Three Water Ices

Appears in

Published 2007

About

There are times when a meal can lead up to a voluptuous cymbal-crashing finale of a dessert; but when the savory courses are complex and ornate, nothing follows them as dramatically as the sharp exclamation of a fruit ice.

In Bombay’s hot months—that is, most of the time—street vendors sell ice golas—balls of shaved ice with brightly colored syrups poured over them. It’s an old, old tradition, pouring syrup over snow, one that Parsis probably enjoyed in Iran, which gave us the word sharbat and all its variants, sherbet, sorbet, sorbetto, sorbete, and so forth.