Summer 2009
ICE-CREAM SUNDAY
Downstairs, Morelli makes its own range of over 20 ice cream flavours, fresh, from scratch, every day. I say from scratch but, as Chris Chalklin, in charge today, explains, Italian ice-cream technology does make life a little easier than it used to be. Years ago, the basement housed six vast, 100-gallon vats into which steam pipes were lowered to bring the basic ingredients to the boil, before the end result was pumped out through a maze of cooling pipes to chill it to the required temperature.
Today, a basic, all-natural mix involving double cream, sugar, eggs, milk and Morelli’s own bespoke base in powdered form slurps sumptuously from one gleaming steel machine to the next, the end result being a vanilla ice-cream to which a bewildering array of flavours are then added. Today’s special is Honeycomb, and the boys watch with eyes like saucers as quarry-loads of golden honeycomb tumble into their succulent vanilla duve.
One massive sugar rush later, it’s time to hit the beach. Diggers, dams, dead crabs and dog Frisbees interspersed with fish and chips eaten with legs dangling from the open tailgate of the Zafira dominate proceedings for a blissful, and mercifully sunny, few hours.
The Zafira VXR now appropriately laden with its own quota of accidentally pilfered sand, it’s time to go home. We’re not, as you can imagine, going to get off the beach without the threat of a second visit to Morelli’s, this time for chilly nosh of a slightly more portable nature. Sadly, ice cream and driving don’t make the best bedfellows. But I don’t mind too much. After all, for the next four hours behind the wheel of the Zafira VXR, and with the family securely strapped in, it’s my turn to have fun.
