Feature your business, services, products, events & news. Submit Website.
Breaking Top Featured Content:
Rachel Roddy’s recipe for coffee semifreddo | A kitchen in Rome
An imperfect but joyful summer treat that bears more than a passing resemblance to a velvety iced cappuccino covered in dark chocolate
“I screamed, sprinted to the sea, flung off shoes and socks, ran towards imagined heaving waves.” I remember the first time I read those opening four lines of Hollie McNish’s When We Got to the Beach, how satisfying they felt, as if they had almost been written for me. Especially last year, when, after three months of lockdown in a small apartment, we could finally move within the region and caught a train from Ostiense to Santa Marinella, where we flung off everything and ourselves into the sea. We really screamed, electric and ecstatic that we were free from our domestic cells, then made headrests out of stones and ate ice-creams on the beach. And now I am thinking of the scene in Down by Law when Jack, Zack and Roberto walk around the cell chanting, “I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice-cream”, again and again. We scream for sea, ice-cream, lollies, sandals, Bic razors, factor 30, mosquito coils, a sun-bleached T-shirt and the beach bag with last year’s sand still in the bottom.
Summer has started, as has my freezing. Having pulled icebergs from the back of the fridge and all sides of the freezer in order to make space, I have set to work on my annual freeze-liquid season, which is greatly helped by a nine-year-old who thinks it is even more exciting than I do. So little effort, such large, iced rewards. So far this year, we have made cherry scratch granita, lemon and melon slush, orange squash and mint syrup lollies. Also, coffee semifreddo, loosely based on a picture I saw years ago of something called la fetta moca, a log of milky, coffee-coloured iced cream with a slim, sponge cake base and a thin and delicate carapace of chocolate. I have dreamed of making this pudding: how satisfying and beautiful it would be, how I would make a short film of Vincenzo pouring the chocolate over the top, and another of him cutting a slice.