A Quick Confession

I have but one complaint about Roman gastronomy thus far, and it is this: it is an unwritten rule that you must order at least two flavors of gelato even for the smallest cup, lest the scooper look at you as if you have suddenly grown a second nose. "Solo?" he responds with disbelief when I order stracciatella and nothing else. "Si, solo," I must answer firmly. He resigns himself to my annoyingly non-Italian ways, and hands me my cup of a single, lonely flavor, his secret heart hoping that this heretic will leave his gelateria at once. 

There are hundreds of gelato gusti ("Mozart" and "Hello Kitty" among them), and of course my goal is to try them all. (Well, not quite all—just as with ice cream, I'm not tempted by anything based in chocolate.) My pignolo today was delicious, and now I know to avoid the boring fior de latte or syrupy-sweet zabaione. But I would like to try them one by one: one flavor taking up the whole of one cup or cone.

It's not that I'm obsessive-compulsive (in most cases I will allow my food to mingle as much as it likes on my dinner plate), but that in order to enjoy the flavor most fully, I must not have to maneuver the ever-melting dividing line between multiple tasty scoops. Moreover, the size of an Italian scoop seems to be about half of an American one, so when two flavors are crammed in one tiny copetto, you hardly have the chance to experience one of the two on its own terms before you find your cup sadly empty. What it boils (or melts) down to is that I want a lot of one taste instead of half as much of two tastes, complementary as they may be.

So, dear Italy, please indulge me and let me sample your many tantalizing gelati gusti one full, unadulterated cup at a time. I promise I will enjoy them that way even more.