Cover Story : BOOK REVIEW : Pursuit of Coolness : THE HARVEST OF THE COLD MONTHS; The Social History of Ice and Ices <i> By Elizabeth David (Viking: $24.95, 379 pp.)</i>

Forty years ago, Elizabeth David innocently repeated some familiar myths in one of her cookbooks: The Arabs froze sherbet in the Middle Ages; the Italians learned of ice cream from the Chinese; Catherine de Medici’s entourage introduced ice cream to the French court in 1533. The galling discovery that all of these statements are false--and it certainly would have galled an exacting spirit like Elizabeth David’s--must have been the grain of sand that gave rise to this pearl of a book.

“The Harvest of the Cold Months” is the last book by the late British food writer, the fruit of an interest that preoccupied her from the end of the ‘70s, when she wrote her book on breads, until her death in 1992. It is not, like the books on Mediterranean food that she is best known for, a cookbook, though if you’re bold enough to do without precise measurements, you can extract a couple of dozen “recipes” from it, as we have done.

Instead, it’s a book about ice and its uses, mostly before the modern age of mechanical refrigeration. David was fascinated by the scarcely remembered story of how ice had to be harvested in winter and stored underground for summer (this had been done in much of Europe and Asia for centuries--in some places, for millennia). What was cooled or frozen with it long ago. Its varying functions in social life.

As a result, this book is not just about desserts but about fashions and crazes, science and mumbo-jumbo, splendors and social-climbing, scandals and intrigues--the whole panorama of human glory and cussedness as reflected in ice. She finds room for this amazing tale:

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“As the colossal wedding banquet [of Maria de Medici and Henri IV of France in 1600--which the groom did not actually attend] drew to a close, an automatically propelled table moved from in front of the new Queen of France, her uncle and their guests, to the two side walls of the great banqueting room, where it transformed itself into two fountains adorned with gold relief and precious stones, to be replaced by another table which rose through the floor, fully set with one of the fantastic desserts, at the time regarded as the very summit of splendor, in which everything, from the goblets and dishes to the napkins and knives and statues, was fashioned out of sugar.

“No sooner had the guests finished nibbling at their confectionery than the lights were extinguished, and with a realistic clap of thunder two pillars in the great hall opened out into two grottoes lined with brilliant gems.” And so the pageant continued, with singers opulently dressed as mythological figures and another transforming table (this one turned into a garden complete with birds).

What did all this have to do with ice? It was the work of Bernardo Buontalenti, whom myth has mistakenly credited with inventing ice cream. David included the story just to show the kind of thing he really did as the impresario of the Medici feasts.

About another colossal 17th-Century banquet (one which did include ices, and which must have gone on all day), she observed, “It all begins to sound like some monstrous tea-party for overfed children--and there were six more services to come.” But she was clearly fascinated by these fantastic blow-outs. Who wouldn’t be? The lifestyles of our own rich and famous can scarcely compare.

The association of ice and splendor continued as long as ice was more or less expensive. Later in the book there’s a description of a Victorian caterer’s standard drop-dead party dinner, which was, in its way, no less awe-inspiring than a Medici banquet:

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“It was the heyday of the decorative mold, and the [current] school of cooking reveled in those crenelated, betowered, beswirled and colonnaded creations of the coppersmith’s art and the porcelain manufacturer’s skills.” The desserts frozen in these molds (“minareted like the mosques of Stambul, many-domed as the Brighton Pavilion, as variously bespired as Ludwig of Bavaria’s neo-Gothic palaces”) ended up, she writes, “resembling small versions of fairytale palaces, mosaics of pink, white, lemon, ruby red and jade green, and as fairytale palaces do, they too have vanished, dematerialized.”

It may seem odd to see David describing these elaborate productions. She was the person most responsible for the English-speaking world’s present interest in the cuisines of the Mediterranean, the champion of rough and honest folk food against the fripperies of international haute cuisine. But those who know her cookbooks will recognize in her steady scrutiny of other times the same quality that made her so perceptive about other national cuisines.

In the Renaissance, she notes, scientists and inventors were often part of a palace entertainment staff--in processions, they marched next to actors, and their main job was providing what we’d call special effects for royal pageants. So for a long time there was a distinct aura of hocus-pocus about ice-making. The earliest description of how to create sub-freezing temperatures (which is all that makes frozen desserts possible) appears in a 1589 book by Giambattista Della Porta, a scientist/charlatan who was also a successful writer of comedies.

That method of creating sub-freezing temperatures was adding salt to ice, as in the old-fashioned back-yard ice cream maker. It indirectly owed something to a country most of us wouldn’t think of in connection with ice--India.

In their desperate pursuit of coolness during the Indian summer, the Mogul emperors took advantage of the fact that if you add saltpeter (sodium nitrate) to water, it lowers the temperature somewhat. A servant called an abdar would have to twirl a bulbous zinc flask in a basin of saltpeter water for hours on end until the water in the flask was cold. David observes that the twirling gesture has survived to our own day in the wine waiter’s token twisting of your wine bottle in the ice bucket.

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This knowledge of saltpeter as a “cold substance” reached Europe in the Renaissance, and alchemist types like Della Porta at first added saltpeter to ice in the hope that the combination would create a sort of double cold. By accident, cheap saltpeter usually contained some ordinary salt, and thus the ice cream freezer technique was discovered.

