Contents
Cover
List of Recipes
About the Book
About the Author
Title Page
Introduction
Ice Creams
Amalfi Lemon Jelly
Imaginary Neapolitan Ice Cream
Buffalo Milk, Almond & Amalfi Lemon
Novellino Orange Jelly
Kumquat Custard
Carrot Seed
Oroblanco & Pale Ale
Citrus Tour
Blood Orange & Bergamot Sherbert
Mimosa, Seville Orange & Rice
East Street Market
Mango
Papaya, Green Chilli & Lime
Passion Fruit Sour
Pineapple & Lemongrass
Guava & Sugar Cane
Tamarillo
Banana, Brown Sugar & Rum
Italian Kiwi
Kiwi
Rhubarb & Raspberry Ripple
Blackcurrant Leaf Water Ice
Peach Leaf Milk Ice
Pigeon Fig & Pineau des Charentes
Rhubarb & Angelica
Montmorency Cherry Sherbet
Pea Pod
Gariguette Strawberry
Prune & Earl Grey
Elderflowers
Strawberry & Elderflower
Cucumber & Sour Cream
Mint Chip
Swiss Vanilla
Apricot Noyau
My Favourite Flavour
Peach
Tomato & White Peach
Nectarine & Verbena
Strawberry Salad
Wild Blueberry
Leafy Blackcurrant Custard
Loganberry
The Lemon Verbena Bush
Lemon Verbena
Green Gooseberry Fool
Pink Gooseberry & Hazelnut Crunch
Mulberry Granita
Fake Mulberry
Yellow Peach & Basil
Melon & Jasmine
Blackberry & Rose Geranium
Apricot & Rose Petal
Peche de Vigne
Fig Leaves
Fig Leaf & Raspberry
Green Walnuts & Nocino Liqueur
Green Walnut
Wild Fig & Watermelon
Vanilla Plum
Damson & Grappa
Prickly Pear
Pear, Myrtle & Ginger
Bramley Apple & Bay Leaf
Uva Fragola
Crème Caramel
Pomegranate & Bitter Orange Granita
Sheep’s Milk Yoghurt & Wildflower Honey
Quince
Quince Custard
Pistachio Ice Creams
Pistachio
Satsuma Miyagawa
Medici Almond
Espresso con Panna
Chestnuts
Roast Chestnut Cremolata
Butterscotch & Agen Prune
Sea Salt, Rosemary & Pine Nut
Black Malt Vanilla
Chocolate Ice Creams
Chocolate Caramel
Chocolate Treacle
Leafy Clementine Granita
Looking For A Date?
Date Shake
Espresso Granita
Ricotta & Canditi
Lime & Botanicals
Barbados Custard
Other Recipes
Citrus Gel
Nougat
Pietro Romanengo
Candied Fruits
Choc Ices
Acknowledgements
Copyright
Amalfi Lemon Jelly
Apricot & Rose Petal
Apricot Noyau
Banana, Brown Sugar & Rum
Barbados Custard
Black Malt Vanilla
Blackberry & Rose Geranium
Blackcurrant Leaf Water Ice
Blood Orange & Bergamot Sherbert
Bramley Apple & Bay Leaf
Buffalo Milk, Almond & Amalfi Lemon
Butterscotch & Agen Prune
Candied Fruits
Carrot Seed
Chestnuts
Choc Ices
Chocolate Caramel
Chocolate Ice Creams
Chocolate Treacle
Citrus Gel
Citrus Tour
Crème Caramel
Cucumber & Sour Cream
Damson & Grappa
Date Shake
East Street Market
Elderflowers
Espresso con Panna
Espresso Granita
Fake Mulberry
Fig Leaf & Raspberry
Fig Leaves
Gariguette Strawberry
Green Gooseberry Fool
Green Walnut
Green Walnuts & Nocino Liqueur
Guava & Sugar Cane
Imaginary Neapolitan Ice Cream
Italian Kiwi
Kiwi
Kumquat Custard
Leafy Blackcurrant Custard
Leafy Clementine Granita
Lemon Verbena
Lime & Botanicals
Loganberry
Looking For A Date?
