Cool, clean-tasting, refreshingly milky, Italian ice-cream is scooped on to a cone. ''Raspberry?'' asks the Italian. ''Oh, yes, please.'' Other topping options include a Flake
for a ''99'', Amaretto nibs, hundreds and thousands and finely chopped hazelnuts, but it's the partnership
of dripping red syrup as the ice melts which is nostalgic childhood in a cone.
Legend has it that the red syrup met Italian ice-cream in Glasgow when a Clyde
football club supporter named MacCallum persuaded his local Italian ice-cream parlour to make an ice-cream in the club colours - red and white. The ''club''
ice-cream was so popular that the inspired supporter was rewarded when the ice-cream was named after him.
The first MacCallums, however, were not take-away cones but sit-in-and-eat saucerfuls of several scoops of ice-cream, striped with the red sauce. Special
MacCallum saucers were stocked for the purpose as the popularity of the
Italian
ice-cream parlours in Scotland developed throughout early decades of the twentieth century.
The first itinerant ice-cream salesmen, pushing barrows around the city streets, had moved into small shops in slum areas. Then, with much hard work, many moved into better areas.
Local prejudice, though, was a problem. In a 1907 article in the Herald, reporting on a United Free Church conference on Italian ice-cream shops, they are described as ''perfect iniquities of hell itself and 10 times worse than any of the evils of the public house''.
But Glasgow was also a fun city with cinemas, dance and music halls. Despite the killjoys, there was an eager market for delectable Italian ice-creams dripping with raspberry syrup. And when popular Glaswegian novelist A J Cronin
took his heroine in Hatter's Castle (1931) into Bertorelli's cafe - perhaps
for
a MacCallum - the ice-cream parlour's future was secured.
''He took her arm firmly and led her a few doors down the street, then, before
she realised it and could think even to resist, he had drawn her inside. Mary paled with apprehension, feeling that she had finally passed the limits of respectability, and looking reproachfully into Denis's smiling face in a shocked tone, she gasped: 'Oh Denis, how could you?'
''Yet as she looked round the clean, empty shop, with its rows of
marble-topped
tables, its small scintillating mirrors and brightly papered walls, she felt curiously surprised, as if she had expected to find a sordid den suited appropriately to the debauched revels that must, if tradition were to be believed, inevitably be connected with a place like this.''
Catherine Brown
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