Strawberry, chocolate, shortbread, tutti frutti, nougat, toasted cream and lemon. Coconut when there are no strawberries. Meringue milk, horchata, lemon granita, smoothies, bonbon and coyotes. While other ice cream parlors innovate to adapt to the times, Lauri Ice Creamfounded in the Malaga neighbourhood of Pedregalejo by Alicante native Eliseo Lauri, has celebrated 73 years with the ‘we won’t be moved’ of nine classic flavours. As an unprecedented concession, Consuelo Lauri, daughter of Eliseo and current manager of the ice cream shop, agreed to make pistachio and Kinder, which are advertised on a fleeting cardboard rectangle instead of the beautiful gold leaf sign on glass and are ignored by the four generations of customers, who come to the counter to ask for a few spoonfuls of childhood in a cone or tub.
To survive the competition, Lauri relies on a superpower: the ability to stop time. Everything in the ice cream shop looks back. Here, vanilla is called mantecado; caramel, toasted cream, and its ineffable tutti frutti, which has disappeared from many of today’s display cases, is one of the star flavours of ice creams that, in Consuelo’s words, “do not contain powders of any kind,” nor stabilisers, gelling agents or flavourings. Everything is made daily from milk that is pasteurised and then mixed with fresh ingredients.
At Lauri, strawberries are made exclusively in season. Then it disappears, giving way to coconut, an exotic ingredient when Eliseo Lauri and Juana Brotons opened their business in the summer of 1952. At that time, Pedregalejo, the beautiful Malaga neighborhood whose history has unfolded in front of the ice cream parlor, was beginning to grow as a residential area. Orchards and old summer estates of large families were parceled out to build single-family houses.
The abundant children of the neighborhood gathered at the door of the garage where Milagros, Eliseo’s sister, prepared the cones that she took to the ice cream parlor on the back of a donkey: when one came out defective, the children ate it. Lauri’s wafers stopped being made by hand when the old iron died of exhaustion. Today they are made by a supplier following the original formula: water, sugar, flour and oil. “It’s not the same, because with the mold they use they come out a little thicker, but we try to make it that way,” says Consuelo,
The meringue milk maintains an intense dairy aroma under the notes of cinnamon and lemon. The texture of the ice cream is magically subtle and creamy, and in the midst of the growing sophistication of the industrial world, the ‘coyotes’, the name that Don Eliseo coined for stick ice cream, maintain the sublime ingenuity of two layers of ice cream. different flavor frozen hugging a stick.
Consuelo Lauri’s sister-in-law and nieces run the branch The company was opened by his brother Juan in the 1980s, and although tradition is also their strong point, they have introduced some new flavours, sugar-free ice creams and ice cream cakes. “Each workshop is independent: I try to continue doing the same thing my father did. We treasure his recipes. The ice creams are made by Antonio, who joined as an apprentice at the age of 14. The raw materials change, of course. When I was a girl, the strawberries came in wicker baskets and had a smell… It’s not the same anymore, but every week I go to Vélez Málaga (capital of the Axarquía region, where excellent but scarce strawberries are grown) to get them.” The candied fruit for tutti frutti is still bought whole and cut by hand, because they like customers to find good pieces, as always.
The ice cream parlor’s office could be used as a set for a movie set in the 1950s: it retains the wood paneling, the stainless steel bar, the original signs and the usual wrapping paper, with beautiful vintage typography in red letters. They continue to finish the packages with twine. What has changed is the outside world: when Elisha and his wife, Joan, arrived from Ibi, more bicycles than cars passed by on the road that his store faces, and the ice cream man went by bicycle to El Perchel, at the other end of the city, to look for ice for the refrigerators. It dragged up to 200 kilos.
Then came cold technology, the ice cream makers that the founder unpacked and put into operation more than half a century ago are still processing about 120 kilos of ice cream a day, which are then transferred to the closed tanks cooled with glycol on the counter. No showcases. “When open, the display case needs more cold and hardens the ice cream. We want very creamy ice creams, although it is true that they melt quickly, and there are those who protest,” says Consuelo. Each day the right amount is calculated so that there is nothing left over, and the next day you start from scratch.
Lauri has a legion of unconditional fans, but there are also hatersbecause in a Malaga with only one football team, fanaticism hooligan moves into the ice cream field. On a map of the city, a line could be drawn between the supporters of Lauri, in the east zone, and those of Mira Housethe undisputed queen of the historic centre and surrounding areas since 1880. Other neighbourhoods have their own favourites; there are many good artisanal ice cream shops, each with its faithful followers, but these two are the subject of discussions worthy of Montagues and Capulets. Consuelo Lauri finds it amusing. “The fact is that we have a very good relationship, and our parents were very close friends,” she explains.
Consuelo smiles remembering anecdotes during the conversation; behind the counter she lavishes herself less because of shyness. She also had a hard time accepting the fate of living attached to an ice cream parlor, even though the public only enjoys it from March to October. “When I was just a few months old they put me in a little basket at the bar, and at nine years old I started helping when I left school. Now I am one year away from retirement: I am very excited to spend the summers in peace,” she confesses. It compensates the sacrifice to know that it is the custodian of a form of craftsmanship and of something as valuable as the collective memory of a neighborhood.
Today, Pedregalejo combines a sought-after residential area with a popular and effervescent beach where the beach bars have an iconic dessert: Lauri nougat ice cream baptized with whiskey. Be sure to try it. So that after his departure everything changes as little as possible, he has chosen Antonio, the former apprentice and head of the workshop, whom he still calls “the boy.” “Antonio knows the value of having a customer come and tell you that our ice creams take them back to their childhood,” he says. That’s why she left hers between the walls of that place. By the way, despite having spent his entire life with ice cream, he not only has not hated them, but he loves them, and this year he suffers because he has promise and cannot eat them.
Lauri Ice Creams: Av. Juan Sebastián Elcano, 53. Málaga. Tel. 952 290 643. Map.
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