Having learned how to freeze, Europeans were content for most of the 17th Century to freeze fruit juice--or even just water. You could eat, or more likely suck on, the results, but basically they were table decorations (usually pyramidal, because that was the shape least likely to break the mold when the ice expanded).

Late in the 17th Century, frozen cream desserts showed up. The French called these early ice creams fromages glacees , frozen cheeses. One variety was known as fromage aux epingles , “cheese with splinters,” because of the large ice crystals in it.

The smooth modern style, made by continual scraping and stirring of the contents of the freezer to prevent the formation of those “splinters,” originated in Naples in the 1690s. David’s chapter on Naples is one of the richest in the book, because of the ebullient creativity Neapolitans lavished on ices and ice creams.

Up to this point, the chapters of this book (originally written as separate articles) have been arranged by the dean of English cookbook editors, Jill Norman (who contributed an introduction taking the story back to Roman and even Babylonian times), into a rough historical pattern. After Naples, they are arranged by region. For instance, there’s a chapter on China, which reveals that, although Marco Polo never saw ice cream, it was from China that the West learned how to use ice for preserving fish in the 19th Century.

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The India chapter is largely about Frederick Tudor, a canny Boston ice merchant who became a millionaire by shipping ice to India. He established American ice as the world standard; to early 19th-Century Londoners, ice wasn’t top quality unless it came from Wenham Lake in Massachusetts. In the 1850s, Norway supplanted Massachusetts as the source of ice--and the Norwegians formally renamed one of their lakes Wenham, so that Norwegian ice could be shipped to London under this still-fashionable name.

And so the book goes, with page after page of unexpected views of a world long gone, when people would have paid anything for one of our refrigerator freezing compartments. If you have more than a passing interest in ice cream and its cousins, or the plain marvelousness of history, this is an indispensable book.

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RICH CINNAMON ICE CREAM

Believe it or not, we have actually reduced the amount of cream in our version of this recipe, originally published by Father Vincenzo Corrado of Naples in the 1780s.

1 cup milk

1 cup half and half

1/2 cup whipping cream

1 cup sugar

1/2 cup butter

6 egg yolks

1 1/2 teaspoons ground cinnamon

In pan scald milk, half and half and cream. Add sugar and butter. Stir until sugar dissolves and butter melts.

Beat egg yolks. Gradually beat in some of hot milk mixture. Return all to saucepan and cook over low heat until thickened. Flavor with cinnamon. Allow mixture to cool. Freeze according to ice cream maker’s instructions.

Makes 4 servings.

Each serving contains about:

687 calories; 312 mg sodium; 530 mg cholesterol; 49 grams fat; 56 grams carbohydrates; 9 grams protein; 0 fiber.

ORANGE BLOSSOM AND PEEL ICE CREAM

In 17th-Century Naples, candito d’ova was not an ice cream but a sweet of egg yolks beaten with hot syrup and then frozen. However, its flavoring of orange blossom water and candied orange peel makes a magnificent ice cream, more delicate and perfumed than regular orange ice cream.

1/2 cup sugar

1 cup water

Peel of 3 oranges, grated

ICE CREAM2 1/2 cups milk

1 1/2 cups whipping cream

1 cup sugar

1/2 teaspoon orange blossom water

CANDIED PEEL

Combine sugar and water in saucepan and bring to boil. Add grated orange peel and boil 10 minutes. Strain candied peel from syrup; discard syrup.

ICE CREAM Scald milk and cream. Add sugar and stir until dissolved. Cool to room temperature. Stir in orange blossom water and Candied Peel. Freeze according to ice cream maker’s instructions.

Makes 8 servings.

Each serving contains about:

313 calories; 54 mg sodium; 55 mg cholesterol; 15 grams fat; 43 grams carbohydrates; 4 grams protein; 0 fiber.

FENNEL ICE

In the 17th Century, Italy was famous for herbal and floral ices, but the French made them too. This recipe is from “La Maison Reglee,” published in 1692 by L. Audiger, who had prepared ices for Louis XIV in the 1660s.

1 1/2 cups fresh fennel fronds, or other fresh herb such as burnet or chervil

Water

3/4 cup sugar

Mince fennel and add to 1 quart water. Infuse 1 to 1 1/2 hours and strain. Slowly bring 3/4 cup sugar and 3/4 cup water to boil, stirring so sugar dissolves. Chill. When ready to prepare, add 1/2 cup syrup to fennel-infused water. Taste and if not sweet enough, add more syrup. Freeze according to ice cream maker’s instructions.

Makes 4 servings.

Each serving contains about:

55 calories; 11 mg sodium; 0 cholesterol; 0 fat; 14 grams carbohydrates; 0 protein; 0 fiber.

TORRONE ICE

1 1/2 cups milk

1/2 cup whipping cream

3/4 cup sugar

6 egg yolks, beaten

3/4 cup toasted almonds, crushed

2 teaspoons ground coriander, combined with 1/4 cup water

This is very rich ice cream for almond lovers. The recipe also comes from Father Corrado.

In saucepan, mix milk, cream and sugar. Scald. Slowly add 1 cup scalded milk to egg yolks, whisking constantly. Add yolks, stirring until thickened. Remove from heat and allow to cool. Stir in almonds and coriander. Freeze according to ice cream maker’s instructions.

Makes 4 servings.

Each serving contains about:

623 calories; 74 mg sodium; 449 mg cholesterol; 41 grams fat; 53 grams carbohydrates; 17 grams protein; 2.14 grams fiber.