Mango
Medici Almond
Melon & Jasmine
Mimosa, Seville Orange & Rice
Mint Chip
Montmorency Cherry Sherbet
Mulberry Granita
My Favourite Flavour
Nectarine & Verbena
Nougat
Novellino Orange Jelly
Oroblanco & Pale Ale
Papaya, Green Chilli & Lime
Passion Fruit Sour
Pea Pod
Peach Leaf Milk Ice
Peach
Pear, Myrtle & Ginger
Peche de Vigne
Pietro Romanengo
Pigeon Fig & Pineau des Charentes
Pineapple & Lemongrass
Pink Gooseberry & Hazelnut Crunch
Pistachio Ice Creams
Pistachio
Pomegranate & Bitter Orange Granita
Prickly Pear
Prune & Earl Grey
Quince Custard
Quince
Rhubarb & Angelica
Rhubarb & Raspberry Ripple
Ricotta & Canditi
Roast Chestnut Cremolata
Satsuma Miyagawa
Sea Salt, Rosemary & Pine Nut
Sheep’s Milk Yoghurt & Wildflower Honey
Strawberry & Elderflower
Strawberry Salad
Swiss Vanilla
Tamarillo
The Lemon Verbena Bush
Tomato & White Peach
Uva Fragola
Vanilla Plum
Wild Blueberry
Wild Fig & Watermelon
Yellow Peach & Basil
Note – Features pages are listed in italics.
About the Book
In a small converted greengrocers in south London (her ice cream shed), Kitty Travers creates an array of iced delights – fresh ice creams that taste of the real, whole fruits; hand-made choc ices that crack open to reveal layers of playful pastel-coloured flavours; juice-drenched granitas to be stuffed into brioche buns with fresh cream; and eye-popping, palate-tickling sorbets.
La Grotta Ices is the culmination of Kitty’s obsessive exploration and research into 75 ice cream, sorbet and granita recipes. Sunlit flavours and far flung traditions pervade Kitty’s ice creams as well as her ultimate inspiration: nature. La Grotta celebrates ripe seasonal fruits and the true artistry of real ice cream through inventive flavours and pure, natural ingredients.
Named as one of the world’s most promising chefs in Coco (Phaidon, 2009), Kitty Travers runs La Grotta Ices, a small, inventive ice cream company specialising in ice creams and sorbets made from fresh, ripe fruit and seasonal ingredients, all created in a former greengrocers shop in Lambeth called her ‘ice cream shed’.
During ice cream eating season (April to October) Kitty’s Piaggio Ape is based at the heart of London food production: Spa Terminus in Bermondsey. Tubs of La Grotta ice cream can also be found year-round at three famous London shops: Leila’s Shop in Shoreditch, General Store in Peckham and E5 bakehouse in Hackney. The Piaggio Ape regularly returns to its pitch at Frieze Art Fair and Kitty teaches a long-established class in ice cream making at the multi-award-winning School of Artisan Foods in Nottinghamshire.
Having first tasted how spectacular ice cream can be while working as a waitress in the south of France when she was in her early twenties, she set about discovering the secrets to making great ice cream, learning from the top to the toe of Italy and using diverse influences from ice cream making around the world.
Kitty trained at the Institute of Culinary Education in New York City and returned to London to become pastry chef at St. John Bread & Wine before leaving to set up La Grotta. In the meantime she has worked as an ice cream advisor to larger national and international companies.
Outside ice cream season, Kitty works abroad as much as possible – always with some aim of learning more about ice cream. Stints have included cooking at The Rome Sustainable Food Project, a kitchen set up by Alice Waters at the American Academy in Rome; living and working in restaurants and pastry shops in Naples and in Sicily; volunteering on a pig farm in Le Marche; and at a lemon festival in Nice. Further afield, Kitty has worked on ice cream making projects in Iceland, Istanbul, Brazil and the United States, using ingredients that grow nearby and experimenting with the always-interesting local idiosyncrasies of ice cream making.
She never leaves home without an essential ice cream making kit.
Ice cream was not so hot when I was growing up. It was usually limited to the summertime treat of a 9p orange Sparkle in the park after school, or the occasional slice of a Sainsbury’s economy sticky yellow vanilla brick for pudding. This would melt and refreeze over the course of being served from its damp cardboard box, and turn into a curious foamy gum. But I still loved it.
As a teenager living at home in suburban Twickenham my favourite cookbook was Cuisine of the Sun by Roger Vergé, an inheritance from my godmother (and one half of the Two Fat Ladies), Jennifer Patterson. The recipes in it demonstrate the use of simple harmonies to enhance the flavour of each ingredient, while still allowing the beautiful, natural produce of Provence to shine. Verge called it ‘cuisine heureuse’. It left me pining for something brighter than the supermarket foods I’d grown up with … something transportive and sun-kissed.
