The woman who revolutionised home-made ice-cream
La Grotta Ice’s Kitty Travers shares her fabulous, fruity flavours and recipes
It started this time last year when, at a warm alfresco birthday dinner — of the sort that one can only dream of now — a friend produced two cardboard pots covered with waxed paper, tied with string. “This is my new obsession,” she said. “One pot is sea salt, rosemary and pine nut, and the other is strawberry salad.”
She had recently invested in a rather expensive ice-cream maker and these were two freshly churned flavours inspired by some ice cream she had tried from La Grotta Ices. She encountered this artisanal producer in London’s Bermondsey, where La Grotta’s creator Kitty Travers parks her Piaggio Ape van to sell her sumptuous ice creams in seasonal fruity flavours. As we sunk our spoons into each pot — the creamy rosemary-laced ice studded with crunchy pine-nut brittle, the strawberry salad so smooth and tangy it reminded me of Fruitella sweets — she explained that she’d bought Travers’ 2018 book, La Grotta Ices, and become hooked on making home-made ice cream.
Things happened swiftly after that. Another friend present, visiting from Paris, bought a £40 Magimix 1.1l ice-cream maker from Amazon as well as “the book”, as it soon became known. I followed suit, envious of discussions about how long prune and Earl Grey mix has to steep before you churn, or whether round or flat white peaches work best for Travers’ mouth-watering tomato-and-white-peach ice. A WhatsApp group we coined Gelato sprung up — a space to discuss flavours, technique and equipment (“Do you really need a thermometer to make sure the custard is 82C?” Answer: yes). Requests came in: “Is it OK to add Nick, he is really into making ice cream?”; “My husband would like to join!”
Over the past year, discussions have taken in everything from one member’s pilgrimage to The Museum of Ice Cream in San Francisco (disappointing) to another’s excitement at tracking down a sole bergamot in east London to make blood-orange-and-bergamot sorbet. We have brought our ice-cream makers on holiday to make figleaf ice, from leaves stolen from a neighbour’s garden in Brittany, and apricot-noyau ice, from Italian apricot kernels. We have mused on flavours to meet the national mood — marmalade, for comfort, on Brexit Day — and ice creams to suit the season; “Corsican kumquats are now in the markets!” exclaimed my Paris friend in January. As well as La Grotta Ices, we sourced second-hand copies of the original ice-cream bible, Ice Creams, Sorbets and Gelati: The Definitive Guide (2010) by Caroline and Robin Weir. My copy arrived, gratifyingly, with splats and smears on the crinkled pages of the chocolate section.