02 Jun 2017

The sicilian granita

by Simona Vitagliano
The scorching heat, the fan or the air conditioner on, a terrace, a garden or a holiday home on the beach ready to welcome a table of friends for dinner: that’s how we imagine and dream of summer every year; and no one can be said to be immune to the charm of after dinner or a fresh dessert offered by a sweet fruit granita.

What not everyone knows, however, is that what normally, today, we call “granita” is nothing but a distant “cousin” of the oldest and most traditional Sicilian granita!

Sicilian Granita: the traditional idea of ”‹”‹iced dessert

If so many supermarkets and ice cream makers offer cheap slush, which are nothing but ice “contaminated” by a fruity taste or flavored with mint, vanilla and other flavors, Sicily has a tradition of its own in terms of granita, and has so much to to teach.

The real Sicilian granita, in fact, is a mixture of water, sugar and fruit, which is frozen slowly but never completely, mixing it continuously in order to obtain a creamy result and not simply hard crystals of flavored ice.

Another important difference between the common granita and this Sicilian cream is that the latter is never consumed at the end of the meal, but always at breakfast or during a snack, accompanied by bread or a brioche, in the taste that you prefer.

Usually the options are: lemon, strawberry, pistachio, coffee, but there are some variations that, from place to place, are reputed “specialties”, included in the list of traditional Sicilian food products, such as the black mulberry granita and the almond.

Less frequent, but equally sought after, are tastes of prickly pears, jasmine, chocolate, peach, mandarin or pineapple.

But back again in time: if the common granitas come from the Sicilian, where is the common matrix in the past to look for?

History of Sicilian granita

The general idea is that behind the recipe of Sicilian granita there is even an Arab drink, called sherbet.

It is an iced fruit juice, flavored with rose water, with which the Sicilians came into contact during the era of colonization.

The curious thing is that, initially, the Sicilian granita was prepared by collecting large quantities of snow from Etna (and nearby mountains), taking advantage of stone ladles, created in natural caves, to prevent it melting and, above all, that it lost that natural fresh temperature. With the passage of time that same snow was frozen and was removed by scratching on the slabs that were formed and transporting the whole adding salt, which kept the temperature low; this is also because it is easy to imagine that the consumption of this dish took place more in the warmer seasons.

The granita was then prepared in a steel container, which turned continuously like a kind of mixer, which in turn was contained in a well with snow and salt.

Just this type of preparation must have inspired another name that identifies this fresh aromatic sweet, both in Sicily and in our Campania: the rattata, that is, precisely, the “grated”.