreover, the egg white component provides amino acids which are crucial for human cell formation but not produced by the body." So eat up.

Summary by Misha Kavka

Published 2003-06-04