There was once a flavorful morning ritual for some residents of the French Quarter’s Italian sector. Angelo Brocato Jr., son of the man who founded the city’s most famous baked goods and ice cream shop, once told me that neighborhood folks would begin their day at Central Grocery (the esteemed home of the muffaletta) to buy a warm loaf of Italian bread. From there, they would go to Brocato’s where a nickel would get their glass filled with lemon ice. Breakfast would consist of bread pieces dipped in the slushy ice. “You wouldn’t believe how good that was,” Brocato recalled.
Diamond Jim Moran was apparently convinced. He was one of the Quarter’s better-known characters, famous for his diamond studded wardrobe, which included sparkle in his belt buckle, braces and, yes, even his zipper. There was a rumor that at his restaurant, “La Louisiane,” he would sometimes slip a diamond into a meatball as a bonus for a special guest.
For Diamond Jim, whose ancestry included the Brocato linage, breakfast was a simple affair. He would send his sons to Brocato’s with a pitcher to be filled with lemon ice and then the requisite Italian bread. The Diamond Jim family may have unknowingly been a prototype for the Quarter’s first “to-go” service.
Lemon ice comes to mind because it is summer and there is nothing quite like it. Brocato’s brand was introduced locally when the shop opened in 1905, so the dish even predates the cherished indigenous snowball for providing a frozen flavorful jolt.
(Over on Tchoupitoulas Street Hansen’s Sno-Bliz’s tart lemon flavor comes the closest to a snowball matching a lemon ice. The flavor was invented by Mary Hansen whose family name was Gemelli, so her ancestral roots traced back to the old country.)
Those same ships that carried immigrants from Sicily might have also been loaded with lemons. The fruit is plentiful and grows big, sometimes approaching softball size, in the Mediterranean region. According to Justin Nystrom, a Loyola History Professor who has studied the local Italian culture, “As late as 1884, lemons represented New Orleans’ third most valuable imported commodity, behind only coffee and sugar. The ships also brought people: Most Sicilian immigrants to the U.S. came on ships operated by the Mediterranean citrus fleet.”
There are variations in the lemon ice recipe, but usually it included lemon juice, sugar, water and “zest,” made from the lemon peel, followed by timed boiling and then freezing. Done right it has a texture that is soft, not creamy, like ice cream, just right for slurping along a Mediterranean beach or Lake Pontchartrain.
Brocato recalls that diversity, as it always does, would have an impact on the product. In the early days his father experimented with a strawberry ice, but the mostly Sicilian population never responded to it. Years later as the population grew more ethnically mixed, strawberry had gained acceptance as well as chocolate and peach among other flavors.
In the bar rooms you might find limoncello, kin to lemon ice, though liquid and fortified with hooch (usually a grain alcohol). The liqueur had been around for years but became a rage after the 2003 movie “Under the Tuscan Sun,” in which one scene even provides a lesson for making a homemade batch. Like ices, over time there has been a more variety of flavors. On the back streets of Naples offerings even include melon limoncello. Whatever the choice, the key is that the drink, for maximum pleasure, must be seriously chilled as though in defiance of the Tuscan sun.
Lemon sorbet is pretty much the same thing as lemon ice, but a tad smoother and a bit more highbrow. Fancy restaurants sometimes serve a cup-full during dinner as a “palate adjuster.” At a recent meal a scoop of the sorbet was served topped by a splash of Grey Goose vodka. Coincidentally, the sorbet came just as my palate was badly in need of adjusting, especially for something sweet, tart, and chilled.
I have a hunch it would have gone well with a loaf of Italian bread.
