In the sixteenth century it was customary to use snow to chill fruit drinks, wine and water. On the tables of the well-to-do, digestive sorbets and ice creams were served halfway through the meal to cleanse the palate between the various spicy dishes. In the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the fashion for cold drinks snowballed. In Don Quixote, Cervantes relates how things could not be all that bad in a peasant's house, because "his wife, while making her way through a pound of wine, had an overflowing jug of delicate snow drinks at her side, as well as perfumes, flowers, song and music."
