The best ways to drink ice cream: sodas, affogato and spiders

The most enthusiastic audience I’ve ever ‘cooked’ for (by a very wide margin) was a bunch of kids I taught how to make spiders. I was in Sharjah at a kids’ book festival, demonstrating recipes from my kids’ cookbook, and I picked this ‘recipe’ because I knew it was fun, not to mention foolproof. Australian summers ran on spiders when I was little, so I knew how much kids adore the whole spectacle of them. But even I was surprised at the reaction when the lemonade hit the ice cream and surged towards the top of the glass in a crackling rush of foam. Several hundred children started shouting and laughing and getting out of their seats to come and take a closer look.

That’s the best part of this genre of drinks-come-desserts: the magic-to-effort ratio is way out of whack, in a good way, because they’re simple and joyful. Affogato, ice cream sodas, floats, sgroppino: you just pour something thing over another thing for a thrilling and delicious contrast: hot against cold, fizz cutting through creamy, sharp against sweet, solid surrendering to melt.

To backtrack a bit, a spider is the Australian name for a fizzy drink poured over a scoop of ice cream, so-called (supposedly) because the foam looks like a spider’s web. In our house, what went into the glass depended on what was in the cupboard: lemonade most often, but also creaming soda or Fanta if the folks were feeling magnanimous. Sometimes when there was no fizz, my dad would make a different version instead: vanilla ice cream with Cottee’s lime cordial poured over it (not the fancy pale stuff but the radioactive-green variety).

The spider, or ice cream float as it’s known in the UK, is, I suppose, a homespun version of the ice cream sodas once served at American drug-store counters, where people gathered for refreshments and treats as well as their medicine prescriptions. The ‘fountain’ was originally the machine used to dispense carbonated water as a remedy for indigestion, headaches and assorted other ailments, a little like the healing waters of natural mineral springs.

Ice cream sodas date to 1874, when a Philadelphia soda vendor named Robert Green stirred a scoop of ice cream into his fizzy drinks at a fair to lure customers away from a rival with a bigger stand, so they say. Within two decades there were reportedly fifty thousand soda fountains across America serving all manner of variations of ice cream, soda and syrup: root beer floats, orange floats, grape soda floats, Boston Coolers made with ginger ale and extravagant sodas piled with whipped cream and topped with cherries. Sadly, most of those drug store classics, along with the soda fountains, have disappeared but drinks poured over ice cream live on in many other guises.

In Italy, there’s affogato of course, which means ‘drowned’ in Italian. I’m sure you know it: a shot of hot espresso is poured straight over a scoop of gelato, which slowly melts into the coffee. It’s one of my favourite desserts because it has everything: the coffee puts a spring in your post-prandial step, the ice cream appeals to your sweet tooth and there is, or at least should be, a nibble of crunch from the biscotti or amaretti propped against the glass.

In Sicily, the same idea appears framed around granita, the island’s characteristically crystalline flavoured ice. It often comes with whipped cream and a brioche alongside, while some cafés pour a shot of espresso over the ice, loosening the crystals into a cooling slush. The Venetians add alcohol, whisking lemon sorbet with Prosecco and a splash of vodka to make a pale, frothy sgroppino.

Further afield, from me at least, there are more elaborate iterations. Japan’s old-fashioned coffee shops, known as kissaten, serve incredible luminous floats, with vanilla ice cream melting into iced coffee, tea and tropical juices, including emerald-green melon cream sodas topped with ice cream and a cherry. Falooda, found across South Asia, reminds me a little of a liquid trifle, combining layers of milk and rose syrup with ice cream or kulfi, fine vermicelli and basil seeds, sometimes adding nuts and jelly.

Which brings me to this week’s recipe: this is the most refreshing, uplifting, easy dessert to enjoy in hot weather. Instead of pouring espresso over ice cream as in affogato, I’ve made a mocha granita and poured coffee liqueur over the top. But honestly, choose your own adventure for the liquid that you pour over, because that is all part of the fun.