Summer 2009
Ice-Cream Sunday
Celebrate the coming of summer and join us aboard a hot Zafira VXR for a cool family day out – in search of the best ice cream in Britain
Words: Anthony ffrench-Constant, Pictures: Simon Childs and Markus Bidaux
Anyone who has ever tried to remove it from a car interior will know that sand has a mind of its own. It either stubbornly refuses to relinquish its grip on the carpets, as if equipped with tiny grappling irons, or simply leaps about like the front row at a thrash metal concert without ever actually making its way up the pipe of the vacuum cleaner.
So it won’t surprise you to learn that visitors to the British seaside inadvertently take a stupendous 160,000 tons of sand home with them in the car each year. That’s the equivalent of 50 million buckets.
Apparently, 54% of the sand in question is transported from coast to car via shoes, 33% is carried in towels and blankets, 5% loiters in your bucket and spade, 1% is caught in newspapers and books and 6% makes it on board via our hair and bodies. Spookily, women export more sand than men – an average of 7kg per annum compared to 5kg for men. Honestly; it’s a wonder, come September, there’s anything left of our beaches at all.
When it comes to that other great staple of a seaside summer day – ice cream – I discover that on average, each person in the UK eats nine litres every year, with people in Scotland and Northern Ireland eating more than those in England and Wales. Americans top the chart at 20 litres per year. Surveys have shown that men rather than women are more likely to choose ice cream as a dessert, and although there are over 1,000 ice cream companies in the UK producing hundreds of flavours, vanilla remains the favourite.
Now, you can tell a great deal about the quality of an ice cream without even tasting it, by simply watching your children devour it. The greater the care, and speed of consumption, the better the flavour. Chilly rivers of molten ice cream flowing liberally down the cone and over small, sticky fingers suggest mild indifference. And if the whole shooting-match simply leaves the cone and plummets to the carpet, crash-landing like a soggy vanilla meteorite, then nine times out of ten the donor probably isn’t all that bothered.
If, however, such a sorry fate were to befall a Morelli ice cream, you can pretty much bank on the mother and father of all tantrums. Billed as the best ice cream in Britain by the editor of Delicious magazine recently, certainly no-one in my family has yet tasted better.
The only slight snag associated with Morelli’s ice cream is that given that sand is still one of the few things you won’t find in Harrods (where you can buy Morelli’s but they haven’t yet installed a basement beach), you’ll have to go to Morelli’s ice-cream parlour in Broadstairs, Kent, for the full, gourmet seaside experience. And that’s as far east as you can go in England without getting your socks wet.
