The Ice-Cream Makers Read Online Free PDF

plenty of time to do so.
    A few days later, the cold set in. The light was a chalky white in the morning, the wind biting. People warmed themselves by his stove. And then they ran out of chestnuts. He sold the last portion to an ancient man.
    â€˜ Danke ,’ the man had said with a voice as delicate as paper.
    During his time there Giuseppe had learned a smattering of German. He lived ‘ weit weg ’ and had come to Vienna ‘ zu Fuss ’: ‘ Jawohl, den ganzen Weg .’ On hearing that he had walked all the way, people looked at him as though he had walked on water. With a stove.
    â€˜We can head home now,’ Bruno said. ‘Your mother will have missed you.’
    Giuseppe nodded. He was looking forward to going back, but first he wanted to visit an Italian he had spoken to over his stove a week ago. He was an ice-cream maker living in Vienna and prepared to sell Giuseppe an ice-cream machine.
    â€˜Do you know how it works?’ the man asked when the two of them stood in his workshop.
    Giuseppe thought of Enrico Zangrando’s words. Churn, churn, churn. The glossy sheen that would come over the substance. He nodded.
    â€˜What matters most is a good recipe,’ the man said.
    â€˜How do I find a good recipe?’
    â€˜The best are secret, but I don’t mind giving you one. If that comes out right, you have to start experimenting.’
    He lowered his voice a little, perhaps subconsciously. ‘Anything is possible; you can make ice-cream out of anything.’ It was like hearing a prophet.
    The man was short and sinewy, in his early fifties. He had a long, rather posh name for someone from his background — Massimiliano — but in Vienna everybody called him Max. The road Giuseppe had travelled was one he had walked countless times, many a springtime, with the sharp outlines of the mountain tops silhouetted against the pale blue, cloudless sky, before heading back again in the autumn. But these days he had lodgings in the city too, above the workshop he now owned.
    The ice-cream maker Antonio Tomeo Bareta had been the first to come to Vienna. He hailed from Zoldo, a small village in the Dolomites, not far from Venas di Cadore, and in 1865 he had obtained an official licence to sell ‘ Gefrorenes’ in Austria’s capital. Next, Bareta had gone to Leipzig and led a business comprising twenty-four ice-cream carts. Later he settled in Budapest, where he opened several ice-cream parlours and had sixty hawkers riding carts across town for him, men with caps and a leather pouch for the money. He had sold the Vienna licence to Massimiliano.
    Giuseppe carried home the ice-cream machine, a wooden barrel with a cylinder and a small hand wheel, all by himself. He didn’t need Bruno’s help.
    Back in the village Bruno offered him a job in his sawmill. But Giuseppe wasn’t interested in cutting logs. His father shook his head. ‘What are you going to do then?’ he asked. ‘You’re a man, you’ve got to work.’
    â€˜I’m going to make ice-cream,’ Giuseppe told him.
    â€˜In winter?’
    â€˜It’s nearly spring.’
    â€˜You’ve lost your mind!’
    The grandmother cut into the conversation. ‘It runs in the family,’ she said. ‘My husband lost his mind during our wedding night.’
    Voices filled the house. Only his mother was silent. His little brothers and sisters whispered, standing in the hallway, looking wide-eyed at the shiny cylinder in the wooden barrel. The youngest spun the hand wheel very tentatively before scuttling off.
    The recipe he’d been given by Massimiliano was for cherry ice-cream, but it was February: the first cherries wouldn’t be ripe until June, late May at the earliest. Every summer he would secretly climb an old tree on Enrico Zangrando’s land and tumble out, drunk on sweetness.
    His mother bought cherries on the market every year and made them into