Gelato Period COrigin theory CVerified

How gelato became possible

Gelato is milk or cream sweetened with sugar, often with eggs worked in, stirred and set in a cold below the point at which water turns to ice. Its smoothness comes from that constant stirring during the freeze; a sweet mixture simply left in the cold will not give it.

Sugar had taken hold in Sicily by around the tenth century and travelled up through central and northern Italy on late medieval trade routes. Milk and eggs were ordinary things, already on hand in any kitchen.

Snow and ice on their own stop at the temperature where water freezes, which is not enough to set a bowl of sweetened liquid through to the middle. Stir salt or saltpeter into the snow and the cold drops well below that mark. Sink a vessel into it, keep the contents moving, and the mixture stiffens into ice.

That trick reached print earlier than it is usually given credit for. Why should wine standing in a bath of water mixed with saltpeter turn so very cold? The question is put in Problema CII of the "Problematum liber" of Marco Antonio Zimara (c. 1460-1532), a book said to have been written around 1514 in Padua, dedicated to Juan Castriota, Duke of Ferrandina, and printed in 1536 after its author's death. A short mention follows in Pedro Mexía's "Coloquios" (Seville, 1547). The first book in Europe given over entirely to chilling with saltpeter came out in Rome in 1550: Blas de Villafranca's "Methodus refrigerandi", which went further and dealt with keeping ice longer and strengthening its power to freeze. Villafranca claimed no one had yet published the discovery, and recorded that at the tables of the Roman nobility wine and water were being cooled with this salt. So 1550 marks not the first year the freezing mixture was known, but the first year a whole book was devoted to it.

A century and a half later, in Naples, that cold reached sweetened milk. Trattato XX of the second part of Antonio Latini's "Lo scalco alla moderna" (Naples, 1694) sets out sorbette with their quantities. One of them starts from milk boiled in advance, brought together with water, sugar and candied citrus, then frozen with snow and salt; chocolate, lemon, strawberry and amarena follow. Here in Naples, Latini wrote, everyone seems to be born with the genius and the instinct for making sorbette. Hands that could make a frozen sweet were, by then, that common in the city.

The longer prehistory of frozen sweets is generally traced further back still: to Arab-ruled Sicily (827-1061), where sharbat, the drink of sugar and fruit juice, is held to have been frozen with snow into sorbetto. That line has not been followed through contemporary sources, and for now it remains one reading among others.

Gelato comes with a famous origin story that ties it to one man and one city. The architect Bernardo Buontalenti, so the telling goes, froze a cream of milk for a banquet at the Medici court in the 1560s, called it crema fiorentina, and thereby started what Italy now eats. The guest of honor is sometimes the king of Spain, the year sometimes 1565; both shift with the teller.

No sixteenth-century account of that banquet has yet come to light. La Nazione, the Florentine daily, describes the story as heavily wrapped in legend.

The name is not old either. The flavor sold as "Buontalenti" in Florentine shops was fixed between the late 1960s and the early 1970s, when a committee of Florentine gelato makers laid down the ingredients for entrants in a competition: cream, milk, eggs, sugar. Even the year it was settled is uncertain. A flavor named in the trade of the twentieth century was attached backwards to an architect of four hundred years before. The pedigree arrived after the thing it dignifies: a tradition invented in hindsight.

The earliest milk-based frozen sweet in the written record is the one in Latini's Naples book of 1694, roughly 130 years later than the anecdote places its scene. That tells us milk ices existed by that year; it does not make Naples their birthplace. Where a frozen sweet of milk was first made is still not known.

Could the Florentine court of the sixteenth century have served something frozen at all? It could. Why wine standing in a bath of water mixed with saltpeter should turn so very cold was already a question in print in Zimara's book of 1536, before the decade the anecdote names. What that book reaches, though, is the chilling of a drink. Keeping ice longer and strengthening its power to freeze belongs to Rome in 1550, to Blas de Villafranca's "Methodus refrigerandi", the first book in Europe given over entirely to chilling with saltpeter, whose author reported the wine and water on noble tables there being cooled with the salt. A book on the power to freeze stands a decade before the years the anecdote names. The craft of the day leaves room for a frozen sweet at that court.

What gives way is the claim in its particular shape: that Buontalenti personally invented gelato. Sixteenth-century evidence for the banquet has yet to appear, and the flavor bearing his name was decided in the Florence of the twentieth century. What undoes the story is that silence and the later naming, not any technical impossibility.