When the ultimate den of depravity was an ice cream shop in Largs
THEY were ‘one of the evils of Glasgow,’ thundered the mustered churchmen in special, 1907 session, ‘ten times worse than the evils of the public house’. Owned by ‘aliens and Roman Catholics’, enterprises that resembled ‘the iniquities of Hell itself’, they encouraged good young Scots to ‘hang about and loaf’.
Opium dens? Bordellos? No: firmly in the sights of those United Free ministers was that axe at the roots of all that was good and upright and manly in the land of oatcakes and Calvin – the Italian ice cream café.
For there were now so terrifyingly many of them. By 1903, Glasgow already boasted 89 ice cream parlours. Just a year later, there were 184 and, by 1906, there were 336. Where might it all end, these low joints ‘epitomizing the evil of luxury being smuggled into the souls of Glaswegians’? Well – unthinkably – there were, by the Second World War, even such establishments in Stornoway.
And several of them were still going when I was a youngling. The Coffee Pot, in all its white vinyl glory, sold meals of the beans-and-chips variety as well as coffee and its justly famed ice cream.
The Rendezvous was more sedate. The sort of place where you might meet a maiden aunt. Tame. Respectable. And then there was the Lido.
It was not remotely tame. It was the sort of place your Mam warned you about. Bejeaned lads from Plasterfield, with scars and motorbikes. And, though founded by the gentle Louis Scaramuccia – whose father had fetched up in Stornoway in 1922 – it was truly run by his wife, Maria Cabrelli.
Maria was about four foot nothing but of formidable personality, well able to tear strips off you and ensure there were few second offenders.
SOMEONE, one afternoon, saw Louis looking apprehensive. ‘Ah,’ he lamented, ‘Maria has cut her finger – but I wish it was her tongue.’ The footfall in downtown Stornoway is not what it was and in February 2016 the last of these enterprises, the Coffee Pot, shut up shop. Owner Peter Scaramuccia has yet to share his prized ice cream recipe with anyone.
Most of what is sold here in Britain is, of course, pretty awful – horrid industrial stuff made with ‘non-milk fat’ and sinister ‘alginates’. Indeed, in her first career as an industrial chemist – working for the Lyons food conglomerate – Margaret Thatcher is said to have been part of the team that invented Mr Whippy.
But there are high-end brands of very good ice cream – my personal favourite is Cream o’Galloway, from a family farm in Kirkcudbrightshire – and some Scots-Italian concerns are still going, including Nardini’s of Largs, Visocchi’s of Dundee, Verrecchia’s fabled University Café in Glasgow and Di Rollo of Musselburgh.
Domenico Di Rollo hailed from Roccasecca, near Cassino, and opened up shop in the East Lothian town in 1899. His great-grandchildren are now in the business, and their factory produces 600 litres of ice cream and sorbet an hour – in a giddying range of flavours.
Broadly speaking, there are two types of ice cream. Ice cream proper – the sort sold in tempting tubs by Häagen-Dazs – is double cream blended with an egg-based custard, sugar, and flavourings. Gelato – the typical Italian café product – is much lighter, made largely with milk and without eggs. And, of course, the Italian café heyday was in that increasingly distant era when few had refrigerators and hardly anyone a deep freeze.
It was probably the Chinese who invented ice cream, and there are no reports of it in Europe till the 16th century – nor in Britain till 1671, when ‘iced cream’ was served with strawberries, on the Feast of St George, at the court of King Charles II.
It was the French, some 70 years later, who first devised custard-based ice cream and for many years thereafter its making was a closely guarded secret. Broadly, ice cream is churned in a container packed outside with a mixture of salt and ice – and it became a matter of huge prestige to be able to serve iced desserts to guests at the height of summer.
Estates everywhere built icehouses, partially or wholly underground, where great blocks of ice, hewn from ponds and so on in winter, could be packed in straw and kept for months on end.
Basic, hand-churned ice cream machines came on the market from 1843, but the real breakthrough was the advent of mechanical refrigeration, using electricity and gas, which not only eased manufacture but made the finished product far easier to store.
But why that United Free moral panic in 1907?
It must be put in proper context. Created only in 1900, the United Free Church was already sliding into liberalism and away from its old doctrinal roots. In 1904, it lost a humiliating court case to the Free Church minority, largely in the Highlands, who had refused to sign up to the new denomination – and, in 1929, most of the United Free Church vanished into what is now the Church of Scotland.
WHEN you are already sliding in your theological loafers, it is always tempting to find a target you can with impunity denounce. Immigrants, especially Irish and Italian immigrants, were widely reviled in Edwardian Scotland, and Catholicism no less widely held in deep suspicion.
Besides, there is a venerable middle-class Scottish tradition of tut-tutting at the pleasures of the poor – a role now joyously exercised by the Scottish Government, at perpetual war with everything from smoking to professional football.
And, as they tended to be in the poorer quarters of our cities and did most of their trade late at night – as folks poured out of music halls and so on in search of refreshment – Italian cafes could be raucous.
Bruno Sereni, brought to Glasgow in 1919 when his father set up an ice cream parlour, used to chuckle that, so often was he sent to fetch the police, that the first words of English he learned were: ‘Come quickly – big fight in shop.’
So many Italians flooded to Scotland at the turn of the last century because life at home was pretty awful: political corruption, organised crime and widespread, deadly malaria.
They met, at times, bigotry and persecution – one Italian family in Milnathort, Kinrossshire of all places, were so terrorised the local cop quietly slipped them a loaded revolver.
But they survived. Put down roots. And, through the generations, many Scots-Italians have greatly enriched our national life: entrepreneurs such as Charles Forte, sportsmen like Simon Danielli and Paul di Resta, actors including Peter Capaldi and Tom Conti, entertainers like Sharleen Spiteri, Paolo Nutini, and artists like Jack Vettriano.
It’s a tale, as author Joe Pieri has rightly written, ‘of what can be achieved by people of lowly and underprivileged beginnings, with little or no education, and with nothing to rely on except their own inner strength and determination to survive and prosper.’