We often forget that before we arrived in this world, there were lives, stories, cultures, traditions and gastronomy. We forget that the craving for something fresh in the heat of summer is as old as human history itself. We forget that the joy of eating ice cream is something people have shared across time and continents.
The snows of Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl(Mexico Desconocido)Today, if we’re craving ice cream, we can go to an Oxxo or our favorite ice cream shop at any hour and pick our favorite flavor. In pre-Columbian times, eating sorbet was a luxury.First, it’s important to know that there was a god of ice: Iztlacoliuhqui.
He was associated with natural disasters, specifically frost and freezing temperatures. The Mexicas (Aztecs) would extract ice from the Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl volcanoes. The tamemes — porters and runners trained since childhood to carry out deliveries across the land at high speed who you can think of as the FedEx of the era — made two-day journeys from Tenochtitlán to the base of the Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl in modern-day Puebla.
They collect blocks of ice, wrapping them in ixtle and animal hides to preserve them. Then, they would run back with the heavy blocks on the back to Tenochtitlán.Once there, the ice was carefully unwrapped and dried, crushed into small pieces and sweetened with prickly pear, honey or agave syrup and sometimes even mixed with fruits like zapote, cherimoya, tejocote, mamey and capulín.
.
