It was at Nardini in Largs, a little seaside town on the Firth of Clyde not far from Glasgow, that I first encountered squirty cream. What a revelation. Proust may have had his madeleines, but for me it was dense, fudgey chocolate cake, rammed into my wee eight-year-old face so the cream billowed like cumulus all around it. I think it was at that moment that I fell in love with the classic seaside cafe or ice-cream parlour, or milk bar intense pleasure being for ever associated with Lloyd Loom chairs, atomic light fittings, knickerbocker glories and a view over a steel-coloured, choppy northern sea. Nardini has lost some of its original fittings now, but the exterior is as perfect a slice of art deco seaside-iana as you will ever find, the neon sign a beacon along the coastal road, and its tablet ice-cream made from the notoriously sugary and granular Scottish confection a work of terrible genius.
When the Italians came over, they brought the flavours and colours of another, hotter, more vibrant part of the world to our black-and-white shores. It is in my blood, of course: my mother's family, the Cimas, ran a cafe called The Gem on Glasgow's Great Western Road. But it was visits to our relatives' Beach Cafe in Troon that really thrilled me to the marrow: not only was I dazzled by Mum's second or third cousins twice removed, Rita and Ada, with their matching beehives, one blonde, one black as the Earl of Hell's waistcoat, but this was the only time I was allowed a double nougat. What obscene luxury: two wafers covered in chocolate sandwiching a thick layer of marshmallow, which in turn sandwiched what I would later come to learn was Italian fior di latte gelato (a light "flower of milk" ice, that doesn't contain heavy cream). Rita has sadly gone from her station behind the till, but Ada is still there, beehive intact.
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