It was a relief to leave school, which I hated and had only a string of failed A levels to show for. I went to art school and, to pay the bills, got a job aged 18 working as a greengrocer on the forecourt of the Bluebird Garage on the King’s Road. I spent a lot of time spraying rocket with an atomiser, while the real work was done by Alf. He arrived early from the market in Milan with a van full of beautiful fruits and vegetables, from moonlight-yellow pears wrapped in inky, indigo sugar paper to bunches of dusky black grapes tied with shiny lilac florist ribbon.
I dropped out of art school and spent the summer of 2000 in Marseille instead. On my return to London I read a newspaper article about a man called Lionel Poilâne who was opening a bakery in London to make this stuff called sourdough bread. I got the bus straight over to the Pimlico shop to find the doors wide open and the shop still being built, with Monsieur Poilâne overseeing the installation of a vast brick oven. I was emboldened after my summer speaking French and introduced myself to him, winning myself the position of Poilâne’s first (and – for some years – only) British shop girl.
Paris
It was a hard sell at the beginning, with the bread at an eye-watering £5.90 per loaf. People would come in asking if we made sandwiches or sausage rolls or pies, and we had to try and encourage them to taste the bread: the miraculous flavour of its crackling crust a result of the magic that can be achieved from just a few essential ingredients: flour, water and salt. I worked as an assistant at the London shop as well as spending some time at the Paris branch. In Paris I lived in a room above the bakery itself, and the smell of those huge burnished loaves of sourdough bread baking in the ancient brick ovens got me out of bed to work at 5:30 a.m. every morning. But although I loved that company, and the chewy crust of that bread, I was looking for something else.
Each morning during the spring of 2001 as I got ready for work I had the telly on in the background. It was screening live segments from the Cannes Film Festival. A clip showed pop stars singing on the beach and their hair looked really shiny. It seemed glamorous and appealing. Then I remembered that Roger Vergé, author of my favourite cookbook, had a restaurant and cooking school in Cannes.
Poilâne was friends with Vergé and when I handed in my notice and bought a one-way ticket to Nice, he handed me a personal letter of recommendation to give to him. He asked Vergé to take care of me and wrote that I sold bread ‘as though I were selling diamonds’. I still have that letter in a suitcase, because pathetically I was too shy to give it to Mr Vergé. I didn’t have the confidence to work in a real kitchen. But I couldn’t face going home, and so instead I took a waitressing job at a beachfront hotel, and started a new career as Cannes’ worst waitress.
Cannes
It was incredibly unglamorous. I worked 16-hour shifts in tennis shoes, nude tights and a pleated aertex miniskirt.
But that was when I found an ice cream shop – a little glacière with tinted glass windows and green leather banquettes just off the Croissette – and began a daily ritual. After a swim in the sea and before work, I would eat ice cream sundaes for breakfast.
The menu board changed daily and the flavours dazzled me: cerise, abricot, cassis, groseille, saffran and calisson. It was nothing like ice cream in the UK. I was astonished by the texture and how they captured the fresh taste of an ingredient in a frozen scoop. I puzzled over how it was made and the ice cream seed was planted.
On my days off I took the train along the coast to Italy. Ice cream specialities in Piedmonte were hazelnut, coffee and latte Alpina – even violet Pinguino’s (choc ices) – and in Liguria, green lemon and bergamot. People seemed to go for an ice cream and a walk the way we in the UK go to the pub. I walked and walked, discovering markets and eating ice creams.
Back home that winter, working another stopgap deli job, I read The Man Who Ate Everything by Jeffery Steingarten. My favourite chapter was ‘The Mother of All Ice Cream’, about his search for the best gelato in the world. I had a plan. Summoning the help of all the Italians working in my deli, I wrote letters to every place mentioned in the book. I attached my CV and asked to be given a chance to apprentice and learn the art of making ice cream. I posted the applications and waited patiently. I didn’t get a single reply.
New York
There was nowhere in the UK where you could learn ice cream making back then. But in 2002, I inherited a generous sum of money from my grandmother. After sitting on it for some time, I decided to enrol on a proper chef diploma course … in New York. I feebly hoped that afterwards I might be able to get work experience for Jeffrey Steingarten.
