Harvest of the Cold Months by Elizabeth David

Author:Elizabeth David [Elizabeth David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571275328
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2012-03-17T04:00:00+00:00

* The spelling is that of the booklet’s author.

† Cotgrave’s dictionary (1611) translates cassonade as ‘powder sugar, especially such as comes from Brasile’.

‡ Faccioli, in vol. 2 of his Arte della Cucina, gives the date as 1734 and the date of his death as 1836.

§ Presumably the translator meant sorrel in colour.

A Persian Tale1

Ice for Isfahan

Among the many marvels of Isfahan in the days of Shah Abbas of Persia, the Marquis Pietro Della Valle, an Italian traveller who had already spent sixteen months in Turkey, and in Baghdad had married an Assyrian girl, singled out two buildings as particularly worthy of notice. One was the palace or castle in which were housed the ‘King’s treasures, arms, papers and other things of importance’. The second most interesting curiosity in Isfahan – at any rate to the Roman nobleman – were the ice houses outside the city. They were called buzchane,* he wrote in June 1620 to his friend Mario Schipani, a Neapolitan physician. He was anxious to convey the information that these were no ordinary conservatories for snow such as everyone knew in Italy, but areas where ice was not only conserved but made, and in great quantity, for use in the city during the summer months. By the citizens of Isfahan it was used to cool beverages and fruit and was considered essential for the table and, Della Valle explained, was preferred by them to the snow more commonly used elsewhere in Persia.†

As Della Valle told his friend, there was no lack of snow in Persia, and in many places it was conserved as in Italy (although in rather different repositories), but in Isfahan people were more particular, and preferred ice, not, it was to be understood by Della Valle’s correspondent, natural ice from ‘waters frequently dirty and corrupt’ and consequently injurious to health, but ice ‘made by artifice from the purest and clearest waters to be found’. Della Valle now tells his friend how this ice is produced and conserved.

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