Snippets from the Italian Scene
Italian Ices: Memories of
Summer
About a month ago I posted a request for Italian ice recipes on the Italian Cuisine BBS -- Perhaps coincidentally, a couple of weeks ago Don sent the following, which he has kindly given me permission to share:
"hi,
"what do you call water ice...
"the one made in an ice cream machine or the type where they shave a block of ice with a scraper and put it in a cup and add fruit flavored syrup on top of it and let it drip down through the ice....
"i remember both as a kid....
"the shaved ice was called hokie pokie, and there was a little old man who we called "hokie pokie joe" he was from italy and he would go through the neighborhood with a little push cart that was real neat with a canopy on top to shade the ice and the fruit flavors were arranged around the sides as kids it looked joe had a 100 different flavors (at least as kids it seemed that way, there was probably only 20 different flavors).
"hokie pokie joe was a real cool guy and very nice and he had the respect of all the kids, no matter where he went... he always came around in the evening ,after supper(now they call it dinner),its amazing how our vocabulary changes when we get some money.... you could hear him all the way down the block calling "HOKIE POKIE...HOKIE POKIE"... and it was only 5 cents...
"i often think of ol hokie pokie joe and wish i could go back to the old neighborhood days...they were fun times and simple... yes and if you didn't eat your supper you didn't get the hokie pokie, mom always saved enough from the food money so you could get the treat, she loved us … she would do without so that we could have...and that's who i miss most.
"My Mom."
I replied that water ice is called a granita in Italy, and in the course of our conversation he added,
"I'm from the Norristown, Pa. area and I grew up in an Italian neighborhood, and we had a lot of Italian water ice stores in town but it was not frozen hard, it was kind of slushy, like snow gets as its melting, in fact as kids we used to make it, someone would have an old hand crank machine and we would go through the neighborhood and collect all the ice cubes from the neighbors (those that had refrigerators, most of us had a ice box) we would mix up a batch and pack the ice cubes around the metal container and start cranking the handle till it became tight, then we knew it was done."
Memories of kinder, simpler times.
A presto,
Kyle Phillips
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