CHIAVARI, Italy – The other day a friend of
mine posted a photo on Facebook of the Paciugo Gelato and Café bar at the
Cleveland airport and I got to wondering if the people walking by think Paciguo
is the name of the guy who owns the café.
It isn’t.
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| Airport, Cleveland, Ohio (photo: Vivian Infantino) |
Paciugo is an Italian word that means a
‘mess’, and it is also is the name of a very delicious ice cream confection
that is found in this part of Liguria, the Chiavari, Lavagna, Portofino,
Rapallo, Santa Margherita Ligure, Sestri Levante and Zoagli part.
The original paciugo recipe called for
vanilla ice cream flavored with sour cherries and sour cherry syrup. Over the
years whipped cream was added and other fruits like strawberries and peaches in
addition to the traditional sour cherries. And for those who really like to
live on the edge, chocolate ice cream is an acceptable alternative to
traditional vanilla.
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| Paciugo |
The recipe I found calls for whipped
cream, chocolate ice cream, small pieces of fruit (your choice), cherries in
heavy syrup, cherry syrup and chopped hazelnuts. The cherries in syrup go in
the dish first, then a little chocolate ice cream, then chopped fruit drizzled
with cherry syrup, then whipped cream with more cherry syrup cut into it and to
top it off - the chopped hazelnuts.
The author of the recipe wrote ‘not
everyone puts everything,” for truth be known Italians don’t like their food
all mixed together. And the reason this ice cream confection was named ‘paciugo’
is probably because the cherries and ice cream and whipped cream are sort of
mixed together just by being next to each other in the same dish. That equals
mess in Italian. If the gelateria followed normal Italian eating patterns, each
ingredient would be put on a separate plate and eaten in a yet-to-be-determined
order. But I digress.
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| The One on the Left is Panera |
Another Ligurian confection is panera,
which translates from Genovese dialect to Italian as panna nera, and from
Italian to English as black cream. In reality panera is not not cream or black,
but a very delicious light brown coffee flavored semifreddo.
The Genovese say panera was developed in
Genova in the mid 1800’s. I have no reason to doubt them, even if they are a
little vague about the date. What they
are more precise about is not calling
panera ‘coffee gelato’, it is a semifreddo.
There is a slight difference and to know more about semifreddi I
recommend: http://thisitalianlife.blogspot.it/search?q=Very+Berry).
And now, on to the battle of the
penguins.
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| Giumin Gelateria, Genova Nervi |
An Italian pinguino is a chocolate
covered ice cream on a stick, and originated in Italy. A true, hand-made
pinguino may be a little hard to find these days, but if you go to the Giumin
Gelateria in Genova Nervi, you might get lucky. Gerolamo
Boero,
the 91 years old owner of Giumin, claims to be the creator of the pinguino. He
says he got the idea one day when he was just a kid, and went into the gelateria,
which was then owned by his grandfather, and put his idea together. His
grandfather liked it, and they began selling the chocolate covered ice cream on
a stick under the name ‘Macallè’.
Macalle turned out
not to be a great choice for a name for reasons I don’t quite understand, but
it had something to do with the war in Ethiopia, and the fact that the Italians lost. When
that happened, Boero’s grandfather decided a name change was in order so he re-christened
his grandson’s ice cream creation, ‘Pinguino.’
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| Clever Idea, Ice Cream on a Stick |
Boero never patented his idea, never felt
he needed too, until one day in 1948, a customer, who just happened to own an
ice cream factory, introduced a new product to the Italian consumer, the Mottarello.
You guessed it. Boero’s ice cream on a stick creation was now on sale
throughout Italy, but not by Boero, but by Signor Angelo Motta.
But the story does not end there for up in
that splendid, regal Piedmontese city of Torino, there is another gelateria
which also claims to be the birthplace of the pinguino, and this part of the
story
starts with Dominic Pepino, an ambitious young man who owned a small ice cream
shop in Naples.
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| Pepino's in Torino |
Signor Pepino made very good ice cream,
and while he was happy with his success, he also had big ideas, very big ideas. In 1884 he left
Naples and moved to Piedmont to sell the citizens of Torino a product they had
never heard of. Chocolate covered ice cream on a stick.
So clever was his approach he even
managed to convince the Piedmontese nobility to try his ice cream. As a result he
became the official ice cream supplier to the Royal House of Savoy which, as
you probably know, ruled the Kingdom of Italy at the time. The royals were so
pleased with the ice cream from Signor Pepino’s gelateria that he was awarded
four ‘Royal Coats of Arms’, which are still part of the Pepino label today.
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| Fit for a King |
You can still buy gelato and ice cream
on a stick at Pepino’s original location in Piazza Carignano, in the
heart of Torino. And as for the origin of the ‘pinguino’ let’s just say the two
versions are brothers not of another mother, but of another father born more
than 50 years apart. How can that be, you ask. Well, this is Italy and in Italy
anything can happen – and it usually does.
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