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Mérida's 1876 dulce frío, born in the marble parlors of the Sorbetería Colón. Milk perfumed with canela de Ceylán and vainilla de Papantla, dissolved with ate de guayaba, finished with a chorrito of rum and the bright zest of lime.
This is Yucatán. Specifically Mérida, specifically the marble counter of the Sorbetería Colón on the Plaza Grande, where in 1876 don Manuel Jesús Pinzón patented a recipe he called crema morisca and froze it in metal cylinders packed with salt and ice hauled down from the volcanoes. The Moorish in the name is not decoration. The recipe traveled from Al-Andalus to Spain to the Yucatán peninsula by way of the trade routes that made Mérida a wealthier port than Mexico City for most of the 19th century, and it landed in a city that already knew what to do with milk, canela, and tropical fruit.
The defining ingredient is ate de guayaba. Not fresh guava, ate. The dense, sliceable paste that Mexican kitchens have made for centuries by cooking guava down with sugar until it sets like a brick. You melt it into the warm milk and it gives the dulce its pale rosa color and its particular texture, denser than gelato, softer than ice cream, something in between that belongs only to the old sorbeterías. The canela has to be canela de Ceylán, the soft Mexican kind, not the hard cassia sold as cinnamon in most foreign supermarkets. The vainilla has to be from Papantla in Veracruz, the only place in the world where vanilla is native and where it was domesticated by the Totonacs long before it ever crossed an ocean. And the chorrito of rum at the end is the Moorish signature, the small breath of liquor that the Andalusian recipe carried across the Atlantic.
My mother did not make this dulce. She was from Jalisco and her notebook was full of cajeta and rompope, not sorbetes. I learned it from doña Aurora, a señora I met at the Lucas de Gálvez market in 1994 who had worked the counter at the Sorbetería Colón as a girl in the 1940s. She wrote out the proportions on a paper bag, the kind they used to wrap dulces, and made me promise I would not call this 'guava ice cream' when I taught it. Cada estado, su propia cocina, and this one belongs to Mérida.
The Sorbetería Colón on Mérida's Plaza Grande, founded in 1876 by don Manuel Jesús Pinzón, was among the first commercial sorbet houses in the Americas, predating most New York and New Orleans ice cream parlors by more than a decade. Pinzón's crema morisca recipe descended from the Andalusian leche merengada tradition, itself a direct inheritance from Moorish Al-Andalus, where the Arab practice of chilling sweetened dairy with mountain ice produced the ancestor of every European sorbet and ice cream. Mérida's status as the wealthiest city in 19th-century Mexico, built on the henequén boom that financed the mansions of Paseo de Montejo, made the city an unlikely but logical home for the technique: ice was shipped from the volcanoes of central Mexico and from as far as New England, packed in sawdust, to keep the sorbeterías running through the Yucatecan summer.
Quantity
4 cups
the best you can find
Quantity
1 cup
Quantity
3/4 cup
Quantity
6 ounces
cut into small cubes
Quantity
2 sticks, about 4 inches each
Quantity
1
split lengthwise and seeds scraped
Quantity
6
Quantity
1/4 teaspoon
Quantity
2 tablespoons
Ron Mocambo or Ron Prohibido
Quantity
1 teaspoon
from a Persian lime
Quantity
for serving
Quantity
for serving
| Ingredient | Quantity |
|---|---|
| whole milkthe best you can find | 4 cups |
| heavy cream | 1 cup |
| granulated sugar | 3/4 cup |
| ate de guayaba (Mexican guava paste)cut into small cubes | 6 ounces |
| canela de Ceylán (true Mexican cinnamon) | 2 sticks, about 4 inches each |
| vainilla de Papantla beansplit lengthwise and seeds scraped | 1 |
| large egg yolks | 6 |
| fine sea salt | 1/4 teaspoon |
| aged Mexican rumRon Mocambo or Ron Prohibido | 2 tablespoons |
| fresh lime zestfrom a Persian lime | 1 teaspoon |
| toasted Mexican pecans (optional) | for serving |
| extra cubes of ate de guayaba (optional) | for serving |
In a heavy-bottomed saucepan, combine the milk, cream, canela sticks, and the split vainilla bean with its scraped seeds. Set over medium-low heat and bring the mixture to the edge of a simmer. You should see small bubbles around the rim, not a rolling boil. Boiling scalds the milk and pushes the canela bitter. Cover the pot, kill the heat, and let the canela and vainilla steep for 20 minutes. This is the Moorish bones of the dish: a milk perfumed with spice before sugar ever enters the room.
Return the infused milk to medium-low heat. Add the cubed ate de guayaba and stir patiently with a wooden spoon. The paste will resist at first, sitting on the bottom of the pot in stubborn cubes. Keep stirring. Over the next eight to ten minutes, the guava will dissolve into the milk and turn it the soft pink of a Mérida courtyard wall at dusk. If lumps remain after ten minutes, mash them against the side of the pot with the back of the spoon. The mixture should be smooth, the color uniform.
In a heatproof bowl, whisk the egg yolks with the sugar and salt until pale and slightly thickened, about one minute. Remove the canela sticks and the spent vainilla pod from the milk, then ladle about one cup of the hot pink milk into the yolks in a thin stream, whisking constantly. This warms the yolks without scrambling them. Pour the tempered yolk mixture back into the pot with the rest of the milk.
Set the pot over medium-low heat and cook, stirring constantly with a wooden spoon, until the custard thickens enough to coat the back of the spoon. Drag a finger across the back of the spoon. If the line holds clean and the custard does not flood back across it, you are there. This takes six to eight minutes. Do not let it boil. A boiled custard is a curdled custard and there is no recovering from it later. No me vengas con atajos.
Pour the hot custard through a fine-mesh sieve into a clean bowl. The sieve catches any threads of cooked egg and any guava pulp that refused to dissolve. Stir in the rum and the lime zest. The chorrito of rum is not optional. It is the Moorish-Spanish signature, the same way the Andalusian leche merengada carried a perfume of brandy across the Atlantic. The lime zest is the Yucatecan correction: a brightness that cuts through the cream and ties the dulce to its peninsula.
Pour the cold custard into an ice cream maker and churn according to your machine's instructions, usually 20 to 30 minutes. The mixture is ready when it has the consistency of soft-serve and holds a ribbon when you trail the paddle through it. The color will lighten as the air works in, from courtyard pink to the pale rosa of mazapán. This is not technically a sorbet, the name 'sorbete' in Yucatán is older than the modern distinction between sorbet and ice cream. The Sorbetería Colón called everything they froze a sorbete, and so do I.
Transfer the churned sorbete to a chilled metal loaf pan or a shallow lidded container. Smooth the top with a spatula. Press parchment directly onto the surface and seal the lid. Freeze for at least four hours, until firm enough to scoop. Pull the sorbete out of the freezer ten minutes before serving so it softens to the right scoopable texture. Serve in chilled metal coupes the way they do at the Sorbetería Colón, with a few toasted pecans and a small cube of ate de guayaba alongside if you want to honor the bandeja tradition. Así se hace y punto.
1 serving (about 210g)
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