What I didn’t expect was what happened at culinary school; I loved every second of it, and for the first time in my life I started doing well at something. My head teacher – Chef Ted – said he’d pay thirty bucks at Daniel’s to eat my coconut ice cream. I still remember the feeling of my skin stinging as it flushed pink with happiness.
The creativity and energy of what I experienced food-wise in New York wasn’t tied to the old European traditions we still hang on to in Britain. There was such positivity and invention! I snipped out an article in The New York Times listing the city’s best ice creams, from pumpkin at Ciao Bella to lychee and red bean at the Chinatown Ice Cream Factory; when my course finished I went to ‘stage’ (work for free) at my favourite of them all: Otto Enoteca. This was Mario Batali’s newly opened pizza and gelato joint, which was already famous for its olive oil gelato with sea salt and strawberries. This was really something. The head pastry chef at Otto was a curly-haired, bandana-wearing, old school New Yorker called Meredith Kurtzman. She had a sensitivity for putting flavours together that was original but never sensationalist, and was scrupulous about the pure taste of the ingredients shining through. I liked it best when I was sent to Union Square Greenmarket on a Monday and Wednesday morning to buy ingredients. My heart was bursting with pride to be walking the streets of New York in my clean chef’s whites, and to feel part of that city. It was late autumn and I would come back to the restaurant with crates of pecan nuts, pumpkin, fresh corn, concorde grapes and tins of Grade 3 maple syrup, all to be spun into delicious ice creams.
New York was still swelteringly hot, and at the end of the day I’d fill a container with house-made granita in tart berry flavours. The bar would top it up with soda water and a straw, and, sipping it slowly, I’d make my way home to the tiny studio bedsit I shared with a mouse and a cockroach.
I would have stayed if I could, but my visa was about to end. So I spent my remaining few free days doing stages. One was at Prune. Gabrielle Hamilton was another dazzler. She approved of my apartment having no air-con, and told me not to be afraid of the heat when I was given the task of grilling bream one service; instead she said I should get closer to the fiery flames. Most importantly, she told me a new kind of restaurant had opened in London; called St. John Bread & Wine. She said I should go back and get a job with Fergus Henderson.
London
It was 11 a.m. and the tables in the dining room at St. John had been pulled together and laid for staff lunch. In the open kitchen trays of fat, pink freshly boiled langoustines lay steaming by open windows while Justin the baker was setting warm caraway seed and buttery eccles cakes out on the counter.
I was allowed to stage that day, and at the end of it was offered the job of pastry chef. In all I spent five years working for Fergus at St. John Bread & Wine and then for his wife Margot at the Rochelle Canteen. It was the greatest happiness I had known up to that point. All us chefs were utterly devoted to Fergus and Justin and worked incredibly hard for them. But what was special about St. John was its humanity. It wasn’t assumed that you had to suffer to create beautiful food. Or contort the ingredients. Dishes were presented simply to highlight the beauty of the ingredient (they were mostly British) and not the ego of the chef. It was unprecedented and brave at a time when most cooking in the UK was looking outwards for inspiration. A revelation for me was receiving a tray of Kentish strawberries one day in the first week of June. Small and fragrant and rosy red all the way through like sweeties, they seemed miraculous.
The very first ice cream I made at St. John was fresh mint. I peeped across the kitchen to the dining room, and watched with delight as the lady who had ordered it looked down at her bowl with surprise and smiled.
Meanwhile, every holiday I had I went to Italy, making my way to each gelateria mentioned in Jeffrey Steingarten’s old essay – on returning to St. John I was able to test out new recipes from what I’d learned.
Sicily, Rome, Naples
Backpacking with my sister in Sicily one summer, I ended up eating tangerine sorbet in a café in Noto, and asking the waiter questions about how it was made. He told me that years before, they had had a funny letter from an English girl asking about their ice creams. I was taken into the kitchen and there was my old letter pinned to the wall, complete with passport photo. The elderly owner of the café came out to talk to me. He showed me round the kitchen, giving me a piece of marzipan to taste made from almonds from neighbouring Avola and a lumpy lemon. He communicated that although he was sympathetic, I could never learn how to make ice cream like an Italian – we couldn’t have the same understanding of ingredients, because he had been making it since he was ‘Cosi!’ … and gestured to knee height.
Well, there’s nothing like being told you can’t do something to spur you on. I decided then and there that I wanted to make ice cream with the same skill and understanding that this man had. But, instead of trying to copy what Italians do so well already, I would try to do my own thing – something relevant to the place I came from – and make it perfect.
