Nose in the cone: coconut sorbet, in the name of the nut

In mid-July, the Montreuil Paradise festival celebrated its seventh edition at the Parc des Beaumonts (Seine-Saint-Denis). After the treasure hunt, the slaloms between the graffiti workshops, and the children's face painting, an interminable queue formed in front of the Natty Kilti stand. The star attraction of this stall dedicated to the Ital diet (a vegetarian or even vegan cuisine popularized by Rastafarianism) was the vegan coconut sorbet. And " there will be a thirty-minute wait!" Rudy, a fifty-something with tied-back dreadlocks, shouted to the crowd.

Stamping with impatience, the customers chorused a few onomatopoeias testifying to their frustration and determination to brave the heat for the tropical ice cream. The first aromas took us back to the mid-2000s, during a Caribbean baptism in Choisy-le-Roi (Val-de-Marne). Familiar with Mont Blanc (a Caribbean cake with coconut cream), a friend handed me a cup: "Don't think. Just drop it, you'll spin!" Since then, the dessert has grown in popularity. It can be found in traditional Creole restaurants but also in Caribbean street-food establishments that have two flagship products: the bokit (a fried sandwich from Guadeloupe) and this coconut sorbet.

In the queue, I hoped to spin again, my eyes fixed on the homemade ice cream maker made of a wooden bucket and a cylindrical metal tub, surrounded by enormous blocks of ice sprinkled with large