Tasting memories: Spanish ice cream at the service of a ball of nostalgia | Spain

Irene Iborra tells stories with ice cream and with a single lick she can invoke memories that take you back to childhood.

“When I opened Mamá Heladera in 2021 I thought: how can flavor trigger memories and how can I find what those flavors are?” she said.

“The obvious thing to do was ask, so I created a Google document and asked about 100 local people about the tastes and smells that reminded them of their childhood.”

At the request of The Guardian, he agreed to try to evoke the aromas of maple syrup, snow and pine needles that accompany the early spring Quebecois ritual of sweetening, when children are taken to the maple woods and given gives a small metal tray full of snow to collect the first syrup crop of the season. When it hits the snow, it solidifies to form a kind of maple candy.

The sherbet it produced captured it perfectly. On the palate, the first taste was of pine, the ultimate scent of Canada, then just a hint of maple syrup, ending with the unmistakable yet nameless taste of snow. For a moment, Barcelona became the wooded outskirts of Montreal.

It was when Iborra, the fifth generation of a family of ice cream makers, was backpacking Asia that he realized how closely associated our idea of ​​where we come from is with the tastes and smells of childhood.

She then became fascinated by neurogastronomy while studying at the prestigious Hofmann School of Hospitality in Barcelona, ​​where she also met her business partner, Irene Vidal.

Lavender featured often in her survey, as it was once common practice to hang bags in closets, so she made a tart cherry lavender ice cream.

“Many people mentioned croquettes, cannelloni [a traditional Boxing Day dish in Catalonia] and bechamel,” he said. “Béchamel ice cream is made with nutmeg, black pepper, salt and vanilla.”

His coconut ice cream is based on the memories of the people of Chang Feng, the first Chinese restaurant to open in the Poblenou de Iborra neighborhood, once the heart of Barcelona’s textile industry.

For many people, the smell of plasticine is closely associated with childhood and Iborra has devised an ice cream made with coconut and bitter almonds that recovers the smell but fortunately not the taste.

“There are limits, you can’t make ice cream with anything,” he said. “Someone wanted an ice cream that tasted like whip [dry-cured pork sausage] but that doesn’t work.

“One of the rarest we have made has been tomato and onion, like a stir-fry. It wasn’t bad, because onions taste sweet, but it wasn’t something we could sell.”

He’s still struggling to perfect an order for ice cream that tastes like barbecued sausage. It’s called Love in March and it has a smoky flavor.

Mamá Heladera is next door to El Tío Che, famous for making the best in town. horchata – a cold drink based on tiger nuts – and run by his family since 1912.

Iborra’s great-great-grandfather left Alicante for Barcelona with the intention of taking a ship to America, but the horchata that he brought with him from home got hooked and stayed.

The cafe got its name, which means “the boy Che,” because when it first opened it used to yell at passersby: “Try it che!” (Hey, give it a try!).

In Spain, both horchata and saying That (hey) they are peculiar to Valencia and Alicante.

Iborra never intended to join the family business but little by little she was attracted to it. “There have been some crazy things, learnings, anxieties, failures, successes, but it is based on a simple logic: what is the smell of your childhood and what does this aroma comprise? she said. “An ice cream can take you directly to this memory.”