I left St. John to set up La Grotta Ices and spent a few months cheffing for Margot Henderson and Melanie Arnold while I saved up to buy my ice cream van. One morning while I was chopping beetroot (wrongly, as Margot pointed out, ‘Argh … No! You gotta still be able to see the SHAPE of the beetroot!’), Margot mentioned that the night before she had been sitting next to Alice Waters (the pioneering chef/restaurateur and force behind the sustainable food movement in California) at a fund-raising dinner. Apparently Alice had recently founded a kitchen at the American Academy in Rome where they hoped to feed the community of the academy using locally grown, seasonal organic produce. They needed volunteers. I sent a postcard to Alice at her restaurant Chez Panisse and waited. Six months later, I was on a night train to Rome, where I lived and worked for a winter, before returning to making ices again in the spring.
Working abroad during the off season became an annual habit. The winter after that I moved to Naples. I pictured myself renting a charming room in a crumbling villa and topping up my winter tan on a balcony cascading with lemons. I’d find a job, shop in the market every day, eat ice cream and maybe I’d try to write, too.
What I discovered when I got there (apart from the fact that it was freezing cold and rained almost every day for three months) was that this situation doesn’t really exist in Naples. There are no flats to rent for single professionals. Single people live at home with their families until they get married … and then they stay living at home some more. Instead, I took a long-term let on a room in a B&B. Living with a depressed (he ate a LOT of nutella) 19-year-old boy and his pet chinchilla was not what I’d had in mind but never mind – I pounded the streets of Naples for hours each day, eating pizza fritta and sfogliatelle and tried to look for work.
In Naples I worked at two restaurants. A chef friend in London had tipped me off about somewhere he’d had a good meal so I went there first. The two women running the kitchen looked at me with deep suspicion and asked what the hell I thought I was doing. Didn’t I know there was a crisis in Italy? There wasn’t enough work for Italians, let alone foreigners. Plus I towered over both of them and was too big for the kitchen. Nevertheless, I could come a few evenings a week and do work experience if I wanted to learn. It was pretty terrifying. Rita and Nuncia used to fight with each other like wildcats – occasionally breaking off to complain that I was rolling the rice balls too slowly – and would then attack one another again and have to be dragged apart by the always-amused head waiter. Sometimes I’d catch Rita looking me slowly up and down … ‘L’altezza è mezza bellezza’ (half of beauty is height), she would mutter bitterly before turning away with a sigh.
I managed to get another job for the day times, but the only place that would take me was a trendy modern restaurant where the owner was a bit of a celebrity but the food sucked, the pasta was gluey and the fish was vacuum packed and sous-vided to obliteration.
Nevertheless, Naples was good. Piaggio Ape’s served as impromptu market stalls all over town, piled high with artichokes that I gorged on – 3 euros for a bunch of ten. Coffee everywhere was dementedly good and thick, as only the first oil-rich drips made it into your drink – the scalding hot cup was whisked away leaving the rest of the coffee to pour away into the drain. I would picture the underground pipes of Naples flowing with espresso.
La Grotta Ices
Now I am the happy owner of La Grotta Ices, finally established in 2008. The name comes from the Italian for ‘cave’ or ‘grotto’, and it was named as such in homage to the first cool, dark ice cream shop, that I discovered working in Cannes, and which set me off on my journey.
At first the ice creams were made at home, with two freezers in a bedroom, then under a damp brick railway arch in Bermondsey. Since 2009, they have been created in my workshop or ‘ice cream shed’, a converted Victorian greengrocers in a beautiful historical south London square.
The La Grotta Ices range changes weekly. My intent is to create inventive, not-too-sweet ice creams that capture the bright flavour of exquisite, ripe fruit but with a supernaturally light, smooth and sublime texture. The focus is on using minimally processed, fresh, whole ingredients and using the confines of the seasons and simple methods to do so. Ices are sold from the back of a small white Piaggio Ape – the same vehicle used to sell fruits and vegetables in Neapolitan markets.
La Grotta runs from April to December. I sell scoops at markets and art fairs, and tubs in shops around London, and inbetween that teach a long-established class in ice cream making at the award-winning School of Artisan Foods in Nottinghamshire. For the first three months of the year – when it’s too cold to sell ice cream (it doesn’t melt in the mouth properly at temperatures below 14°C), I continue to work abroad.
