Eaten Magazine No. 18- Dessert

Sharbat Wishes and Dairy Queen Dreams

To give you a little taste of my writing, I thought I would start this all off by sharing pieces I wrote and had published in 2023. This one is from the incredible food history magazine, Eaten, gorgeously and thoughtfully edited by Emelyn Rude. You can find her and Eaten on Instagram at @eatenmag and online at www.eatenmagazine.com.

I hope you enjoy!

It's summer 2023 and it's roasting in London and we have no air-conditioning. It's hot out. I'm hot. My cat is hot. My four-year-old son is hot. He had a popsicle for breakfast today. No: make that two popsicles. I was okay with it. Frozen icy goodness and hydration for a little one who doesn't yet understand the notion and importance of "hydration." And yet, almost by instinct, he clearly understands the delight of an icy frozen treat. He is part Iranian, after all, and, unbeknownst to him, his twenty-first century cooling, thirst-quenching breakfast popsicle is a direct descendant of the sharbats enjoyed by his ancestors in Iran.

Upon arrival at anyone's home in Iran, chances are you will be handed a glass of sharbat — a cold beverage made from a sweetened fruit or floral-flavored syrup, diluted with water; and served over ice. According to my father, an 87-year-old immigrant from Iran, if you're not served sharbat, then is something majorly wrong with your hosts. But sharbat isn't just for when guests come to visit. It's for celebrations — like weddings, births, holidays, birthdays— and for every day, any day. And it's been this way for thousands of years.

The problem with history is that things get lost and muddled over time. Tales, facts and legends comingle, making it sometimes difficult if not impossible to discern the "truth." The problem with food history is that, generally speaking, not a lot of people documented food history. And the problem with popsicle/ice cream/sharbat history is that this particular food is fleeting — it melts away and disappears, quickly. So what to do? We piece together texts and facts, and sift through legends and tales, and do our best to get it right, to do justice to those who came before us, who ate before us, who drank before us. And, on this occasion, we arrive at the story I am about to tell you.

The story goes something like this, or at least we think it does: ancient Persians drank sharbat, Arabs conquered Persia, then they went on to conquer Sicily, taking sharbat with them.

Sharbat turned into sorbetto in Naples, sorbetto turned into sorbet, and, at some point, dairy got added, and after a few twists and turns, we got gelato, ice cream, and sherbet.  And now it's 2023. End of story. But it all started in Iran. And it all started with sharbat.

As far back as 500 BCE, the ancient kings of the Persian Achaemenid Empire enjoyed snow mixed with concentrated fruit juice as a cooling summertime treat. And from around 400 BCE, Persians began building specialized ice canals (qanat) and domed ice houses (yakchal) where, in addition to providing much needed refrigeration and food storage, ice and snow could be stored so that the royals' beloved sweetened snow could be enjoyed all year round. These ancient Persian icy treats sound kind of like snow cones to me (I'm currently picturing one of those flimsy paper cones in the hands of a tall, handsome, dark-haired royal of antiquity), not at all like the iced beverages that are modern-day sharbat. But who am I to judge — I've never been to Iran and have never had a sharbat other than the ones I've made for myself as experiments in my East London kitchen. My sharbats are tasty but perhaps not "authentic," homemade second-generation attempts at bringing a taste of the proverbial "old country" into my new one.

My Iranian father has at this point lived more of his life in his adopted home in midwestern America than he has in his native country, and yet he still talks of sharbat, nostalgically, wistfully, joyfully. He tells me of running home after school as a child, giddy at the sight of a fresh winter's snowfall - snow which he and his friends and siblings would collect and over which they would drizzle sweet grape molasses and then eat. It was an icy, sweet, refreshing wintry snow sharbat not unlike those once enjoyed by the early Persian kings. He's told me that story a few times, told my siblings too, always with a smile in his voice.

He's only recently told me about other sharbats of his childhood. Flavors included sour cherry, pomegranate, rose petal, and melon. Sharbats were cold and iced and sweetened. They were the only things he could stomach, literally, during the six separate times he had malaria. The poor guy had malaria twice a year, three years in a row, in northwest Iran in the early 1940s. That sounds so terrible that I can't imagine it, but I have seen photos of him as a boy and he looked so small and frail. My father couldn't eat when he was sick. He lost pounds and pounds of weight, and gained a yellowing in the whites of his eyes that is still with him today. The only thing he enjoyed during those bouts of illness was sharbat. He says maybe it was because of the sweetness from the sugar and the molasses. Or maybe it was because of the icy cold. Whatever it was, the sharbats his mother and father and aunt brought to his sickbed sustained him. Who needs chicken soup and quinine and modern medicine when you can have sour cherry syrup diluted with water and chilled with ice?

In his eleventh century tome The Canon of Medicine, Ibn Sina, the Persian thinker, astronomer and "father of medicine," praised sharbat for its medicinal healing powers. He writes specifically of sekanjabin, a sharbat of honey and vinegar, and suggests that nursing mothers should drink it to thin their milk, that others should take it with pomegranate to reduce their fevers, and that those with "depraved" appetites should have it with radish and fish to, um, induce vomiting. I'm so glad my appetite isn't "depraved" because, to Ibn Sina's credit, a combination of honey, vinegar, radish and fish does sound like something that would make me throw up. ("Medicine," indeed.) Luckily for my father, the sharbats that sustained him during his malarial bouts were not so much the fish-radish-vinegar kind but were more akin to the sweet and sour Shirazi ones that would eventually spread across the Middle East and Mediterranean.

