Crema

Over a year ago, perhaps it’s been two by now, I went to “Fall for Greenville”—a local food festival with my friend.  There, I feasted on mussels and lobster mac and cheese, fried green tomatoes and bacon brownies, but these, I’d had before.  It wasn’t these things that stuck with me, well no more than good food normally does.  Here I was first introduced to gelato and this was memorable. The flavor was birthday cake and it was profound.  A perfectly frigid representation of the treat. 

The next time I had it was in Torino, in the closing days of summer.  All previous memories disappeared in the delight.  Pepe and I found the storefront close to Porta Nuove, underneath the covered walkways.  Instead of a piazza, there was a park with a fountain.  Walking through there later, we would see children playing by the water, old men reading the paper on benches, a young man and dog drinking from the bull’s head (see below), and one particularly amourous couple laying together in the shade.

Bull's head, Torino's symbol.  More importantly, a water fountain!

But this was before the gelato.  Crema.  Cream.  It’s a flavor we don’t have here, at least to my knowledge.  Even if we did, it wouldn’t compare.  There were undertones of butter, the good, saltless kind.  Neither of us was expecting to be so overwhelmed by a simple ice cream cone.  I had pure crema.  Pepe soon admitted his error in wasting a single spoonful on chocolate.  That was the taste, better than Italian chocolate. 

My gelato and me, such love.

The day after, we thought that the beauty was in crema itself.  We were wrong.  We tried gelato from another store front, throwing it away in disgust.  One can do this in Torino, where gelato goes for a mere 2 € and the servers’ stinginess is non-existent.  We changed path, favoring an extra walk for the superb gelato of the day before.

The day he left, we went for gelato again.  In October, in the cold, we had gelato.  In November, when I was in Torino sans Pepe, I had gelato.  It was a problem, but an inexpensive one that didn’t need any help.

Now, sitting in the second winter of South Carolina’s impossible weather, I want crema gelato from that little store in Torino, almost as much as I want to be in Europe again.