What’s the Difference Between Ice Cream and Gelato?
It is a question that tormented me for many years. And that many people ask me. The literal answer is that gelato is just the Italian word for ice cream … but here’s what most people will also explain:
1. Gelato is made with mostly milk and rarely contains egg yolks (ice cream is generally custard-based). Gelato is consequently lower in fat.
2. Gelato is churned more slowly than ice cream, which means it incorporates less air into the mix and is a denser, smoother product compared to ice cream. Less air means that the flavour of the gelato is more concentrated.
3. Gelato is served at a higher temperature than ice cream so that it has a soft texture and can be scooped easily.
What you will never hear anyone (particularly gelato makers) explain is just how they create all of these wonderful attributes. It’s as though it happened by magic!
In most cases, gelato compensates for the lower fat and less air by adding commercially used ingredients less familiar to the home cook. Dry milk powder (milk solids) adds richness and body to the gelato, making the texture seem creamier and more dense. This is because although it is fat-free, it is high in milk proteins. Sugars like glucose, dextrose and trimoline allow the gelato to stay soft and scoopable, but because they don’t have the sweetness of saccharose (sugar), the gelato doesn’t taste as sweet. They also help prevent crystallisation, which keeps the gelato smooth.
I choose not to use either in my ice creams for a few reasons. Firstly, dry milk powder has a ‘cooked’ taste that interrupts the sweet, pure flavour of fresh cream and milk. Likewise, glucose, dextrose and trimoline tend to coat your tongue. Sugar is much ‘cleaner’ tasting and allows the other flavours to shine. But there are other issues to consider apart from taste. Dry milk powder contains roughly 50 per cent lactose compared with fresh whole milk, which is 4.8 per cent. Skimmed milk powder is a prevalent ingredient in many processed foods, and as humans are consuming lactose in much higher quantities than we used to, it wouldn’t be surprising if this turned out to be one of the causes of lactose intolerance.
The perfect balance
You don’t have to use mysterious powders to make great ice cream. The foundations of a perfect scoop are based on having the right quantity of water, sugar, fat, solids (proteins) and emulsifier in a recipe, all of which are found in milk, cream and fresh eggs. Whole fruits add body. These ingredients need to be frozen quickly while being stirred/churned. This incorporates some air (to keep the ice cream light) and ensures the ice crystals are as small and even as possible (to keep the ice cream smooth).
Ice cream recipes have to be perfectly balanced to work. If you remove one element, like the fat, for example, your ice cream will suffer and lose ‘body’, becoming thin and watery. Likewise, if you take away the sugar, your recipe will freeze into a hard icy block and be impossible to scoop. A well balanced recipe will stand you in good stead.
How to Use This Book
I now have 13 years’ worth of crispy-edged, custard-splattered recipe notebooks (and counting) where I’ve recorded all my ice cream making attempts. The early books are experimental – recipes I tried once or twice and didn’t go back to. Throughout the middle ones you start to recognise the favourites that I return to, making small changes and adjustments with each more recent version. This book contains all the recipes that made it into the most recent notebook – the core favourites. They have been honed and edited, to leave only ones that work and are delicious, ones that I look forward to returning to year after year.
The order in which the recipes have been printed follows the spectrum of ices I make throughout the year. As ingredients come in and go out of season, so the ‘menu’ is constantly changing. You can dip in and out of the book as you like, but if you use it as a seasonal guide you will find fruits are more likely to be ripe, which means they taste good and are at their best value.
The book begins in January, mid-winter, a dry time for locally grown produce and a time when I welcome piercingly bright citrus fruits into my kitchen. Amalfi-lemons, leafy navel oranges and bergamot from Italy come into season now, followed by sweet and sour kumquats and the extraordinary blood orange with its pitted peel heavy with rich oils and its volcanic strawberry-flavoured tangy flesh – it’s exciting! In February I give in to the lure of dazzling tropical fruits from overseas. The vivid colours and potent flavours of pineapple, passion fruit, papaya, lime and mango bring energy to this somewhat bleak time of year.
Early spring ice creams employ the use of bracing kiwi, earthy rhubarb, confetti-like rice, peach leaves and delicate scented blossoms like mimosa and clover. In late May, expect the first cherries from the south of France and the Gariguette strawberry from Brittany. British strawberries should be ripe and red all the way through by June and are swiftly followed by soft-skinned stone fruits: flat white peaches, apricots and nectarines.