Cherry and watermelon granita. With a postscript on loss and summers past.

I'm not good in the heat, although part of me feels guilty even saying this, given that I live in temperate England. Anyway, if you, like me, are looking for antidotes to wilting in the heat, here is one suggestion.

Watermelon granita, as Jacob Kenedy writes in Bocca: Cookbook is ‘possibly the one thing in the world more refreshing than a big slice of watermelon’. But much depends on the quality of the watermelon. Some watermelons are so dull-tasting that your granita would end up tasting of nothing but sugar. As insurance against disappointing melons, I tried adding some frozen cherries to the watermelon granita mix one day. It worked! The cherries heighten the melon both in colour and in flavour. So if you open up your melon and it tastes boring, don’t despair. This granita will still be sublime.

Serves 8

1kg or so of watermelon

300g frozen cherries (I buy frozen sour cherries when I can but use fresh cherries and pit them or bags of frozen sweet cherries are also good)
110g granulated sugar

Cut all the green and white peel off the watermelon. Whizz the watermelon with a hand-held blender and then pass the juice through a sieve to get rid of the seeds. You should have about 600–700ml of juice. Add the cherries to the watermelon juice and again whizz it with a hand-held blender to purée the cherries. Add the sugar and stir to dissolve. Taste the vivid pink liquid for sweetness, remembering that ice cream and granita mix should always taste too sweet when unfrozen because the cold dampens your sense of sweetness. Pour it into a shallow container (I usually use a ceramic baking dish). Place it in your freezer and check after an hour. Once ice crystals start to form, mash them to a slush with a fork. Keep mashing every half an hour or so. It should take around 4 hours to freeze in total. I like to make the final mashing of the granita a communal affair. Bring the dish to the table and let each guest have a go at mashing it with a fork until it looks like beautiful pink slush, as airy as snow.

You can have this plain, pure and refreshing or – my preference – you can eat it with lashings of whipped cream. Take 300ml of double cream and whisk it with 1 tablespoon of icing sugar until it forms very soft peaks (if you are in doubt, stop – whipped cream can easily turn into butter if you overwhisk).

A postscript. The version of the granita here was from last summer. I was at a lovely restaurant in Leeds talking about the cookbook. The chefs led by Josh Whitehead made a meal of recipes from the book, so thoughtfully done. The version of the granita the Kino chefs produced was so much better than any version I've made myself. They had sourced the most beautifully rich tasting fresh cherries and watermelon so sweet it did not need the cherries to boost its fruitiness. And I loved the way they decorated it with borage flowers, an allusion to the start of the book where I quote an old recipe using the juice of borage to take away melancholy. Kino has since closed down, like so many other excellent restaurants. But I will never forget that meal a year ago.