Ice cream cones and cups

Bep Al·lès/Ciutadella – Although we can eat ice cream all year round, it is during the summer months that we consume the most, both at home, in bars and restaurants, and in the street, and we will find industrial ones, which come from outside the island, and also artisan ones, made in Menorca, with milk from local cows, and with more personalized production processes.

Ice creams and sorbets have been changing. From the classics of vanilla, strawberry, cream, chocolate, hazelnut, nougat… we have moved on to a wide range of natural fruit flavours, varieties of chocolate, nuts, signature ice creams, sweet and also savoury, as well as production techniques, with the incorporation in the 80s and 90s of the Italian way of making ice cream, where more air is added to the ice cream, which makes it more spongy and at the same time, less consistent and, perhaps, makes it more attractive when serving it both with an aluda (wafer cone) or in a cubellet (glass).

Aluda and cubellet, two words that until recently were very much ours and that we are losing, like many others that were part of the gastronomic lexicon or our way of speaking in Menorcan.

Nowadays, avalanches are called “cucuruchos” or even “cornets”, referring to a commercial brand, as was the case with what is called a “cut” of ice cream, and in Menorca, this way of serving ice cream between two wafers is called a “Frigo”, as we still usually call yogurts “danones”.

The word aluda is very much ours, it is a word that we must not let go, and it must continue to be part of our vocabulary, our gastronomic lexicon, as should the word cubellet, which is being lost to the detriment of the Castilian words “vasito” and “terrina”, which are or in fact seem to have already replaced this word so much ours, cubellet, which was once also one of the preparations of Menorcan pastries, with prestige until the 40s, and which little by little disappeared from the bakeries, and of which only its recipe remains in the notebooks and recipe books of old cooking and its box-shaped moulds, increasingly difficult to find, in antique shops.

So we recover our usual gastronomic vocabulary and, when this summer, or whenever, we go to have ice cream, ask if we want it with an aluda or inside a cubellet.