granita

The Italian word 'granita' is the past participle of 'granire,' to make grainy, from 'grano,' grain, and ultimately from Latin 'granum,' a grain or seed. The name describes what makes granita different from sorbetto: its texture is deliberately coarse, with large ice crystals that crunch and melt unevenly on the tongue. The word is a production instruction as much as a food name. To make granita is, quite literally, to make something grainy.

Sicily developed granita in roughly the same cultural crucible as sorbetto. Arab administrators of the ninth through eleventh centuries brought their tradition of sweetened, chilled drinks to the island, and Sicilians already had access to snow from Mount Etna, transported down the mountain in insulated carts by vendors called 'nivaroli.' The difference from sorbetto lay in method: rather than churning the mixture smooth, the maker scraped and stirred the freezing liquid at intervals to produce the characteristic crystalline texture. Catania and Palermo both claim the most authentic tradition, and both claims have merit.

By the sixteenth century, granita was a defined Sicilian product, served with brioche for breakfast in the summer months in a practice that continues today. The Catanese tradition favors almond and mulberry; the Palermitan tradition favors lemon and coffee. The breakfast combination of granita and warm brioche is one of the more extraordinary contrasts in Mediterranean food: cold and hot, grainy and soft, tart and rich, consumed at eight in the morning in the Sicilian summer heat.

Granita reached mainland Italy and then the wider world more slowly than sorbetto, partly because it was so tightly bound to Sicilian ingredients and identity. The coffee granita that now appears on café menus from London to New York is the most widely traveled form, its bitterness and large ice crystals a reliable novelty. But the Sicilian version, eaten at dawn with brioche and made with local almonds or blood oranges, remains the original that every other version refers back to.