For thousands of years, Persians had been making wine in the city of Shiraz, whose gardens, fruits, and flowers were acclaimed across antiquity. Grape cultivation in Shiraz stretched back to at least 2500 BCE, with regional wine production occurring since 500 BCE. When the Arabs arrived and subsequently conquered the Persian Sassanian Empire in the middle of the fifth century, they brought with them Islam, its prohibition on alcohol, and a resulting curtailing of Shirazi wine making and wine drinking. And so, chilled alcohol-free drinks, flavored with grape, rose, cherry, quince, pomegranate, and orange blossom, exploded in popularity and supplanted wine as the refreshing beverage of choice in Iran. This love of sharbat did not remain confined to Iran, but spread across the Muslim world, with recipes and methods exported to the vast, alcohol-free lands under Arab rule. Over the next two hundred years, first under the relatively short-lived Rashidun Caliphate and subsequently under the powerful Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates, Islam rapidly and forcefully expanded, eventually stretching over the Middle East, North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula, as well as across Central Asia. It was the Abbasids who, in 827 AD, sailed from present-day Tunisia to conquer the Byzantine-con-trolled island of Sicily. However, Islam was not the only import the Arabs brought with them to the triangular isle. No, no, no - that sweet, icy refresher from Persia arrived in Sicily as well.

Using snow from Mt. Etna, along with Sicilian citrus fruit and blossoms, the Arabs created their own local version of Persian sharbat, one which has barely changed and is still made and loved on the island (and across Italy) today. The granitas of twenty-first century Sicily, made of scraped or shaved ice, sugar, a fruit or herb or nut puree — almond for me, please, and lemon for my husband -are as close to the sharbats of Sicily one thousand years ago as you can get. On a hot day in Taormina or Siracusa or Catania or Ragusa, there is nothing more pleasant than an ice-cold granita. The Arab conquerors and the native Sicilians of old would have agreed with me, I'm certain of it. They adored the icy import so much that it made its way to the Italian mainland, to the tables and tastebuds of the elite in Naples and, eventually, north to Florence. Along the way, the word "sharbat" evolved into "sorbetto."

According to lore, in the final quarter of the thirteenth century the Italian explorer Marco Polo traveled across Asia on the Silk Road, all the way to China and back. When he returned to his native Venice, he supposedly brought with him myriad novel things that changed the Western world forever: noodles, paper money, gunpowder, and possibly a recipe for ice cream. The thing about Marco Polo is that there is a lot of exaggeration and misinformation surrounding his travels and the many revolutionary ideas and items he supposedly brought back to Europe with him, not to mention a lot of romanticized, magical, wishful thinking. There is demonstrative evidence that in the early-seventh century the Tang Dynasty of China created a frozen milky dessert that may have been the first "ice cream" recorded. (This was actually a frozen yogurt, if we're being really pedantic, because there was some fermentation involved.) However, there is no evidence that Signore Polo brought that recipe back to Italy with him, however amazing that would have been.

What we do know and have evidence of is that back in Italy, the Renaissance arrives, and sharbat is reborn, all thanks a Neapolitan scientist named Giambattista della Porta. In the mid-sixteenth century, della Porta discovered that wine could be frozen (and stay frozen) by mixing saltpeter (potassium nitrate) with snow, thereby creating an early boozy slushy. He wrote of this discovery in a 1558 treatise, Magia Naturalis, that was widely shared across Naples, Italy, and, eventually, the rest of Western Europe. "Put wine into a vial," della Porta writes, "and put a little water to it that it may turn to ice the sooner. Then cast snow in a wooden vessel and strew it into saltpeter... turn the vial in the snow and it will congeal by degrees." Cooks and scientists alike embraced della Porta's freezing method, but also discovered for themselves that common salt has the same freezing effect on snow as potassium nitrate. They also discovered that they need not be restricted to making frozen wine slushies and began to make an iced treat we would nearly recognize today. Eccolo — we have sorbetto!

The creation of gelato followed closely behind. In 1565, the Grand Duke Cosimo I de Medici tasked his architect, Bernardo Buontalenti, with creating a dessert to impress a visiting delegation from Spain. Buontalenti rose to this challenge, and mixed together salt, snow, eggs, milk, sugar, bergamot, and lemon to give the Spaniards something singular: a sorbetto made with dairy — a gelato, a triumph.

By the end of the 1500s, elites across Italy were devouring sorbetto as treats on hot days and as palate cleansers between courses at elaborate meals. And, by the 1600s, the frosty delights had spread beyond Italy's borders, and elites in France and England were eating sorbetto and possibly even gelato too, renaming it sorbet in France and, eventually, sherbet and ice cream in England. And, though the Safavid Persians across the Mediterranean continued to enjoy sharbat as an iced and sweetened fruit and floral beverage, just as Iranians do today, sharbat, in the Western world had been transformed, reborn. The rest, as they say, is history.

The history of sorbet, gelato, and ice cream from the seventeenth century onwards is a tale of immigration, slavery, war, diplomacy, innovation, democratization, and religion. It's a tale, above all, of a common and deep-rooted love and desire for something sweet, cooling, and refresh-ing, for something that has been and can be at once a treat for kings, a salve for sickly invalids, a palate cleanser for noble-men, a cooler for toddlers, and, for me, the heart of cherished memories of grand-parents. In those memories, I'm sitting at a picnic table outside the Dairy Queen with my Grandpa Carl and he's gotten me a dipped cone — warm chocolate sauce over vanilla ice cream, something my parents never allow me to have. It’s too messy. It's too sweet. It's too much. And then I'm in the parking lot of the McDonald's after school, in my Grandma 'Rene's Ford Thunderbird, eating a butterscotch sundae - another forbidden treat — with a little white plastic spoon. The grandparents are long buried, but the memories are alive and well, if a little muddled by time. A kid and her grandfather and an ice cream cone. A kid and her grandmother and an ice cream sundae. A hot day. A cooling treat. A refreshment.