When I saw Jens’ entry on Switzerland from earlier this week, on what a friend of mine likes to call its incomparable “Hotelkultur” (that is, the culture of spending your life in stylish but appropriately understated hotels), I was reminded of the very first sorbet in my life. Naturally, it was served to me in a Jugendstil dining hall in Sils Maria. My family in Italy is more of the icecream-eating kind. That is, there’s patriotic pride in gelato, and there is not the least concern with the tons of calories that real icecream has. But Sils Maria is a place where the rich are not only rich, they are also ‘conscious’ of all kinds of things: the environment, health, and so on. So dessert is sorbet. While I haven’t yet persuaded my family that sorbet is half as good as icecream, I am happily eating it in sugar-fat-and-so-on-conscious Manhattan.
Anyway, I asked Jens whether he had a picture of sorbet, and reluctantly he gave me this one. Not one hundred percent to his liking as a photograph, for all kinds of complicated reasons. But I find the fact that it’s pear sorbet, combined with blueberries, utterly refined. That’s even better than the lemon sorbet (how banal!) I had in Sils Maria…